Hammett (Crime Masterworks)

by Gores, Joe

  ‘How long ago?’

  ‘Three o’clock this morning. I was still up. He rang the bell, came up, showed me that badge . . .’ The old man said softly, ‘He was a ringer, wasn’t he, Sam?’

  Hammett merely nodded, frowning in thought. Nearly nine hours before. An impossibly cold trail. He could mobilize the men under Jimmy Wright’s command, but as for the police . . .

  Hell, any one of them – particularly Dan Laverty – could have been the one who came and got her. The only cop he really trusted was Jack Manion . . .

  The old man’s face had changed. His eyes had gone dull, as if something opaque had been drawn across them. He doubled up his fist and struck himself in the face with it.

  ‘Cut it out,’ growled Hammett.

  The old man hit himself again. His brass shell-casing ring gashed his cheek. Blood trickled down his face.

  ‘Stupid!’ cried the old man. ‘Worthless! The oldest trick in the book and—’

  ‘Cut it out, Pop,’ said Hammett again. ‘You were taken by experts, they’d know how you feel about the government, how you’d respect a man from the Treasury Department. What bothers me is how they knew where she . . .’ He broke off. Comprehension flooded his face, tightening the lean features. ‘The goddamn phone call!’ he burst out softly.

  He looked over at the old man. Pop had a handkerchief pressed against the purple-lipped cut on his cheek.

  ‘Were you in the room with her when she called her parents?’

  ‘In the next room. But, Sam—’

  ‘Could you hear what she was saying? Did she tell them anything about where she was?’

  ‘Couldn’t hear words, just her voice.’

  ‘English or Chinese? The cadence and tenor would be different, even through a wall.’

  The old eyes, more alive now, sought backward through memory. ‘English.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said softly. ‘Could you identify the guy who took her again?’

  ‘Big man,’ said Pop. ‘Tall, bulky, hat and overcoat . . .’ Chagrin entered the eyes. ‘Now I remember, kept his scarf up around the bottom half of his face, casual like . . .’

  ‘Silk scarf? Wool?’

  ‘Silk.’

  Hammett squeezed the old man’s thin upper arm. ‘Okay, Pop, keep safe. He doesn’t know you can’t identify him.’

  Late afternoon sunlight slanted through the dusty windows of Hammett’s apartment to lay a cool pale oblong on the rug. Summer fog, rolling silent and gray through the Golden Gate and across the western rim of the city, soon would blot it out.

  Jimmy Wright was annihilating a Fatima in Hammett’s ancient Coxwell. His round tough sleepy face was placid, almost stupid with thought.

  Hammett was on his feet as usual, prowling from hallway to window, throwing questions and remarks and comments as he did. He hadn’t shaved and his shirt was open to show the top two buttons of his balbriggan undershirt. A lock of hair hung down across his forehead. His eyes were bloodshot. From the kitchen came the plock-plock-plock of his Challenge electric percolator.

  ‘All right, what have we got on the snatch itself?’

  ‘Post Street at three in the morning is what we got. Nobody saw him in or them out. Nobody saw any cars at the curb with the motor running. Nobody saw—’

  ‘The cop on the beat?’

  ‘Five blocks away rattling doorknobs. He says. More likely drinking coffee in the Pig’n Whistle.’

  ‘This afternoon I did what I should have done as soon as Pop told me about it. Checked up on her phone call.’

  He paused beside the op’s chair to stab his cigarette into the ashtray, then fished for another in his pocket.

  ‘Jack Manion checked with the girlfriend at the chemist’s shop in Spofford Alley. No phone call from Crystal. He checked with the folks. No phone call. They didn’t even know she’d been found and was in a safe place.’ He gave a sudden angry burst of laughter. ‘Safe place!’

  ‘But then that means—’

  ‘That she called a friend we don’t know about, who sold her out to whoever the hell was looking for her. Or that she herself called whoever the hell—’

  The doorbell rang.

  Hammett poked his head into the hall to yell, ‘It’s unlocked.’ He used the interruption to light the cigarette he’d gotten out.

  Goodie came in. She wore a new silk satin Charmeuse frock that looked expensive. Pearl drops glowed at her earlobes, and her golden hair was freshly marceled.

  ‘There’s a telephone call for you, Mr . . . um . . . Wright.’

