Hammett (Crime Masterworks)

by Gores, Joe

  It rang a great many times before a girl’s sleep-tousled voice answered.

  ‘I want to talk with Dashiell Hammett,’ said Atkinson.

  ‘You’ – she broke it with a huge yawn – ‘you know . . . what time it . . .’

  Atkinson put on his tough voice to growl around his cigar, ‘Hammett, sister. It’s important.’

  Hammett’s voice was short and irritated.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Dash!’ he exclaimed loudly. ‘How are you this bee-oo-tee-ful morning?’

  ‘Christ, I might have known. You bastard, I’m writing.’

  ‘And I’m walking the midnight streets, alone, drinking in cheap gin mills, alone, ogling pretty girls, alo—’

  ‘Goddammit, Vic, I’m writing!’

  ‘I’m at . . .’ He paused to read off the phone number in the dim light, wondering for the first time whether maybe he wasn’t a little bit drunk, after all. DAvenport seven-seven-eight-nine, and . . .’ He got his mouth close to the receiver. ‘I’m in danger, Dash! Strange men . . .’

  ‘I hope they beat your goddamn head in!’

  Atkinson rubbed his ringing ear thoughtfully, twitched his nose, wiggled his eyebrows, and checked his railroad watch. Going on one. He decided maybe it was a little thick, at that.

  One thirteen Steuart Street was a bare white wooden door without any lettering on it, not even a knob. But when Atkinson pushed, it opened inward to a flight of wide stairs going straight back. He reached the second floor winded. Too damn many cheap cigars. A hallway took him back toward The Embarcadero; he checked each door for a peep-slot.

  Two-thirds of the way along the hall he thumped a fist on a heavy hardwood panel that turned out to be sheet steel. After a moment the peep-slot slid open and an eye gleamed at him.

  ‘You’ll wake the baby.’

  ‘Maxie sent me over with the kid’s milk.’ Atkinson laid a five-dollar bill, folded longways, on the edge of the slot.

  It disappeared. The door was opened by a man in a dark suit and shirt with a wide white tie. He was a head shorter than Atkinson, but fully as wide. He had dirty fingernails. He gestured.

  ‘Sorry, bo. House rules.’

  ‘You got a chill off?’ sneered Atkinson.

  But he stood patiently for the frisk. It was for show, to impress high-rollers from uptown out for a night of slumming; it wouldn’t have turned up anything smaller than a cannon.

  ‘Through the door, bo,’ said the bouncer.

  Atkinson stuffed the cigar back into his face and sauntered away. As his fingers touched the knob, the door opened with a short angry buzz. Interesting. If . . . Yeah. Three feet beyond it, a second door. Yep, hinges on the opposite side. Buzzed through. And beyond that the third, hinges again reversed.

  No scrubbed-out stains, no scars in the wood. Again, just for show.

  The third door admitted him to a blast of light and noise, and to a carbon copy of the man on the outside, except his chin was a little bluer and his fingernails a little cleaner. Or maybe it was just that the light was better.

  ‘Welcome to Dom’s Dump.’ His grin was as manufactured as his Brooklyn accent.

  Atkinson jerked his thumb at the three-door arrangement. ‘I thought Big Al had a lock on those.’

  ‘Where’d you say you was from?’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  Atkinson sauntered on. Dom’s Dump was a huge echoing high-ceilinged place with heavy plum curtains around all the walls to mask the windows and sop up the noise. The ornate hardwood bar ran the length of the right-hand wall; it had retained its old-fashioned brass rail, but the spittoons were gone. Too many ladies came to the speakies these days. The center of the room was open, the hardwood floor waxed but well-scuffed, ready for dancers. Tables were crowded around the dance floor, and the long wall across from the bar was lined with dark-varnished wooden booths with high backs.

  Atkinson put his back to the bar. He hooked his elbows over it, and one heel over the brass rail. He puffed blue smoke. Few people here this time of night on a Tuesday. Thursday through Monday would be their big play. Suspended over the dance floor was a giant ball covered with hundreds of bits of mirror. It was motionless, but on busy nights it would revolve and the colored spots trained on it from the corners of the high ceiling would cast shifting patterns of light and color across the dancers.

  ‘What’ll it be, sir?’ Atkinson looked back over his shoulder at the barkeep.

