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had more than fifty or sixty bucks in his immediate possession at the time of his going. His habits for months past could be accounted for too thoroughly to justify any suspicion of secret vices, or even another woman in his life …”
    Krinsky said Flitcraft’s wife wanted Pinkerton to find her husband, bring him home, and make him pay for what he had done to their family. Krinsky was the company’s missings specialist in the Northwest so he began by picking up the usual loose ends. The guy didn’t gamble. The dealership was still making money for the family. Even a good-looking secretary didn’t lead anywhere. Nothing led to Flitcraft’s whereabouts. It was one thing to type out Krinsky’s story, quite another to have Spade take up the tale and tell it to Brigid as his own.
    I had Spade pick up Flitcraft’s trail after someone spotted a man in Spokane who had won a car race in a vintage Packard. His description matched Flitcraft to a T. Years had lapsed since Flitcraft’s disappearance when Spade finally caught up with his man and discovered that he had indeed changed his name, owned a successful business, and was married with a baby boy. Flitcraft, when Spade discovers him, didn’t feel a great deal of guilt; after all, he had left his Tacoma family well provided forand felt that what he had done was perfectly reasonable under some very bizarre circumstances.
    Five years earlier in Tacoma Flitcraft was walking past an office building that was being put up—just the superstructure. A beam fell eight or ten stories down and struck the sidewalk alongside him and then toppled over. Now even Brigid, who was only interested in matters that affected her well-being, became a bit more attentive. At that point I went back to my Krinsky notes and read: “He felt that somebody had taken the lid off of life and let him look at the works. And that scared the bejesus out of the man.” He realized that the good father-citizen-husband could be wiped out between office and restaurant by the accident of a falling beam. He knew then that men died haphazardly like that, and lived only while blind chance spared them. Chance ruled everything. So why were we kidding ourselves?
    After the beam fell and missed, Flitcraft chose to live a random, uncommitted life of chance. But a few years later up in Spokane when there were no more falling beams in his life, he pretty much becomes his old Flitcraft self again, a stable, predictable, solid citizen. This idea Spade particularly enjoys and he tells Brigid, “That’s the part of it I always liked. He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling.” If you want to know our species in a nutshell, there you have it.
    Rarely do I falter or allow myself to be taken in by my own rare good writing. “Somebody had taken the lid off oflife and let him look at the works.” Jesus, that’s an epitaph. Does it even matter whether that was Krinsky or me? My whole life up to the
Falcon
—up to Lillian—was nothing but dealing with “the works” under the lid, so much so that I thought that “works” were all life had to offer. Not complaining, no, not at all. Some people don’t even know life has “lids” and “works” and couldn’t even give a damn about the difference. Samuel Spade, however, is not one of them. Nor am I. Lillian, of course, makes metaphysical poetry out of Flitcraft, but then again she functions on an entirely different plane of existence than I do.
    Even though we’re both Samuels, Spade is not quite Hammett, nor vice versa. I have to remind myself of that in certain situations. It made sense to me then that Spade wanted to hear himself tell Brigid something she couldn’t possibly understand. And I certainly knew better than to allow myself to wax philosophical in a thriller and stop things cold. But that’s what I did, so I wrote a note to Alfred telling him to knock the story out if he didn’t think