by Sam Toperoff
Hammett expelled breath slowly from puffed cheeks. “God damn me.”
Phil said, “Why?”
“I screwed this up royally. How did I let them …”
He explained to the photographer that just a few wide shots were now needed but be sure the time and date on them could be confirmed. “Thirty bucks for two shots and all your trouble?”
“Not necessary, Mr. H. Just meeting you was good enough for me. But maybe if you’d be kind enough to look at one of my stories …”
“We’re sorry for the inconvenience.” He put the money in the young man’s suit jacket. “Phil, give him another ten.” Hammett slowly began to walk away.
LATER THAT EVENING at Phil and Myra’s, he gave his summary analysis: “The autopsy is only important now if it can get you to a formal inquest that determines the actual cause of death. I’m speaking legally here, so you’re going to need a tough, smart lawyer who knows what he’s up against and is willing to take these people on. They are very good at what they do, a hell of a lot better than I thought. I’m not wild about our chances now, and … and I’m profoundly sorry for falling asleep at the switch.”
Phil said, “You said our chances. That means you’re willing to stand with us on this?”
“I’ll do what I can.”
For her part, Myra Ewbank was still frozen by the fact that somebody had murdered her friend. Just last night Jerry Waxman was sitting right there in Hammett’s chair. She looked out the window and imagined Jerry serving 30–love.
Hammett said, “If you want to proceed with this, call everyone you know in the business, newspapers, radio people. Get the word out everywhere, most especially to his union guys back East.”
Myra said, “What do you mean, ‘If we want to proceed’?”
“Phil will explain.”
“Does Lilly know about this?”
“No, not yet. Why?”
“She knew Jerry Waxman too.”
“Really?”
Sitting in his car, Hammett berated himself. In the old days he’d never have left the crime scene. He didn’t have to leave. That was a careless mistake. It was the why of his carelessness he searched for while smoking alone in the car.
Deep down, he knew the why: He had been reluctant to get completely involved as a participant. He was from the outset not, as he liked to say, in for a penny, in for a pound. He was only in for a penny. Working from a distance, he convinced himself he could have it both ways. That was a luxury he could never have had when doing good detective work was his livelihood. And maybe at the heart of why was his unwillingness to jeopardize the good M-G-M money he was still making writing movie scripts? The Waxman case would have found its way back to him. That why carried the weight of truth.
As he drove home, he was convinced that someone had gotten away with murder. The idea was abhorrent to him. Hammett suspected how it might have been done. He remembered a case up in Frisco. The feet, an injection between the toes, insulin was his best guess. Maybe it still wasn’t too late.
His sense of failure was every bit as acute as Lilly’s had been with Days to Come. In her, failure revealed itself as shame. In him, it came as hatred, not directed at whoever might have murdered Jerry Waxman, but solely at himself.
. 9 .
Secrets
LILLIAN WAS STAYING at the large, sun-filled corner apartment on Riverside Drive she had leased for two years. She was hoping to entice Hammett to leave California. Of course, she preferred him to leave on his own terms, not be driven out, as looked more likely since he was being squeezed out of Thin Man scripts.
The sun arrived in Lillian’s place in late afternoon. There was a superb view of the Hudson. A continuous line of small boats, barges, ferries, and large ships passed up, down, and across the river. They helped give her writing hours just the diversion she presently desired. She would write a sentence on a lined sheet in her tight hand, reread it, alter a word or two, perhaps move a phrase forward or back, look out the window, and tell herself she would start the next sentence when that Jersey ferry touched the pier.
It was a writing pace she’d never experienced before. Normally words poured out in such a rush she’d let them spill across the page, at least in first draft. Afterward there was plenty of time to see what she really meant, time to rearrange and reorder. Here at her neat desk alongside the window she felt herself writer, editor, and reader at once, participant and observer simultaneously. She told herself she enjoyed the ease of composing in this fashion. It wasn’t true. She was, in fact, writing haltingly, uncertainly, because she didn’t fully know what she was talking about.
Hammett was finally coming East. Just for a visit, he made clear. Still, she was hopeful. He’d be in New York on Thursday. She needed him right now. One good evening’s talk with him would clarify her problem and give her a choice of solutions. No one knew more about what was actually happening in Spain in the first months of ’37 or of the political events of the previous year than Hammett. She had not yet told him about the commitment she’d made to write a documentary film about the Spanish Civil War. She didn’t think he would approve, especially if after coming to New York Hammett discovered it was Lillian who had opted to leave. No, surely he would not like that. But wasn’t that all the more reason for him to come with her to Spain?
Lilly didn’t fully understand why Hammett had agreed to come to New York. True, he didn’t have a lot of work in Hollywood at the moment. True, his mishandling of the Waxman murder was a blow to his ego. True, he wanted to talk Alfred Knopf into a good advance on a new novel and thought that if he was based in New York for a while, Knopf was likely to think him serious and go for the deal. And true, he missed her company, although she certainly wished he would actually declare that to be so. Just once. But she perceived something else, something halting in his voice over the phone that suggested discomfort. She put her pen down and looked out the window for a very long while and watched an ocean liner, probably arrived from Europe, being pulled by tugs up the river and alongside the West Side piers. She missed Hammett terribly.
