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O’Shaughnessy, telling me what they wanted me to know, whom I ought to trust and not trust. In Brigid’s case, of course, it was nobody but herself. I didn’t get many good nights’ sleep. Didn’t matter; personal turbulence was good for the book. I was trying not to drink, first not at all and then not too much, which made things harder—and easier.
    The
Falcon
was the last of my three-book deal with Alfred Knopf in New York. I’d missed the last payment to Jose, who wrote just the week before to say she needed some moneyfor the girls. Never for herself, and I’m sure that was true. I intended to mail out the first big chunk of the book, six chapters, about eighty pages, tomorrow morning first thing and ask Knopf for an advance. There’s a natural break in the action right there, end of Chapter Six. The story was going to pick up again in Chapter Seven with Brigid in Spade’s apartment—which is also on Post Street, why not?—where the two are waiting for Joel Cairo to show up. My plan was a dinner out and then an all-nighter with Brigid and Cairo exchanging lies.
    I bought a
Racing Form
on the corner and made for Tait’s. Wednesday, the goulash was the special. Who’s sitting at my regular table but Buddy Krinsky, an old-timer from Pinkerton. No one else at the agency called me Samuel, my given name, but Krinsky. He saw it once on my license. I wasn’t sure I wanted him to spot me. He bellowed, “Samuel, come join me, my friend.”
    Krinsky assumed I was still an Op, had no idea I had quit to become a writer. I let that go. He told me about a missing he was just wrapping up: “Damnedest thing in all my years, Samuel. Damnedest one ever.” He assumed I would say, “Tell me about it,” and he did. Krinsky was one hell of a talker.
    When I got back to my Underwood I typed Krinsky’s story pretty much verbatim, I didn’t want to miss any details. Krinsky didn’t want to tell me his missing’s name, which I thought was a pretty professional thing to do. He said, “Let’s just call him Flitcraft,” which is what I did when I got backto the apartment. I don’t know when I decided to use the Flitcraft story in
Falcon
, but if I didn’t intend to use it, why couldn’t I wait to get back and start typing?
    I can’t say I absolutely understood the Flitcraft story myself, certainly not what it meant as a general description of the human psyche. I think I might have typed it to try to understand it better. Because Krinsky and I had both been trained to be respectful of facts, and I knew him to be a loudmouth but a damned good Op, the Flitcraft story probably only means what the facts tell us it means. In the detective business you soon learn that meaning is nothing more than what people do, what they want, what they need, and how they go about trying to get it.
    Rule number one in detective fiction:
Thou Shall Not Stop the Plot
. For any reason. Ever. So then what made me want to begin Chapter Seven with the Flitcraft story and bring everything to a dead halt? And why in the world do I have Spade—my own Samuel—tell the Flitcraft story to Brigid as though it were a case he worked on himself when it has nothing to do with the Falcon? Why? You tell me. Lillian says I put it there precisely because I realized that was where it didn’t belong, and that’s why she loved it. Who knows, maybe I thought the plot needed the squeal of brakes to build suspense. A couple of times that night I almost pulled it out but decided finally that’s what editors are for.
    Here is what Krinsky told me: “A man named Flitcraft had left his real-estate office in Tacoma to go to luncheonone day and never returned. As best I could make out, his wife and he were supposed to be on the best of terms. He had two children, boys, one five and the other three. He owned a house in a Tacoma suburb, a new Packard, and the rest of the appurtenances of successful American living. There was nothing, absolutely nothing, to suggest that he