  ‘Antiquary, if it wasn’t cooked up this morning.’

  Midforties. Black curly hair shot with gray, a pasta figure under his white apron. Too old by fifteen years for Pronzini, and he didn’t have the Capone air they all cultivated these days. The eternal hired hand.

  ‘Here you are, sir.’

  Atkinson dropped the shot in a lump, shook his head, wheezed, and wiped his eyes on the sleeve of his lumberjack.

  ‘If that’s twenty years old, it’s been dead for nineteen. Lemme talk to the Ghee with the brass nuts.’

  ‘Dom?’

  ‘I don’t mean Lindy, sweetheart.’

  Atkinson sipped his second Scotch and started the slow cremation of another cigar. He figured he wouldn’t have to wait long for Pronzini.

  ‘So who’s asking?’ demanded a voice at his elbow.

  Pronzini was a heavy, darkly handsome man with thick black hair, heavy black brows, and heavy sideburns to the bottoms of his ears. He wore a tight chalk-striped double-breasted suit tailored for a Pronzini twenty pounds younger.

  Atkinson jerked a head at the front door.

  ‘Last time I saw one of those was in a cathouse on the south side of Cicero, out near the Hawthorne racetrack. Button-operated. You get your man between doors, then lock all three electrically. The man on this side pumps a few rounds into the door, maybe, chest-high.’

  There was a sneer in Pronzini’s voice. ‘You John Law?’

  ‘Two weeks after the place opened up, the inside door looked like Swiss cheese. Between doors looked like a slaughterhouse. Hymie Weiss and his boys burned it to the ground for a thousand bucks from a committee of reform. Now Hymie Weiss is dead.’ He added tonelessly, ‘No, I ain’t John Law.’

  Pronzini gave a meaningless grunt and jerked his head.

  ‘Let’s barber.’

  They took the end booth, next to a split in the drapes behind which Atkinson assumed would be a rear exit. Three tables away a very young man with a shock of blond wavy hair was talking with a petite girl in a bright red satin cocktail dress. The young man looked drunk and intense, the girl sober and bored.

  Pronzini snapped his fingers at the bartender. To Atkinson, he said, ‘What’s your grift? The eastern mobs don’t send nobody around ever since a couple of their boys went home in the baggage car.’

  Atkinson relit his stogie.

  ‘How about one man with money to spend, and willing to play by the house rules?’

  ‘He might find some action,’ Pronzini admitted.

  The bartender appeared at the table. Pronzini looked at Atkinson.

  ‘It was supposed to be Antiquary.’

  ‘Yeah. Tony, bring my friend here some of the real stuff. The real stuff, you got that?’ The bartender went away. Atkinson flicked ash on the floor. The darkly handsome bootlegger leaned forward confidingly.

  ‘Wait till you taste this Scotch. Smooth as a baby’s butt.’

  ‘Word I pick up around the speakies is that you gotta juice the cops in this town if you want to make connections.’

  Pronzini chuckled complacently. ‘I ain’t saying you’re wrong.’

  ‘Anyone special who—’

  Tony set down Pronzini’s beer and Atkinson’s Scotch. Prewar, right enough, rich smoky taste with an edge of bitterness that woke up the throat and nose. Pronzini was watching with delighted eyes.

  ‘Didn’t I tell you?’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind a couple of bottles to take—’

  The golden-haired youth was on his feet, shouting at the girl in the red dress. As h
e shouted, he jerked greenbacks from his wallet and threw them on the floor.

  ‘Go ahead, take it, take the money!’ he cried, tears running down his face. ‘That’s all you’re after, isn’t it? Isn’t it? That’s all you’re after.’

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ grumbled Pronzini. The bartender and the bouncer were already converging on the table. ‘Ya gotta let him in, his daddy’s on the Board of Supes, but I tell ya, he gives the place a bad name. Can’t hold his liquor and can’t hold his dames.’

  The girl was down on both knees like a washerwoman, scrabbling after the money. The boy threw the empty wallet at her head. The bouncer grabbed his arm from behind. The boy spun gracefully, yelling, and threw a right-hand lead at the blued jaws. The bouncer kneed him in the crotch. He fell on the floor. The girl was on her feet, backing away, her face composed and sullen.

  Pronzini stood up, shaking his head sourly. ‘C’mon, we can’t talk in all this racket.’

