by Gores, Joe
‘Yeah. And once I knew you hadn’t spent your three years back east dodging Capone, I had to wonder what you were doing.’
‘I could have just been at the Harlem Inn in Stickney.’
‘I believed that part of your story,’ said Hammett.
Her eyes had a quizzical expression. ‘You’re a funny kind of detective. It’s too bad you have to . . .’ She broke off.
‘And you’re a funny kind of ex-whore.’
His hands in the tight handcuffs had gone numb, but he knew it would do no good to ask her to remove them. Lynch’s death hadn’t altered his peril any.
‘So here were three years of your life unaccounted for, and here you were with a command of English, when you forgot yourself, like a college graduate. Molly mentioned that you would have been terrific dressed up as a little girl, driving the older johns wild – deflowering young virgins is a common sexual fantasy. You said yourself that they dressed you that way at the Harlem Inn. So I thought about the possibility that some rich old man in Chicago had taken you out of the cathouse and . . .’ He raised his shoulders in as much of a shrug as the cuffs permitted him.
The girl’s eyes were momentarily far away, as they’d been when she’d told him of her introduction to whoredom.
‘He was seventy years old; and important enough in Chicago that he could just tell Capone he wanted me, rather than ask. He kept me in a house on the West Side. After the first year, he trusted me to serve as hostess when he entertained. I watched and listened and learned.’ It was her turn to shrug. ‘Then he died of a heart attack at home with his wife. I just packed up and left.’
‘And came out here to go after Lynch. But why him? Was he the one who really—’
‘Yes.’ She spat the word, her tilted eyes narrowed and alive with hatred. ‘He liked them ten years old, eleven. First, he’d take down the bloomers and give them a spanking. Then—’
‘But it got away from him.’
‘Even four years ago I knew it would. He broke one of my ribs. When they locked me in a train compartment with a man who didn’t care whether I had a broken rib or not, I stayed alive by telling myself that one day the one who’d had me first would kill one of the girls, and when he did I would be ready for him.’
A blood-curdling depth of hatred, Hammett thought. He said: ‘So you came back and went to work for Molly . . .’
‘I didn’t know the man’s name, of course. So I needed the fat woman. After three months at Molly’s I picked up word about her. Once I had her name and where she lived, it wasn’t hard to make her do whatever I wanted. She was a stupid woman. Greedy and stupid. First I frightened her by threatening to expose her for furnishing occasional girls to Lynch, then I offered her money . . .’
‘And then, nine months ago, you started visiting your parents again. That’s the part I can’t handle, Crystal. Using your visits to your parents as a way to scout out the occasional girls Lynch wanted. Without him knowing you were involved, of course. But . . . little girls . . .’
She shrugged. ‘There are many who are never missed, they are forever being smuggled in from Hong Kong. Manion’s last slave raids were less than three years ago.’,
‘But you knew what you were condemning them to—’
Her eyes flashed.
‘Let them take their chances as I did!’ She stood up. She strutted in front of him, forcing his awareness of her body. The taunting calculation was back in her eyes and voice. For the first time, Hammet wondered uneasily just how she intended to kill him. ‘What else did I do wrong?’
‘You yelled a warning to me about Andy’s shotgun – after it was too late for the warning to help me. You rubbed your clothes on the closet floor to make it seem they hadn’t been worn for days, but you got splinters in them, which got into my sweater and started me wondering. So when Heloise and Andy died in gangland-style and I knew no gangsters were involved . . .’
She looked at her watch. ‘It is as well you must die.’
He was damned if he was going to give her any satisfaction.
‘Their deaths made your mobster scenario real to everyone. Except me, unfortunately.’
She clapped her hands in delight. ‘You think that is the main reason they had to die?’
‘I hoped it was. I hoped the slaughter of the Chinese girl in the cemetery was Lynch’s evil, not yours.’
‘Evil!’ she spat. She thrust her face close to his. ‘What is evil? Show it to me! I live and then, after a time, I die. Neither has meaning, except to me. So what is evil?’