  Hammett waited until the stocky detective had disappeared, then said to Goodie, ‘Long time no see, sweetheart.’

  She made an abrupt gesture with one hand.

  ‘Your coffee’s done.’

  He could hear the sounds of her unscrewing the electric cord from the wall socket, the rattle as she got spoons and cups, the grunt of the icebox door as she looked for milk. She called from the kitchen in a voice falsely light and gay.

  ‘I’ve been busy.’

  ‘Sure.’ Hammett watched her set the tray with two steaming cups and other paraphernalia on the davenport table next to his typewriter. When she handed one to him and carried the other over to Jimmy Wright’s chair, he added, ‘You’re not having any?’

  ‘I’ve . . . got a date . . .’

  The fat little op bustled back into the room. He did not sit down, nor did he take any notice of the coffee.

  ‘And there’s something else that don’t make sense. Our people finally got hold of the police report on the Pronzini kill. He was gunned down at three A.M.’

  ‘That’s solid?’ demanded Hammett in a surprised voice.

  ‘Eyewitnesses, three of them. They didn’t get a description of the killer or a license number on the car, they were too busy trying to fit into the same six feet of gutter. But they’re sure of the time. Three A.M.’

  Hammett tugged at his mustache, then caught the look on Goodie’s face and shrugged slightly. She had been turning from one to the other, frowning, not understanding.

  ‘At three A.M.,’ said Hammett, ‘Crystal was snatched from the Weller Hotel.’

  ‘Oh, Sam, no! How terrible for her.’

  ‘If we count out the eastern mobsters, the only suspect we’ve got for the snatch and the Pronzini kill is Dan Laverty, the Chief of Detectives. Since the simplest way is usually the easiest way, we’ve been trying to fit him for both the killing and the kidnapping. But if they happened at exactly the same time . . .’

  Goodie was still quite a way behind him. Her voice was shocked. ‘Sam, a policeman?’

  ‘I told you a long time ago that everybody’s for sale in this burg.’ He turned to Jimmy Wright. ‘What’s Laverty been doing since we put the tail on him?’

  ‘Down at the Hall, doing his job. Hasn’t seen anybody he shouldn’t have. No phone calls when he’s been out and around. Which ain’t saying much, since we can’t tap into his phone at the Hall.’

  ‘Tell the boys to stick tight.’

  ‘Will do. If anything develops, you’ll be where?’

  ‘Here. I’m waiting for a phone call from Lynch. He’s supposed to be working on it from the other end.’

  The op nodded and put on his hat and left.

  ‘You don’t seem terribly worried about that girl, Sam,’ said Goodie.

  ‘I think she called whoever came and got her. I think she arranged for him to spring her out of the hotel with that phony badge. It’s the only thing that makes sense.’

  ‘Then she’s not really in danger at all?’

  ‘Oh, she’s in danger, right enough. She just doesn’t realize how much. She’s playing some sort of game, and she thinks she can handle whoever it is.’

  ‘I don’t see how you can believe that, Sam!’ she exclaimed. ‘You say you count out the eastern mobsters, but if Al Capone himself is after her for—’

  ‘Sometime when I’ve got a week, I’ll tell you all the holes in that story.’

  Goodie’
s eyes softened. She put a hand on his arm.

  ‘Sam, if you have to stay here for a phone call, I’ll stay and make us something to eat and . . .’

  ‘What about your date?’

  ‘I could break it.’

  He almost said yes. But he still hadn’t told her about Josie and the two girls. Tell her now. Let her know how futile it is. Hurt her now so you hurt her less later. Can’t. He said, ‘I wouldn’t want you to do that, kid.’

  As if to punctuate the sentence, an auto horn sounded twice in the street below. Color rushed into Goodie’s face. She checked her wristwatch. Hammett hadn’t seen it before. He knew jewelry from his years at Al Samuels’ store: This looked like the Elgin eighteen-karat white-gold bracelet watch that retailed for seventy dollars.

  ‘Yes!’ exclaimed Goodie. ‘I . . .’ She flew to the window. She looked out. ‘Yes,’ she said again. She turned to Hammett. ‘Are you sure . . .’ She stopped, said, ‘That poor girl,’ and put her hands on Hammett’s forearms and went up on tiptoe to kiss him on the mouth. There was yearning and desperation and passion in the kiss. He put his arms around her. He responded. Goodie tore free and ran to the hall doorway and out.