  Atkinson, carrying the bottle casually by the neck, followed him through the break in the drapes. He was glad to get out of the suddenly stuffy barroom.

  Beyond the door was a long narrow room stacked floor to ceiling with wooden crates of liquor. Over his shoulder, Pronzini said, ‘We got a private room back here we won’t be disturbed.’

  The door at the far end led to another room, this one small and square with a bed and table and dresser and chairs. Three other doors: bathroom, closet, and one probably opening on stairs down to the dark narrow alley he could see from the window. Pronzini sat down at the table and gestured Atkinson to a seat across from him.

  ‘Okay, bo, you tell me what sort of financing you’ve got, I’ll tell you whether there’s any chance we can deal.’

  ‘Maybe you could lay out your setup for me a little first.’

  He treated himself to Scotch as Pronzini talked about payoffs and which cops had to be juiced on a regular basis. Atkinson drank and listened and reminded himself to go easy on the hootch; he had a long night ahead, and a lot of details to remember, and he was already getting a heat on.

  Only it wasn’t a heat. He started clumsily to his feet as he realized what was happening to him. The bitter edge to the Scotch! He cursed the heavy, grinning, distorted face. He reached across the table for it. Tear it off its fat neck. But the floor moved sideways under his feet to spill him over so his chin struck the edge of the table.

  Through waves of nausea, Vic Atkinson could hear a voice that sounded vaguely familiar. Then he placed it. Dominic Pronzini. It came back to him. Like a rube from the sticks. The real stuff, Tony. The real stuff.

  ‘. . . he used to hang around North Beach in the old days when I was a kid . . . Huh?’

  Atkinson realized Pronzini was on the phone. ‘Naw, I don’t know his grift, nothing in his poke but a few bucks . . . Yeah. No. Sure. He ain’t going nowhere . . .’

  Atkinson tried to move his head, but the waves of nausea swept over him again. Chloral hydrate. Probably would have knocked him out for hours if he’d been a smaller man. As it was, hitting his chin had knocked him out. The Mickey Finn had him drifting . . . paralyzed . . .

  He came back again, maybe a little stronger. Pronzini was back on the phone with the same guy and a different conversation.

  ‘Who you sending to – no, check that, I don’t want to know. The alley door’ll be open for him. But what difference does it make who this guy is? My boys can make sure he gets the message. He wakes up in an alley somewhere with his teeth in his pocket . . .’

  Away again, drifting. Try to move the head, so he’d know if he was . . . gently. Gently, goddamn you! Ohh-h-h . . .

  Sound of door opening. Footsteps approaching. He realized he didn’t even know if he was lying on his back or his face. No feeling. But better now, even so. Not going away and coming back.

  Above him, a grunt of surprise. On his back then. The newcomer seeing his face and recognizng him. Had to get eyes open, see who it was had come in from the downstairs alley door Pronzini had left open. Had to. It could be the man. The man. Crack his case before he even got started on it.

  Now!

  With a supreme effort, Vic Atkinson forced his eyelids open. He was flat on his back, staring straight up. Up, high as the moon, at the elongated, distorted image his eyes gave his foggy brain.

  The man, all right. But opening his eyes had been a mistake.

  ‘Yes, well, that’s it, isn’t it?’ said the man looking down at him. Turned away, regret in his eyes, Atkinson could see him go to the door, open it six inches, call Pronzini and shut it again.

  He was standing at the window, overcoat collar turned up, hat pulled low on his head, when Pronzini came in.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘He opened his eyes. He saw my face.’

  Goddamn chloral hydrate. If only Dash had come with him, none of this would have . . .

  ‘I’ll need . . . something . . . to—’

  ‘In the closet,’ said Pronzini quickly. ‘I don’t want to know about it.’

  ‘Just so you get rid of it later,’ said the deliberately muffled voice.

  Pronzini’s footsteps, going away. Door closing. Other footsteps to same door, key turning in lock, then footsteps to closet. In the closet. Coming at him.

  Atkinson tried, despairing, to move. Couldn’t. God, so sick. Meet it.

  With a supreme effort, Vic Atkinson raised his head three inches and opened his eyes.

