The Falcon's Malteser Read Online Free PDF Page B

37 and 38. But the number had fallen off. The door was closed.
    “Do you think this is a good idea?” Herbert whispered.
    “Have you got a better one?” I asked.
    “We could go home . . .”
    “Come on, Tim,” I said. “We’ve found him now. It can’t hurt to—”
    That was as far as I got. The gunshot wasn’t loud, but it was close enough to make me jump the way you do when a car backfires or somebody drops a plate. It had come from the other side of the door. Herbert froze, then tried to lurch away, but fortunately I managed to grab hold of his jacket. I didn’t want to go into the room by myself. I didn’t want to go into the room at all. But if I’d run away then, I’d never have forgiven myself.
    Still clutching Herbert, I opened the door. It wasn’t locked. In the Hotel Splendide, the rooms didn’t have locks. Some of them didn’t even have doors.
    The first thing I saw was a flapping curtain and a shadowy figure disappearing outside. I couldn’t even tell if it was a man or a woman. There was just the flash of a leg hanging over the edge of the sill and then it was gone.
    It was a small room, just big enough for a bed, a table, a chest of drawers, and a corpse. I closed the door behind me. Johnny Naples was lying on the bed. He wasn’t dead yet, but the big red splotch on his shirt told me that his time was running out about as quickly as his blood. I went over to the window and looked outside. But I was too late. Whoever had climbed out had jumped the short distance to the overpass and run for it. Maybe they’d had a car waiting for them. Anyway, they were gone.
    The dwarf groaned and I looked back again. The room was probably in a mess to begin with, but I guessed there had been a fight. There was a chair upturned on the floor and a lamp had been knocked over on the table. My eyes fell on a pack of matches. I don’t know why I picked them up and put them in my pocket. I knew we didn’t have a lot of time and that any clue—no matter how small—might help. Maybe it was just that I didn’t want to look at the dwarf. Anyway, that’s what I did.
    Johnny Naples opened his mouth and tried to speak.
    “The falcon . . .” he said. Then a nasty, bubbling sound.
    Then: “The sun . . .” And that was it. His eyes closed. The mouth stayed open.
    D for “dwarf.” D for “dead.”
    Herbert had picked something up off the carpet.
    “Nick . . .” he began.
    It was a gun. And it was still smoking.
    And he was still standing there, holding it, when the door crashed open. The man who had been drunk outside the Hotel Splendide was standing there and he had a gun, too. The Alsatian was with him, growling softly.
    There were two more people behind him.
    “Police!” he shouted.
    Herbert fainted.
    The man swung around to cover him. “You’re under arrest,” he said.

THE FALCON
    Johnny Naples was taken to the morgue. We were taken to the Ladbroke Grove Police Station. I don’t know which of us got the better treatment. While he was carried out on his back, covered with a nice clean sheet, we were dragged out, handcuffed together, and thrown into the back of a van. It had turned out, of course, that the drunk in the street had been a plainclothes policeman. The Alsatian was a plainclothes police dog. The Hotel Splendide had been the subject of a major police stakeout, and we’d more or less asked for trouble the moment we’d walked in.
    We were left to stew in a bare-bricked interrogation room. Or to freeze, rather. That place couldn’t have been much warmer than the morgue. There was one metal table, three metal chairs, and five metal bars on a window that would have been too small to climb out of anyway. A blackboard lined one wall and there was a poster on the other reading CRIME DOESN’T PAY, underneath which somebody had scrawled NEITHER DOES POLICE WORK. The room smelled of stale cigarette smoke. I wondered how many hardened criminals had grown harder waiting there.
    Herbert had said little