Hammett (Crime Masterworks)

by Gores, Joe

  ‘I don’t follow politics much.’

  ‘Meaning you didn’t – or wouldn’t – vote for Bren? There was a time when I didn’t myself.’

  Hammett knew the story. In 1913, as a feature writer on crusading editor Fremont Older’s Bulletin, Lynch had been one of the few who opposed McKenna’s candidacy for mayor. But despite Lynch’s clever and biting attacks, McKenna had won even in the home district of his incumbent opponent, P. H. ‘Pinhead’ McCarthy.

  ‘He’s gotten better since then?’

  ‘Or I’ve gotten less discriminating,’ said Lynch with an easy smile.

  Four years later, embittered by personal tragedy, he had resigned from the newspaper to direct McKenna’s drive for reelection. It was successful, for McKenna’s personal magnetism had found its perfect complement in Lynch’s hard-headed pragmatism.

  ‘Bren is backing you all the way in there with the committee.’

  Hammett slid down on his spine in a big leather armchair, and said nothing.

  After a moment, Lynch chuckled. ‘You think he’ll try to hamstring the investigation?’

  ‘It’s his town.’

  ‘Which he’ll be leaving in two years for the statehouse in Sacramento.’ He gestured with his empty brandy glass. ‘Unless there’s a scandal in his administration that he does nothing about.’

  ‘Molly Farr,’ said Hammett. There was a thoughtful, vaguely approving look in his eyes.

  ‘Molly Farr or some other. Oh, I know he has been elected three times because the citizens want a wide-open town. But his popularity extends beyond that. He’s America’s first lord mayor in the British sense.’ His eyes were alight with enthusiasm. ‘When he took office, San Francisco was still a nineteenth-century provincial town; Bren turned it into a twentieth-century metropolis. It was a community with a tradition of political corruption under Abe Reuf, and with a history of mob violence and vigilante violence and labor violence. Bren has brought together employer, employed, and unemployed, and gotten them to—’

  ‘The only thing that won’t go away is that political corruption,’ cut in Hammett in an almost lazy voice.

  ‘And that’s exactly why I arranged for Bren to chair this reform committee as soon as I heard about it. That’s why I talked Dan Laverty into advising the committee – so they’d get an incorruptible investigator. And when that investigator was killed, I had Dan get us another one equally trustworthy.’

  ‘You trust the Preacher’s judgment that much?’

  ‘He and Bren and I went through grammar and high school together out in the Mission. We’ve known each other for better than forty years.’ He shook his head. ‘The directions people go! Griff Mulligan was another one in the class . . .’

  McKenna bustled in. One pearl-gray trouser cuff was artfully draped into the top of an oak-tanned cowboy boot. Despite his high heels, he was half a head shorter than the other two men. Through the briefly opened door, Hammett could see the committee members still standing in odd groups around the table.

  McKenna beamed, pumping Hammett’s hand up and down in both of his. ‘Congratulations! The reform committee has hired you to investigate graft in the San Francisco police department, and to report to the grand jury all material for criminal indictments against policemen guilty of taking bribes.’ He crossed to the sliding panel in the Gillow sideboard, which was supported by two magnificently carved wooden eagles. ‘Brandy?’

  ‘I’m on the wagon.’ Still wary, Hammett added, ‘I’ll need strong backing in certain areas, Mr Mayor . . .’

  ‘Just name them.’

  ‘I’ll be questioning policemen, everyone from sergeant up, to start – and a lot of them aren’t going to want to talk to me.’

  Lynch said, ‘Dan Laverty will see that anyone your people want, your people get.’

  ‘They’ll be Vic’s people, actually, headed by another ex-Pinkerton named Jimmy Wright. Jimmy’s in town now, the rest are due up from Los Angeles next week. They’ll start interrogations on Monday, in an office we select ourselves so informants can come and go unobserved for their own protection.’

  ‘Anything else?’ asked Lynch.

  ‘I’ll need some sort of authorization to talk to the phone company to monitor certain lines, with stenographers taking down all incoming and outgoing calls.’

  ‘Fair enough.’ Lynch extended his hand to Hammett; the mayor was working on his second brandy. ‘I’ll get written authorization for you before your men arrive. You’ll see that I meant what I said about the total backing of this office.’ He chuckled. ‘And you can be as secretive as you wish about your methods and findings, even with us.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Hammett pleasantly.