  He stood in the middle of the floor for nearly a minute, face set, then moved to the window to stand looking down into the street.

  Goodie went across Post to the massive Hispano-Suiza Cabriolet gleaming on the far side. A uniformed chauffeur, very correct in visored cap and gleaming boots and the beige uniform with flared breeches, got out to hold the door of the enclosed rear compartment for her. Hammett had last spoken with the chauffeur about jabbing a knife into the backside of a fat woman in Bolinas.

  The electric lamps came on along Post Street. Hammett paced his apartment. At some point he heated a can of Campbell’s tomato soup and turned out a tin of Booth’s Crescent sardines. As he ate, he glanced through his partially revised manuscript of ‘Black Lives.’ Goodie’s phone didn’t ring. He got interested in the manuscript.

  He piled his dishes on the drainboard and moved over to the Coxwell with the manuscript. Soon he was frowning in concentration. He had written Harry Bloch at Knopf that some revision was wanted but that he wasn’t sure he could, or would, do it. Now he was sure.

  Of course. Now some of the changes jumped right out at him. Get specific. Make a question about an address into a specific reference to Golden Gate Avenue. And forget that line about Homicide men messing around in the Op’s job. Wordy. Just wonder who’d been killed. Good. Clean and crisp.

  An hour later Goodie’s phone rang, unheard and unheeded.

  It was that damned ending. The ending of Part I of the novel had to be strong. Words again. Too damn many of them. Hey! Just end it where he said of his work that it got done. The last three paragraphs could go. He lined them out. Good. End it with the simple declarative. That livened the dull spot at the end of the first quarter.

  That still left problems of course: too many murders, too much of a gap between the first two quarters of the story and the rest of it – but at least he’d made a start at revisions along the right lines . . .

  He leaned back and rubbed his eyes. Goodie’s phone was ringing. He went to answer it.

  ‘I tried to get you earlier, but there was no answer.’ Owen Lynch’s heavy, considered tones. ‘I spoke at length with Dan about—’

  ‘Where was he the night Vic got chilled?’

  ‘Home in bed. Asleep.’

  ‘Sure. With his wife beside him. Double bed?’

  Lynch said in a rather stiff voice, ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Jesus!’ Hammett exclaimed. ‘Sensibilities! Okay. No way to prove he wasn’t. I don’t really think he did it. I think it happened with Tokzek about the way he told it, too. Which means that somebody set Tokzek up for a fall. Somebody who knew that Laverty, when he saw the Chinese girl, would go berserk. Knew, because he did it once before with a cheap hood named Parelli.’

  ‘If you’re right, it could only be the Mulligans,’ said Lynch. ‘He swears he was home in bed when Pronzini died, too.’ His voice was exhausted. ‘I asked him for his badge just until all this is cleared up. He cried when he laid it on my desk. If you’re wrong, Hammett, and it turns out to be the eastern mobs moving in . . .’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Lynch shook the lethargy from his voice. ‘Any news on the Chinese girl?’

  ‘Lots of negatives. Not anybody from the Treasury Department. No known hoods in by train from back east, nobody out with a Chinese girl under one arm. Our eyewitness on the snatch can’t identify the guy.’

  Hammett went back to his own apartment, leaving both doors open in case Jimmy Wright called with news about Crystal.

  The ringing of Goodie’s phone woke him a final time at four fifteen in the mowing. He was sprawled in the Coxwell chair, icy cold from the mist blowing in through the open windows. His neck was stiff as hell and his shoulder was sore. He groped around in the half-light for his shoes, the wisps of his dream still fogging his mind.

  Ten years old, living on North Stricker opposite the orphan asylum the old man always threatened him with when he was bad. But he’s been good, and he and his dad are duck hunting in the salt marshes along Chesapeake Bay, he with a four-ten single-shot too big for him.

  ‘Coming, goddamn you,’ he muttered at the phone. Four fifteen. Why in hell didn’t Goodie answer it? Oh.