Hammett said evenly, his voice back under control, ‘All right, you wanted to be officially dead. You needed someone to die in your place. You found a final Chinese girl, lured or forced her to the cemetery . . .’ He paused, truly curious. ‘If you were there when she was killed – maybe were even doing the screaming to make sure she’d be found right away – how’d you keep Lynch from turning the shotgun on you instead of her?’
‘I had no fears of Lynch. When I telephoned him for the first time on that Monday I disappeared, and told him who I was and what I wanted, I also told him I had everything written down concerning each girl Heloise had furnished him, including the one who’d been in Tokzek’s car. When I called him from the Weller, I told him to kill Heloise and her son, and how to do it. I also told him to take me from the hotel. Of course, after that . . .’
She ran her hands slowly and voluptuously down her body, pausing to cup and massage her breasts. She laughed.
‘After that and before the girl in the cemetery, I had him for a night. I gave him total fulfillment of every fantasy he’d ever had. He was mine, then.’ She looked over at the dead man and giggled. ‘Mine. Begging, like a dog begs for scraps. It was so easy to make him do . . . everything I wanted him to.’
Hammett shivered. He believed her. He finally knew what had tipped Lynch over the edge. Crystal, the totally corrupt and endlessly inventive, had transfigured him. She’d be able to do it to any man she wanted. Hammett included.
‘This morning, poor Daddy, out of guilt, was going to commit suicide. He didn’t know that yet. That was to be the final price.’ She gave her joyous laugh. ‘But how much better that he should have been choked to death by his lifelong friend! So that the marks on his throat will fit Laverty’s fingers. And then that Laverty should kill himself with his own gun, which will bear only his fingerprints! So you see, you are . . . unnecessary.’ She looked at her watch again and giggled. ‘So in an hour, perhaps two hours . . . perhaps five minutes . . .’
He met her mocking gaze steadily. He asked a single question. ‘How?’
‘A fire in the wiring? Gas that seeps in? An explosion? Oh, but you’ll enjoy yourself so much more, wondering . . .’ She came close. She wet her lips and let them get pouty. The lisp was back in her voice. ‘Wondering just how evil little Crystal can be to the big detective mans.’
In that moment, Hammett’s only regret was that he would be unable to take her with him. She saw it in his eyes: no terror. Not even fear. Only rage. Realizing that his eyes betrayed him, he shut them. She drew a finger along the line of his jaw. The lisp was gone.
‘Good-bye, Hammett,’ she said in a soft voice.
Kill him how?
And with the thought, he had such an intense need for a cigarette that he actually opened his mouth to cry after her. Then he got control of himself and remained silent.
How? And how long?
Dawn couldn’t be far away, but nobody would wonder about him until long after noon. By then . . .
Christ, his final dawn.
How? And when?
He sniffed the air automatically, got angry all over again, as if she were still there to witness his weakness. Fire? Or leaking gas? Or . . .
It had to be soon. Before an arriving cook or housekeeper found him alive. He caught himself flaring his nostrils again. Stop it, goddamn you, Hammett. Go out right. If only he had a screwing cigarette.
His mind constructed the whole sequence:
getting it out, thrusting it between the teeth, getting out the match, striking it, bringing it to the tip, sucking in that first harsh-soothing smoke that . . .
Death.
Had he ever really – really – considered death before? He’d known it intimately, but now all of a sudden he didn’t any longer. Now he just spewed meaningless words about it on paper. He had to start all over again, refamiliarize himself with it. Death. Cessation of consciousness. Sleep, to never wake. He hated it.
Of course. You hated death because you were involved with life. Life was. And dammit, life would be, when you weren’t. That’s why you hated death. Its unfairness.
Never again, the exquisite moment of sliding into a woman.
And never again the joy of a page dragged up dripping from your guts. Never again realizing that there were ten pages of fresh manuscript stacked beside the typewriter that hadn’t been there before.