  When the lean detective had departed, McKenna lowered his snifter almost sadly. ‘That’s a man with a grievance, Owen, and you’ve turned him loose in my city with a meat ax.’

  Surprising anger suffused the secretary’s heavy features. ‘Goddammit, man, this is your only chance to get out of the mess you’ve gotten yourself into!’

  ‘Mess?’

  Lynch sighed. He plopped his briefcase on a walnut and gilt console table and fished in his watch pocket for the key.

  ‘I didn’t plan to spring this on you until tomorrow morning on the Sacramento train, Bren, but . . .’ He delved for papers. ‘You know they’ve taken to calling you Randy Bren around City Hall these days?’

  ‘Haw! That’s good, that!’ McKenna tossed off half his third brandy with a practiced flip of the wrist. ‘Randy Bren. I like that.’

  ‘I doubt that Colleen would find it very amusing.’

  ‘She ain’t likely to hear it.’

  Lynch said nothing. McKenna turned a hard questioning stare on him. Mention of his wife seemed to have troubled him.

  ‘Well, is she?’

  Lynch had removed a thin file folder from the briefcase. ‘Report from a private detective dated Monday, May 21, 1928. Subject of Investigation: BRENDAN BRIAN MCKENNA. Client: COLLEEN DOROTHEA MCKENNA. Quote: “Subject was observed leaving—”’

  ‘Col . . . you mean that Colly put a private snoop on me?’

  ‘What did you expect, Bren? She’s no fool and you’ve been getting more flagrant with it. Quote: “Nine thirty A.M., subject was called for at City Hall by a blonde . . .” Hmm . . . ah, yes. “Left Whitcomb Hotel, Market Street, at eleven o’clock A.M. . . .’ Ah! Here: “Twelve ten P.M. ascended to upstairs room above Jack’s Restaurant with a brunette” . . . There’s a good word, Bren, “ascended”; it gives a scriptural flavor that I’m sure Colly would find comforting. The investigator points out that there are beds in those upstairs rooms, and . . .’

  ‘You’ve made your point,’ said McKenna weakly.

  Lynch put the folder back in the briefcase. ‘And you can ask what mess you’ve gotten yourself into?’

  McKenna said wearily, ‘Thank God Colly didn’t see—’

  ‘Who the devil do you think gave it to me?’

  ‘You . . . can’t be serious, Owen!’

  ‘With a note that if this didn’t stop, you’d be running for governor as a divorced man.’

  McKenna went to the ornate rocaille pier glass to nervously center his cravat. The light slanted down cruelly across the puffiness of indulgence around his jowls, the fine veining in his eyes, the first tiny hints of burst capillaries in his nose.

  He mumbled, ‘Colly would go through with it? The divorce?’

  ‘If you force her hand. If you don’t, she’ll keep it in the family once again. But something that isn’t going to disappear is that Judah Street rezoning stink. It’s all over the papers and liable to—’

  ‘I vetoed the damned thing Friday.’

  ‘Two weeks too late. It’s an open secret that your three handpicked boys on the Board of Supervisors took a thousand apiece to vote for the change from Second residential to commercial.’

  ‘I’ll have their candy asses if they did,’ said McKenna with as much anger as he could muster.

&nbs
p; ‘Then there’s the rape-murder of that little Chinese girl . . .’

  ‘Dan Laverty shot the murdering bastard dead; the blue-noses ought to be cheering.’

  ‘Would they cheer to know that Dan kicked the man’s balls up into his belly first?’

  ‘Yes,’ said McKenna defiantly, ‘after what he used ’em for.’

  ‘Maybe so. But the dead man was a rumrunner for a local ’legger. The teetotals are already saying it wouldn’t have happened if you didn’t allow the speaks to flourish in San Francisco. And finally is this thing of the Brewster pup and his cronies going off to Molly Farr’s place.’

  McKenna attempted to shrug it off. ‘So Brady’ll have to make a little noise because he plays handball with Dalt Brewster. It’ll cool down, Owen. It always does.’

  ‘Not this time. Not with Evelyn Brewster on the reform committee. She wants Molly out of business and in jail.’