  Waking up cold and stiff. Swing your legs over the edge of the bed in the hunting shack, stretch and yawn and scratch your backside through the trap in the union suit. Plank floor numbing cold-blue feet as you grope for your socks with a cautious toe. Out in the living room, pull on stiff canvas pants by the intense white light of the hissing kerosene lamp. The big potbelly iron stove starting to glow red.

  He shambled down the hall, still yawning and massaging his neck. Cold air blowing a gale through the open door.

  Cold salt-marsh air as you come out of the cabin into just enough predawn light to see the path through the rushes and elephant ears in front of the shack. Cold wind straight from the north, hint of snow in it to keep the ducks moving nervously around and coming upwind into your guns.

  Into Goodie’s open front door.

  The op shocked him fully awake. ‘Better get out here, Dash. We’ve found Crystal.’

  In the pause, Hammett thought again: Goodie wasn’t home. Something ending, as Crystal had ended.

  Because the op was saying, ‘At least we’ve found what was left of her.’

  30

  Wind-driven fog lanced through Hammett’s topcoat as he swung off the trolley on Presidio Avenue. He stood staring through ornate wrought-iron gates: The fog hid the rolling green acres of Laurel Hill cemetery. A shiver as much mental as physical ran through him. He crossed the street. A thick shape materialized.

  ‘Why do these bastards always have such a flair for the dramatic?’ demanded the fat little detective. He was sucking on a Fatima.

  ‘Dumping her in the cemetery?’

  The tone of Hammett’s voice jerked the op’s head around, but the stocky detective said only, ‘Yeah,’ and then, ‘This way.’

  They followed the gravel drive used by the hearses, then cut off on an earth path. Jimmy Wright used a hand torch against the fog. Hammett stumbled and cursed behind him, hands thrust deep into his coat pockets.

  ‘Trolley conductors,’ said Wright over his shoulder. ‘They were ahead of schedule, so they stopped to have a smoke. Otherwise they’d never have heard her, and she probably wouldn’t have been found until the weekend.’

  ‘You mean she was killed here, not just dumped here?’

  ‘Yeah. Kept screaming for almost five minutes, according to the witnesses. They were just about here when they heard the shot.’

  Moisture dripped from Hammett’s hat-brim and his mustache bristled with it.

  ‘Just the one shot?’

  Their feet crushed tough aromatic wild flowers massed across the path. Jimmy Wright slipped and cursed.

  ‘He u
sed both barrels at once. Shotgun. I figure him for a big man to take the recoil.’

  The path angled between two black wet cypresses grown scraggly as winter dogs from lack of care. This part of the graveyard was full of weed-grown, unmonumented plots.

  ‘What time was all this?’

  ‘Little over an hour ago.’ The op flashed his light on his wrist briefly to confirm it.

  ‘And Laverty was—’

  ‘I’m damned if I know for sure, Dash. One of my men put him to bed last night, but there’s an alley runs the length of the block he lives on, he could have back-doored my man through the night. I left word that when my operative calls in, he should go pound on Laverty’s door and see if he’s home. But that ain’t going to prove anything either.’

  They had come up on the moving lights carried by a couple of patrolmen searching for clues. Two Homicide dicks were standing off to one side with their hands in their pockets and their hats tipped back on their heads. Hammett didn’t know either one of them.

  Both he and Wright were sopping to the knees. Palpable fog-forms seeped between the old graves and ornate crumbling tombstones like dawn-harried wraiths. Directly beside a chest-high marble gravestone bearing the dates 1831–1893 was a white marble obelisk knocked down by the 1906 quake. Flanking it were two shattered cylinders of dark marble.

  The dead Chinese girl was sprawled face down across the obelisk. One arm was folded under the body so the childishly small hand formed a cup. Blood from the shattered head had arteried the curved marble to run into the cup. The other arm was outflung. Hammett recognized the tweed knickers and argyle socks and leatherette sport jacket. The legs were apart enough so he could see the crotch of the knickers was stained.

  Hammett squatted over the body. He touched his fingers to the crotch of the knickers and sniffed them. Urine. Bladder voided in death. Raped? No way to tell yet. He realized with an abrupt touch of nausea that the girl’s limbs unnaturally fit themselves to the contours of the unyielding stone beneath her. He put a hand on the body.

  ‘Hey!’ One of the Homicide dicks took his hands out of his pockets. ‘The medical boys ain’t seen her yet.’