Never again the special, little-understood joys of manhunting. The blood-sport of beating the man who was trying to beat you. Most special when the stakes were high, when what you were trying to take from him was something he valued deeply, often his liberty and sometimes his life.
Cessation. Waste, of everything: sensed, learned, read, remembered. All wasted.
You should never regret the was. But you could regret the never-was. And the never-to-be.
Jesus, for a cigarette.
Regret. Because the tomorrow had come. The tomorrow that was the today and the yesterday and the forever and the never. The last, the only, the never-again.
Because he’d become an amateur. He’d played with his typewriter while he’d become a nonprofessional. No longer a real manhunter. He’d known, when he’d crouched over that devastated body in the cemetery, that Crystal was still alive. He’d known it. The old detective instincts. But he’d rejected what they told him. Played the writer’s game of walking around evil, drank himself insensate. Because the writer hadn’t wanted to know what the manhunter had known intuitively about the evil in one slight fifteen-year-old girl.
Hammett cursed aloud. He’d treated Crystal as a literary creation rather than as a real person. He had pretended to be the Op, or Sam Spade, instead of being them. He’d become a writer playing at being a manhunter. A typing desk was safer than a street corner. The tiger in his mind had sheathed its claws. He’d become able to risk less. Death had stopped looking over his shoulder.
And so he had died.
The door across the room opened. Jimmy Wright strolled in, a Fatima in his mouth and a fedora on his head. For a terrible moment, Hammett thought he had died. Jimmy Wright had his hands in his overcoat pockets because each pocket contained a naked .45 with the safety off. So he could fire through the pocket without having to draw.
Because Jimmy Wright was a manhunter. The fat little op would never be anything else. Drunk or sober, nobody would ever get the drop on him the way that they’d gotten the drop on Hammett. The way the girl . . .
The girl! Crystal!
‘Jimmy, get to hell out of here! The house might go up any second—’
‘Been through the house, Dash.’ He stepped across Laverty’s body with the same casual disregard Crystal had shown. He crouched beside Hammett to unlock the cuffs. ‘Quite a dump. Fancy. Big for a guy living alone. Give you fantasies after a bit. This room’d give you nightmares. Somebody’s been busy down here.’
‘Laverty,’ said Hammett. He leaned weakly against the wall, waiting for the agony as the blood started getting back into his white, pudgy, useless hands. ‘He killed Lynch with his bare hands, and then shot himself.’
Wright grunted, standing in the middle of the room with his hands on his hips, staring up at the mess drying on the ceiling.
‘Why?’
‘End of a dream. Christ that hurts!’ He had begun gingerly shaking his hands. But he loved the pain because it told him he really was alive, that Jimmy Wright was real, that Crystal . . . He said delicately, ‘Anyone else in the house?’
The op shook his head. ‘Cook’s day off, maybe. I’d better call O’Gar. We’ll need the meatwagon here.’
‘Sure. Listen, Jimmy, how did you . . .’ He waved an arm weakly.
‘Goodie was up packi . . . was still up, when you managed to thump her door as Laverty took you out. Figured out that Pop Daneri would know where to reach me. I went over to her apartment and sat around twiddling my thumbs until the call came.’
The call. A horrible suspicion dawned in Hammett’s mind. He sat down on the edge of the bed and began flopping his aching hands against his thighs to hurry the wake-up process.
‘Call?’
‘A woman. Called Goodie’s, asked for me, said you were shackled in the basement here with a couple of stiffs. Said the front door would be open and the keys to your handcuffs would be on the telephone stand in the front hall. What’s so funny?’
Because Hammett had begun to rock with helpless laughter. Tears streamed down his face.
. . . you’ll enjoy yourself so much more, wondering . . . just how evil little Crystal can be . . .
‘She sounded Oriental, must have been the maid or something.’
Or something. In this single contemptuous gesture she had shown Hammett just how thoroughly he’d been beaten. Sam Spade? Even Sam couldn’t have done much with her. No manhunter, real or fictional, could.
Because Hammett couldn’t touch her. He knew all, could prove nothing. She was above it, beyond it, she’d won. She’d had them all killed, methodically and maliciously, but had killed none of them herself.