  ‘I’ll not see Molly put away for fifteen years.’ He raised a hand to forestall objections. ‘I know, Owen, you don’t use whores and don’t see why anyone else should, but it’s more than just that. Last election, Molly had every Mary Magdalene in this city out voting tombstones for us from morning till night. I’ll not throw her down.’ He brightened abruptly. ‘Besides, nobody knows where she is.’

  ‘Epstein does, no matter how much he denies it to the newspapers. If I were Hammett, I’d be trying to make a deal with Brass Mouth for her secret testimony.’

  ‘And you wanted him hired!’ He burst out suddenly, ‘Why are we suddenly so worried about the reform element, anyway, Owen? In the old days—’

  ‘The old days are gone. To be governor two years from now, you have to get the clean money in San Francisco behind you now.’

  ‘It was the not-so-clean money put me in this office.’

  ‘Don’t you understand yet, Bren? That money has nowhere else to go.’

  They descended the broad marble stairway to the floor of the rotunda, and paused at the head of the granite outer stairs while the chauffeur brought up McKenna’s grand yellow and black 1927 Lincoln coaching brougham with its gleaming side-lamps. Then Lynch went up Polk alone to his four-year-old Auburn. His thick shoulders slumped slightly. He was tired. It was all getting so damned complicated.

  ‘Bren, Bren, you damned fool,’ he said aloud in fond exasperation as he watched the brougham’s retreating taillights.

  What wouldn’t he give to still have a wife to buoy him up, comfort him, inspire him as Colleen McKenna would do for Bren, given the chance? But his wife, Clarissa, had died, childless, in the influenza epidemic of 1918, and he had been alone ever since.

  12

  Hammett went down Prescott Court, a narrow cul-de-sac off Vallejo Street, looking at house numbers. He paused in front of 20/22, an older building with white scroll-work on the roof overhang and around the windows of the lower flat. From somewhere, very faintly, came the tang of fermenting grapes. It was only in the past ten years, since the Italians had begun pushing the Irish out, that the billy goats had disappeared from the lower slopes of Telegraph Hill and the bootleg winepresses had begun to outnumber the whiskey cookers.

  Which reminded him that he needed a bottle if he was going to play in Fingers LeGrand’s poker game. It was tricky to try to get information about payoffs over the poker table in seemingly casual conversation; but Fingers knew him as a writer, not a detective, and he doubted that news of his hiring by the reform committee would be out on the street yet. He’d left McKenna’s office less than an hour before.

  And the sooner he found Vic’s killer, the sooner he could return to the revision of The Dain Curse.

  Hammett knocked, then rattled the heavy brass knob of the alley door. He had to stoop to press his nose against the heavy-gauge wire mesh that covered the window. It was gritty with street dirt.

  A blocky silhouette moved toward Hammett, a latch was turned, and the window opened inward. A garlicked voice shoved words at him through the mesh. ‘I don’t know you.’

  ‘Fingers does.’

  ‘Fingers who?’

  ‘For Chrissake, knock-knock.’

  The door scraped open. The man’s gray sweatshirt stank of stale sweat and was stretched taut over a broad hard mound of gut. He led the way to the speakeasy, a square concrete cell, the walls dampstained and unadorned with either picture or calendar, the ceiling the rough pine joists of the subfloor above. A single light globe hung from an electric flex stapled to one of the rafters.

  ‘Nice little place you’ve got here,’ said Hammett politely.

  ‘Yeah, Palm Court at the Palace.’ He went around behind a two-by-twelve of unplaned wood laid across two upended wooden beer kegs. ‘What’s yours?’

  ‘Rye?’

  ‘Seven-year-old Canadian.’

  Hammett leaned an elbow on the plank and looked around. There were a few straight-back chairs and two kitchen tables with chipped white enamel tops. One was empty, the other held a bottle and three glasses and six elbows.

  The Italians who belonged to the elbows wore their overcoats buttoned and their fedoras precisely centered on their dark heads. None of them was speaking. The light laid down their shadows as thick as tar across the floor and up the walls.

  ‘Flip a lip over that,’ beamed the barkeep. He had a crooked nose and the eyes of a spaniel.

  Hammett laid back the shot. His eyes popped wide open. ‘What’s a pint of this run?’

  ‘For you? Three fifty.’

  ‘And for everybody else?’