His plane was due to arrive in Newark at three p.m. American Airlines Flight 111. She was at the terminal building early, unwilling to repress her excitement. He ducked out of the plane, stood for a moment at the top of the ramp and looked around at the people pushing forward below. He stood thin and tall, buttoning his suit jacket on a very cold day; his pewter hair against his tanned face made him look glorious. She saw him first and touched her throat with her hand. Hammett, there. She was like a young girl again with a crush on a movie star.
He carried a leather valise, which he put on the ground when she appeared before him. Seen up close he looked weary, his eyes fatigued, his face lined. It had been a hard trip; he looked very like what he was, a used forty-four-year-old. Hammett embraced her tightly with both arms, raised her off the ground, and rocked her gently back and forth. Neither spoke. Why had there been so few moments like this one between them? They loved one another strongly in each other’s presence, especially when they came together after a long absence. It was Hammett who did not want to end the embrace.
Then, abruptly, as though a director had called Cut, Lillian pushed away, took up his valise, and, trying to be funny, ushered him through the crowd. “Coming through, folks. Coming through.” And when she had sufficient attention: “That’s right, God has arrived. We’re all saved.” Until a great many years later when she became an icon and an old lady, there was always something playful, devilish about Lillian.
In the car she chattered as she drove, throwing around names and places, friends’ successes and failures, mostly failures, marital problems and scandals. Hammett did not know all the people involved and did not want to. He was more concerned with how erratically she was driving. Lillian did not stop talking. Just before she entered the tunnel, he touched her arm and said her name in a way that made her understand they were fine. She looked over at him and smiled. He was smiling back in the same way.
Lillian didn’t speak again until they were in midtown traffic. “Tough flight?”
He reduced a paragraph to two words. “Very. Always.”
“At least now it’s legal to get high while you’re high.”
“Haven’t had a drink in about three weeks.” About the time Waxman was killed.
“Why didn’t you tell me, for Christ’s sake?”
“I think I just did.”
“Dash. My god, that’s—”
“Don’t say wonderful or I’ll puke.”
“Open the window quick … wonderful.”
“I’ve got to be careful. I don’t want any of my temperance to rub off on you.”
“I do.”
Later, in the apartment together, they watched in silence as the winter sun set over Jersey, sending diagonal light into the darkening room. Lights came on along the riverfront on both shores; the gliding boat traffic on the water was illuminated faintly. The two were at ease. He was tired. She was tamed. They drank tea out of beautiful cups. Neither wanted to break the silence until Lilly said softly, “How come?”
He understood. “The Waxman thing. What else?” He had never told her of his carelessness in leaving the crime scene and chose not to tell her now. “Had to get away.”
“I sent Phil five hundred. He says the thing is costing a fortune. Where’s that all going?”
“The money?”
“No. The case.”
“It’s not too promising. The bad guys have a lot of clout, financial, political. Until I can be sure, we have to assume he was killed because he was going to try to make Hollywood a union town.”
“They would do that?”
Hammett opened his eyes wide: “They wouldn’t? I’ll get a better handle on things when I go back.”
When I go back came as an affront. He just got here. How to keep him here was Lilly’s new concern. “I know you are far too manly to admit it, but if these guys are killers and they know you’re onto them, isn’t there a chance, the slightest little chance, you’re in danger?”
“Actually a pretty good chance. But of course they can tail me here too. Probably will.”
Lillian said in a voice close to Nora Charles’s, “So Nickie, you came back to me because you needed a hideout.”
“Some hideout. Who couldn’t find me here? No, mostly I came because I needed you, and only you, to tell me that I wasn’t a piece of garbage.” Dashiell Hammett expelled a breath. He had never made such an admission to her. Another woman, he knew, would want to know why he considered himself garbage. Never Lillian. It was simply out of the question.
A long silence was broken by the sustained wail of a nearby tugboat’s horn. When the silence returned, it and the darkness had deepened.
Lillian had been moved by this hard man’s defenselessness more than at any time she could remember. She heard herself say the word. Garbage, not as a question, just as a word, the sound of it. She reached for his hand. “You? Hammett? Garbage? My god.”
It was exceptionally dark outside now, the moon had disappeared into the wintry night, which made the lights of Manhattan and towns across the river seem braver. There was a faint red glow in the far western sky. Snow.
Lilly sat silently pressed against his side. His arm hung loosely about her. After a while Lilly said, “Hungry?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Want to go out?”
“Don’t feel like other people just yet.”
“Eggs okay?”
“Eggs are magnificent.”
Lillian made scrambled eggs with buttered muffins and then more eggs and more muffins, which they devoured, stopping from time to time to toast themselves with champagne, which is what they decided to call their ginger ale. After the last toast—a mock pledge of eternal loyalty to one another—they left the dishes in the sink and went to bed arm in arm. They did not make love because it seemed so unnecessary.