  The bulky man swung the baseball bat. The arc ended with a sickening abruptness on the bridge of the detective’s nose. As the home run exploded against Atkinson’s eyes and into his brain, his bladder and sphincter let loose. The killer leaped back with a little exclamation to avoid the mess. And the blood. Then he stepped back in to use the bat some more. As long as it had to be done, he might as well enjoy it.

  8

  It was coming right, now. Felix Weber, the ex-con, was gone. The Primrose Hotel was gone. Hammett’s typewriter clacked. The ashtray was overflowing; flecks of tobacco drifted on the top of black coffee long since gone cold.

  He stopped, rubbed bloodshot eyes, tugged his mustache, considered. Aaronia Haldorn. Her husband Joseph. And instead of the run-down hotel, their exclusive Pacific Heights place, the Temple of the Holy Grail. Joseph would work as a character where Weber hadn’t.

  He got up and started to pace. Hell, yes. Joseph would believe. That was it. Wield the knife himself. Sure. As for Aaronia . . .

  Aaronia.

  Hammett quit pacing to light himself a cigarette. Aaronia. He’d given her the name but not the physical description of his older sister, Reba. Of all his relatives, the only one he still wrote to. He chuckled. Aaronia Rebecca Hammett, as stiff-necked as he was. He’d send her a copy of The Dain Curse when Knopf published it. If he ever got the damned thing revised.

  But still he stood, gripped by the past. Philadelphia. He’d been . . . what? Two? Three? White house with a little wooden porch and initials carved penknife deep in the railing. Tagging along after Reba to the park to fetch drinking water. Must have been Fairmont Park. And the time the old man took them both – maybe even the baby, Dick, too – to the city dump. There’d been a billy goat with a long white beard and mad eyes, eating tin cans. Or at least the labels off them.

  Circle of men around the goat, laughing. Every time one of them would toss a cigarette butt, quick as lightning the goat would piss on it and put it out. Every time. He’d never seen his father laugh so hard.

  He became aware that knuckles had been rapping against the front door for some time. He rubbed a hand over his sandpaper jaw and called, ‘I’m asleep.’

  ‘Sam. It’s me. Goodie. You’ve got another phone call.’

  Hammett went to the window and jerked at the bottom of the shade. It shot up to slap twice around the roller. Sunshine burst in to squint his eyes. He threw up the bottom half of the double-hung window and sucked in shocking dawn air. Where the hell had the night gone?

  Goodie was dressed for work in a checked gingham apron f
rock with a collarless square neck and a midcalf hem that would turn no sufferer’s head in the doctor’s waiting room. Following her to her apartment, he talked at her back.

  ‘I’m going to give that damn Atkinson a blast he won’t forget, after that trick he pulled last night . . .’

  He knelt on the couch, picked up the phone, clipped the receiver between the side of his neck and a raised shoulder so he could make drinking motions with his left hand to suggest coffee. Goodie nodded and disappeared into the kitchen.

  ‘Yeah, I know, Vic. The cops picked you up and—’

  ‘Dash? Jimmy Wright here.’

  A well-remembered voice from his Pinkerton past, another operative who’d stayed on when Hammett had left.

  ‘Jimmy, how’s the boy, long time no see. You still with the Pinks?’

  ‘Not for a year. I quit to go with Vic down south. Why I called, they found him behind the Southern Pacific station this morning. Worked over with a baseball bat or something, then dumped there.’

  I’m in danger, Dash! Strange men . . . Hope they beat . . . goddamn head in . . .

  ‘Dumped?’ he asked almost stupidly. The tips of his fingers had turned pale against the phone. ‘Dead?’

  ‘You never saw one deader.’

  He was without movement for a full twenty seconds; then a long ripple that might have been a shiver ran through his lean body.

  ‘I’m on my way.’

  Goodie came from the kitchen with a steaming cup of coffee half-extended. Hammett felt hollow. Hope they, beat . . . goddamn head . . .

  ‘Sam, what’s wrong? What—’

  He was already heading for the door.

  Hammett paid off the cab and started across Third toward the bulky colonnaded Mission Revival SP station, built of stucco phonied up like adobe. When he saw the craning knot of loungers at the far end of the long wooden baggage shed, he veered down Townsend instead. At the gate in the iron picket fence, a uniform bull was holding back the crowd. He let Hammett through.

  Jimmy Wright, five feet eight and overweight, was at the foot of the wooden ramp leading up into the shedlike baggage building. They shook hands.