The Falcon's Malteser Read Online Free Page B

the box. You can buy them just about anywhere in the world even if the name isn’t always the same. Maltesers are those chocolate malt balls that crunch when you eat them. Personally, I’ve never been that keen on eating them at all. I’ve got better things to spend my pocket money on. New pockets, for example. The old ones are full of holes.
    The question was, why had Johnny Naples paid out five hundred dollars to have us look after a box of candy? Why had someone gone to so much trouble—wrecking the apartment—to get his hands on them? And how had the Fat Man gotten mixed up in all this? Chocolates were the last things he needed—he was on a diet. It just didn’t make sense.
    We’d opened up the box. In for a penny, in for a pound (or 5.15 ounces, to be exact). The contents certainly looked like ordinary Maltesers. They smelled ordinary. And they tasted ordinary. Herbert had some sort of idea that they might be chocolate-covered diamonds or something. It was only after I’d eaten half a dozen of them that he changed his mind and suggested that they might contain some sort of newfan gled poison. If looks could kill, I’d have buried my brother.
    “What we’ve got to do,” Herbert said, “is find Naples.”
    For Herbert that was a pretty brilliant piece of deduction. The Fat Man had given us two days to get back to him. Johnny Naples had said he’d return in about a week. That left five days in which all sorts of unpleasant things could happen. The only trouble was, Naples hadn’t told us where we could reach him. We had no address, no telephone number.
    Herbert echoed my thoughts. “I wonder how we could get hold of him?” he asked.
    “We could try the Yellow Pages,” I suggested. “ V for ‘ver tically challenged’?”
    “Yes!”
    I groaned as he reached for the telephone book. “I was only joking,” I said.
    “Were you? Of course you were!” Herbert dropped the book and gazed out of the window.
    Meanwhile, I was fingering the envelope. The Maltesers hadn’t told us anything, but looking underneath the flap, I found a small white label. The dwarf, in a hurry to seal the package, must have missed it. “Look at this,” I said.
    Herbert took the envelope. “It’s an envelope,” he said.
    “Yes. But look at the label.”
    Herbert found it and held it up to the light. “Hammett’s,” he read. “Eighteen cents.” He frowned. “That’s cheap for a box of Maltesers.”
    I shook my head. “That’s the price of the envelope, not the candy,” I explained. “Look—the price is handwritten, but the name is printed. Hammett’s . . . that must be the stationer’s or newsstand where he bought the envelope to put the Maltesers in.”
    “That’s terrific!” Herbert exclaimed. “That’s great, Nick.” He paused. “But how does it help us?”
    “If the dwarf wanted to buy an envelope, he probably bought it fairly near wherever he’s staying,” I said. “So all we have to do is find out how many Hammett’s shops there are in London, visit them all, and ask them if they remember selling an envelope to Naples.”
    Herbert sighed. “They probably sell hundreds of envelopes,” he said. “And they must have thousands of customers.”
    “Yeah. But how many of their customers are dwarfs?”
    “That’s true.” He considered. “So how do we find Ham mett’s?”
    “We look in the Yellow Pages.”
    Herbert snatched up the book again. Then he turned and looked at me disdainfully. “That was my idea in the first place,” he said.
    I didn’t argue. Arguing with someone like Herbert is a bit like hitting yourself with a brick.
    As it turned out, there were six Hammett’s in London.
    We found them under the section headed Newsstands and News Vendors. There were three south of the river, one in Notting Hill Gate, one in Kensington, and one in Hammersmith. By now it was too late to visit them all, so we decided to take the three in the south first and pick up some secondhand furniture