Hammett was up before the sun rose. This was his favorite time of day, at least when he was sober. He cleaned the dishes, the cups, the frying pan, so quietly he didn’t have to close her door. Then he found his jacket and walked out through the lobby and down the front steps without encountering a soul. There was a bracing chill in the morning air. It hadn’t snowed but certainly would.
He had almost forgotten how alive the seasons made a person feel, as did a true neighborhood setting. Hollywood was unreal in almost every respect but its essential artificiality lay in its invariable sunlight. Seasons and their unpredictable weather would, of course, have made location shooting too uncertain and therefore too expensive, so even the sun ended up in the movie business.
Broadway was awake, at least its commerce was. Stores, some pushcarts, newsstands were open, and people of all shapes, sizes, types, and backgrounds were all about and mingling. Hammett bought a Times and asked for a pack of Fatimas, which he pronounced “Fat-i-mas.”
“Here’s your ‘Fa-tee-mas.’ ”
“Duly noted. And could you direct me to a good Jewish deli?”
“There ain’t none. But on the corner is the best of the worst.”
Dashiell Hammett turned away smiling. How long had it been since he’d smiled this way, appreciatively, pleasurably, and without wearing the mask of satire. This smile made his face feel good. He was the only one smiling in the deli, where numbers were handed out even though no number was required.
When he returned to the apartment, Lilly was awake and in a short kimono. He whistled at her very good legs.
He sliced her bagel, smoothed on the cream cheese and lox and onions. She made the coffee. Lilly waited for what she thought was an appropriate amount of time over breakfast before she touched his Times and said, “I have a far better hideout than this place.”
He put the paper aside and did a Tallulah: “Who doesn’t, dahling.”
She had not told him of the meeting she attended a few weeks earlier at Shumlin’s office in midtown. “Want me to drop names? Of course you do. Dos Passos, MacLeish, Blitzstein, Shumlin of course …”
“I knew you were seeing someone behind my back, but the Dalton gang, come on, Lilly …”
“Martha Gellhorn. She was there too. Hemingway’s already gone over to Spain. They want me there. I want you there with me.” Hammett said nothing.
The project was Shumlin’s brainchild, a film on the war in Spain. Americans knew almost nothing about it. None of the studios, of course, was interested, but Shumlin had raised some of the money already, and the rest was promised. He said the White House supported the project but was, until the film was made, unwilling to let that support become public.
“No surprise,” Hammett said, “since they’re bending over backward at the moment not to offend our fascist friends anywhere. What’s Hemingway in for?”
“Herman said he put up a ton of his own money and raised even more. He wants to narrate it.”
“Hemingway will read your words as written? And you believe that?”
“I talked seriously with Martha afterward. I believe they’re both sincere. Hemingway is on the right side on this one, Dash.”
“And you?”
“I want to write it. I want to make it mean something. But the whole thing is so confusing, I’m in over my head already. I need advice.”
Yesterday’s Hammett, the Hammett who didn’t know how to smile properly, would have said, “What’s it pay?” The Hammett in front of her now said, “Lilly. You are a shining piece of work in a tarnished world. Fire away. I’ll give you the best advice I’ve got.”
She handed him about twenty handwritten pages, as she had so often done before. She did not have to say, Tell me what’s wrong, but she did.
Hammett said, “How firm is all this?”
“Firm. I’m going. Interested in cowriting? There’s money for us both to go over.”
“I’ll be the guy in the shadows on this one, if it’s all right with you.”
“It could be important in our lives. For us. We could make a great
film together.”
Hammett did not say, Impossible. He thought, Wasn’t that just the way of the world? Just when you decide to come together, the damn thing flies apart.
“I’m sailing in two weeks. Come with me, Dash.”
“Let me read the pages. We’ll talk. Where’s a good place?” Lilly had the impression that his feelings had been hurt but didn’t know precisely how or why. It was better to address that problem later. Or never.
“There’s a desk in the bedroom. Remember, it’s just a first pass. I’m concerned about the approach.”
He looked heavenward: “Writers. Lord, spare me.”
Hammett emerged more than three hours later, which meant he’d read the draft many times. She peered into his face for a sign. She detected puzzlement. As he handed her the pages, she noticed only a line through her title, Spain Is Waiting, and in a smaller, cleaner hand, The Spanish Earth. She flipped through the pages; it was the only change. A bad sign.
It was wrong conceptually, he told her. Much too much history, much too much politics, too much documentary for a documentary, all in all too puffed up. You’re not going to change people’s attitudes, he said, unless you first touch their hearts. In a documentary everything starts with the heart. This version didn’t even come close, didn’t even try to. This is polemics. Be a playwright. It’s the human drama that matters, that always matters, that only matters. Capture the drama of people, innocent victims, caught in a world where suddenly bombs are falling out of the sky on them and on their children. How would you folks like that in Pittsburgh or Poughkeepsie? Then maybe a line—but no more than that—about those bombs and the planes dropping them being German and Italian. Nazi and Fascist. This killing is the true face of fascism, this is what totalitarians do to decent people. And we’ve got to stop them now or there may be an even harsher lesson for us further down the line.