  ‘Three fifty. Listen, that stuff goes out of here at fifty-six bucks a case. My cousin, see, runs this fishing boat for Dom Pronzini, and part of his cut he takes in—’

  ‘Giusepp.’ One of the men with his elbows on the table swung the word at the barkeep like a sock full of sand. To Hammett, he said, ‘Now you have your bottle, now you get on your way dam’ quick.’

  Hammett laid a five on the stick. The bartender replaced it with a pint. Hammett dropped the bottle into his overcoat pocket, picked up his buck change, and asked how to get to the game.

  ‘I’ll show you the way.’

  Giuseppe led him through a small concrete area past a couple of battered garbage pails to steep exterior stairs. A dozen feet below, the yellowing grass of the hillside fell away to Sansome and Vallejo. Refuse, empty tins, and broken bottles lined the foot of the wall.

  ‘Top flat. Don’t bother the girls in the lower, y’know?’

  Something in his voice made Hammett ask, ‘Blisters?’

  ‘Now, nothing like that. Dead swell dames. Ya want some of that I can maybe arrange it, but no just knockin’ on the door lemme in, see?’

  ‘Sure.’

  One of the dead swell dames was outside her open back door. Her body, silhouetted through her filmy negligee, was full and lush and Mediterranean.

  ‘Blisters,’ she said scornfully to Hammett as she ground out a cigarette beneath the heel of her pastel French mule. ‘We’re no coffee-and hustlers, big boy.’

  She swayed against him, turning so her breasts were cushioned against his chest and her strong whore’s thighs gripped his leg.

  ‘That’s the best you’ll ever get next to.’

  ‘Sorry, sister, my weakness is liquor.’ He clamped powerful fingers around the hand trying to slip the wallet off his hip. Her unabashed laughter followed him up the stairs.

  Fingers’ back door opened on a bright kitchen. A short mustached walleyed man came in from the hall as Hammett was taking out his pint.

  ‘Pantry,’ said the man. He disappeared again.

  Hammett could hear voices and chips. Stale smoke hung in the air. In the narrow white pantry he found a glass and opened the old-fashioned zinc-lined cooler. He chipped enough ice from one of the twin hundred-pound cakes for his drink, rammed the pick back into the wooden top of the waist-high cooler, and was dousing the ice with rye when the walleyed man popped back in.

  ‘Dining room,’ he said.

  The dining room was paneled in
blond wood; its plate rail held only empty bottles and mail-order junk. The massive oak table bore scores of burns and dozens of pale rings to mark its years of service for poker rather than dining. In the corner behind Fingers’ chair stood his loaded ten-gauge goose gun, outfitted with an extra heavy frame and breech.

  LeGrand’s dolorous face swam up at Hammett through the haze of smoke like a carp surfacing in muddy water.

  ‘Table stakes with a pot limit. I’m the bank.’ He indicated whites, reds, blues. ‘Quarters, halves, dollars.’

  Hammett bought twenty bucks’ worth of chips. Fingers started the first-name-only introductions.

  ‘Dash, you met See-See out in the kitchen . . .’

  They nodded to each other. Hammett happened to know that the dapper little man with the reputation for looking in two directions at once was the best ‘soft-touch’ pickpocket in the game. In thirty years as a cannon he’d never taken a fall.

  Directly to See-See’s left was a tough, handsome, loud-mouthed Irishman named Joey. Auto mechanic by his hands. He said it was his night off.

  Finally there was a pudgy, middle-aged German named Dolf, whose last name Hammett knew to be Geltwasser. He peered myopically through spectacles thick as bottle glass and ran a pawnshop and was one of the city’s deadliest amateur poker players. He had killed two men that Hammett knew about.

  Hammett also knew he was probably wasting his time there that night. There just weren’t enough players for the conversation to develop along the lines he needed. But now he was here, he may as well try; and what the hell, maybe he could pick up rent money in the process.

  Fingers broke out a new deck, shuffled, and burned the top card. Despite deliberately erratic play, Hammett took two hours to lose the first of two double saw-bucks he had gotten from Jimmy Wright as an advance against expenses on the Atkinson Investigations fund. He ran a few bluffs as advertising, and two of them took good pots.

  By the time he bought his second stack, he’d killed half his pint, and the group had loosened up a bit. All of them were punishing their bottles, especially Dolf Geltwasser. He drank prodigious amounts of whiskey; the eyes magnified by his thick glasses became only more kindly, and his play only more deadly.