San Francisco Call Newspaper

The Call is both a commonplace newspaper in the characters’ movements and a crucial physical trace in Sam Spade’s investigation. A copy obtained at Brigid O’Shaughnessy’s request becomes linked to a second, damaged copy found in Joel Cairo’s wastebasket; by reconstructing its torn shipping list, Spade identifies La Paloma’s arrival from Hongkong and follows the clue toward the ship. The paper’s importance lies not simply in what it reports, but in the marks of someone’s attempt to remove part of that report.

An ordinary purchase becomes a clue

After the driver had dropped Spade off, Brigid asked to get a newspaper while they were traveling out Sacramento. The driver stopped at Polk, whistled for a boy, and Brigid obtained The Call. The route and the timing establish the paper as part of her movements that day, though the exchange does not say why she wanted it or identify the copy she bought as the one later examined by Spade.

The driver recalled that after they had crossed Van Ness, Brigid knocked on the glass again and directed him to take her to the Ferry Building. The newspaper therefore sits within a sequence of specific changes of destination: first the stop for the paper, then the journey toward the waterfront. In the driver’s account, its acquisition is a small, practical incident; viewed alongside the later shipping clue, it also places the paper among the objects associated with the characters’ pursuit of La Paloma.

Cairo’s damaged copy

Later, Spade searched a wastebasket and found the previous day’s Call folded with its classified-advertising page facing outward. He first examined that page but found nothing that held his attention. On turning the newspaper over, he inspected the page containing financial and shipping news, weather, births, marriages, divorces, and deaths. From the lower left corner, a little more than two inches at the bottom of the second column had been torn away.

The position of the damage made the torn portion more significant than a random scrap. Immediately above it, the caption “Arrived Today” introduced a list of vessels and their ports of origin. Three entries remained legible: Capac from Astoria at 12:20 a.m.; Helen P. Drew from Greenwood at 5:05 a.m.; and Albarado from Bandon at 5:06 a.m. The tear passed through the next entry, but its surviving letters allowed Spade to infer “from Sydney.” The column supplied a shipping record with a gap exactly where additional arrivals should have appeared.

Spade then examined the rest of the wastebasket. Among a piece of wrapping paper, string, two hosiery tags, a haberdasher’s sale ticket for half a dozen pairs of socks, and other discarded material, he found a tiny ball of newspaper. He carefully opened and smoothed it on the desk, then fitted it to the torn section. Its edges matched exactly, but half an inch was missing between the fragment and the words “from Sydney”—enough room for six or seven ships’ arrivals. The reverse side of that missing piece could have contained only an uninformative corner of a stockbroker’s advertisement. The comparison narrowed the significance of the missing text: the removed material was from the shipping column, not from a passage that would have explained the concealment in some unrelated way.

Reconstructing the shipping list

When Luke asked what the newspaper fragment meant, Spade said that it looked as if the man was interested in a boat. Rather than treat the damaged copy as sufficient, Spade went to the Business Office of The Call, bought the previous day’s issue, and compared its shipping-news page with the page from Cairo’s wastebasket. The second copy let him restore the lines that the first had lost.

The missing arrivals included Tahiti from Sydney and Papeete at 5:17 a.m., Admiral Peoples from Astoria at 6:05, Caddopeak and Silverado from San Pedro at 8:07 and 8:17, La Paloma from Hongkong at 8:05, and Daisy Gray from Seattle at 9:03. The restored list placed several ships beside one another, but Spade singled out the one entry that mattered to his inquiry: La Paloma, arriving from Hongkong. He underscored “Hongkong” with his fingernail and cut the arrival list from the newspaper with his pocketknife.

That handling turns the intact issue into more than a reference copy. Spade preserves the relevant printed information by cutting it out, while discarding the rest of the paper and the damaged sheet from Cairo’s wastebasket. The two copies perform different evidentiary functions: Cairo’s copy records the act of removal, and the replacement issue recovers what was removed. Together they make the omission legible.

From print to investigation

After marking the Hongkong entry, Spade returned to his office, looked up a telephone number, and called to ask where the Paloma, in from Hongkong the previous morning, had docked. He repeated the question before thanking the person on the other end. The newspaper thus carries the investigation from a material clue—a missing piece in Cairo’s discarded copy—to a specific inquiry about the ship’s location.

The Call does not itself explain why Cairo removed the shipping information, nor does the surviving account establish who first tore out the notice. Its narrative force comes from that unanswered question and from the precision with which Spade works around it. Fold, tear, surviving letters, fragment, comparison copy, underlined port, and telephone inquiry form a chain of inference: the paper first conceals the decisive arrival through damage, then supplies the means to restore it. In a story of pursuit and concealment, a newspaper’s routine shipping column becomes a record whose omissions are as telling as its printed facts.