Anyone – anyone – who could prove anything against her was dead.
Hammett could tell his story until he was a little old man with a bent back and a long beard, and no DA in the land would take him seriously. A fifteen-year-old whorehouse maid did what?
He stood up.
‘I’d better call Goodie. She’ll be worried.’
‘She’s gone,’ said the op. He didn’t try to soften it. ‘As soon as the call came that you were here safe . . .’ He shrugged. ‘She was already packed.’
Hammett rested his forearm against one of the bedposts and pressed his forehead against it. So. He’d driven her to it. Stupid drunken bastard. Once Biltmore possessed her, there’d be no turning back for her. No more small town and houseful of well-loved kids and . . .
‘Said to tell you she’d gone back to the porch-swing cowboys. Said you’d know what she meant.’
He felt a soaring of spirit. For every evil, a good. For every Crystal, a Goodie. He found he was grinning broadly.
Sure, goddammit, who ever said you were going to get it all? A piece of it was the best any self-respecting manhunter ever expected, anyway. And in the meantime . . .
Hell, in the meantime he was on salary.
He jabbed a finger into the op’s hard, ample gut.
‘Okay, Jimmy, use the phone upstairs to call the rest of the boys. Lynch was behind the Mulligans. It won’t get made public, but it’s going to come out where it counts, so I want a raid on the bailbond office right now. Legal. Court order. Before Mulligan finds out his boss is dead and sends his tame cops in after the stuff. There’s enough dynamite in those files to blow up this goddamn town, and we’re going to light the fuse!’
34
It was Wednesday, August 29. Eighty-nine days since Molly Farr had jumped bail to start it all.
Hammett had spent the morning, as usual, passing details of the investigation to the grand jury in closed session. It wasn’t over yet, but it was drawing to a close.
The Mulligans already were under indictment on multiple felony counts of bribery, conspiracy to commit bribery, and conspiracy to commit extortion.
Gardner Shuman had resigned as police commissioner, and one of the city supervisors had committed suicide.
Fifty-seven policemen ranking from patrolman to captain had resigned quietly; fifteen more had been removed by dismissal and five had been indicted for perjury and extortion.
According
to the tabloids, Laverty had killed himself while depressed over ill health, and Lynch had been murdered by an unknown assailant he had surprised rifling his home.
The probable hobo who had rolled and accidentally killed Victor Atkinson was still at large.
Famed ex-Pinkerton detective Jimmy Wright had been conducting a sweeping investigation of graft and corruption in San Francisco under the personal direction of Mayor Brendan Brian McKenna. The name of Dashiell Hammett had not appeared in the newspapers at all.
The bookies were still thriving. And the taxi houses. And the speakies. Rinaldo Pronzini had taken over his son’s club, which, thanks to its notoriety, was flourishing.
Hammett paused outside the hearing room to check his watch. Jimmy Wright, on his way in, stopped beside him. ‘Just had another photo-session with His Honor, Dash. Without his wife to point him in the right direction and tell him to smile . . .’
‘Yeah, but nobody’s going to stop him. He’s cleaning up San Francisco, he’s Irish, he’s handsome, he’s a hell of an orator, his wife has aged beautifully, and his best friend died defending the sanctity of the American home. Given all that, they’d make him governor if he was a hydrocephalic.’
‘Listen, Dash, I’ve closed the deal with Vic’s widow for the agency. That partnership offer is still . . .’
‘We can kick it around next week, Jimmy, okay?’
Ever since Jimmy Wright had walked into that basement charnel house to free him, Hammett had been immersed in the corruption that had spewed from the asbestos-lined filing cabinets hauled from Mulligan Bros Bailbonds. He was tired, worn out, sick of it. He was barely aware, as he went down the echoing marble-floored corridor, of the rushing attorneys, the nervous accused, the testifying cops and witnesses, the spectators and hangers-on congregated around the doorways of courts just convening for the afternoon sessions.
