Chasing Sam Spade

by Brian Lawson

  "CHASING SAM SPADE"

  By

  Brian Lawson

  Copyright 2011 ©

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this document may be reproduced without written consent from the author.

  All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  CHAPTER ONE:

  On Tuesday, Danny Gets a Letter

  It had been raining most of the night and into Tuesday morning when Danny Boyle got the letter from a dead man. Danny was standing on his stoop, staring into the damp morning and trying to decide whether it was worth walking down to the corner for the morning paper, when the U.S. Postal Service truck wheeled around the street corner and squealed to a greasy double parked stop.

  As the postman splashed up the puddled stairs two at a time carrying a thick Express Mail envelope along with the morning stench of rotting newspapers and stale street oil, Danny opened the door and nodded at the man.

  “Nice weather.”

  “Seattle,” the man grunted as he levered open the scarred brass panel and tried to stuff the cardboard envelope into the narrow mail slot. Giving up, he slammed the panel closed and ran a quick look over the names by the bells and punched 2-E.

  Danny said, “That’s me. I’m 2-E. You got something for me?”

  “Boyle?”

  Yeah, he said, reaching for the parcel. The gray wool man turned, looking at him with flat eyes that had the reflected color of wet pigeon feathers, then handed him the thick envelope. He said, “It’s supposed to go in the slot.”

  Danny hefted the slick cardboard envelope; it felt like a summons hand addressed by his mother on a thin brick. He looked up but the postman was already down the stairs and slogging through the puddles back to his truck.

  Padding back into his apartment in soft slippered steps, he dropped the package on the kitchen table and poured a third mug of coffee, then slid into the timeworn chair nearest the window just as a gust rattled slanting rain against the tired glass. He picked up the package and ran a bony finger under the thick cardboard flap.

  He slid out a cover note from his mother handwritten in her elegant, old world hand on a piece of lined white note paper, the note stapled to a second larger sheet. He read it, put it down, and picked it up again and reread it. The note was simple:

  Danny, I got this call from the people up in San Francisco. They said I was next of kin listed for Chuck and he was dead in an accident. They got my address from a card in his wallet I think. They made me go up there and I had to take the bus. They said I had to come up and identify the body and they would give me the letter I am sending to you here. I said I would not look at him so they showed me a picture and I said, yes, that was him, and I showed them an old picture and they said, yes, that was him and they gave me his things.

  They said they knew nothing else, just that he fell and died. There was nothing much with him, his wallet, a few dollars and a key to his hotel room. They said somebody should go get his things, the police didn’t do that they said. So I had to take another bus into a bad part of town to get there. I shouldn’t have gone but somebody needed to do it out of respect for the dead but there was nothing much there, some more clothes, a box with some papers and photos I took, and this envelope for you. You see it has stamps on it so he was going to mail it me to keep for you I think, but never did. I left the clothes there and took the other things. I send you this notice from them so you know how he died and the envelope because it has your name on it. Momma

  He flipped to the second page stapled to his mother’s note: official City and County of San Francisco letterhead, a Coroner’s Report summary, stark white and coolly indifferent in its hybrid legal and medical terminology, the language of the professionally disinterested. It said that Charles I. Boyle died by misadventure, trauma to the head and neck proximately caused by a fall down concrete stairs, secondary deep laceration on skull. There was more, the age, general condition of the deceased, height and weight, a hotel address somewhere but that was enough. Unstated but sliding between the lines was the coroner’s casual view of yet another Irish drunken “misadventure” where a whiskey-clouded brain took an old man down a final unforgiving flight of concrete stairs.

  It should have been a surprise, but it wasn’t; Chuck Boyle had been dead to them for years; now they had official confirmation that the noted drunk and denizen of San Francisco’s notorious Tenderloin district, scofflaw ex-husband of Maria Boyle and estranged father of Danny, was dead. More news at eleven.

  He hefted the manila envelope addressed to him that made up the bulk of the package. It didn’t look like she had even opened it, just forwarded it untouched. Now she was passing on the burden, neat and tidy, out of her hands: I got this, I give it to you, finished. He watched the rain sliding in oily lines down the window, then glanced slowly around the drab, second hand room, at the bright blue LED time signature on the stove, then finally back to the package.

  “So what’s this supposed to feel like.” The rain continued at the window, the morning grew lighter in thin degrees. Your father falls down some stairs and breaks his neck, it should feel like something. “Nothing, it feels like nothing.”

  He poked at the faded manila envelope that seemed somehow cold to the touch, as though it carried the touch of the grave with it. The tidy cursive lines marching across the battered manila envelope were alien and familiar at the same time: addressed to his mother’s Burlingame address in an oddly familiar handwriting a tickle at the back of his brain, a memory scratching to get out, the envelope was festooned with three lines of 24-cent stamps in neat, colorful un-canceled rows, waiting, but no return address. It was the first thing Danny had ever received, even indirectly, from a man he knew only from his mother’s descriptions and a few small Box Brownie photographs labeled on the back in this same tidy handwriting.

  “Ah, what the hell,” letting out a grunt, a sudden explosive rush of air as he tore through the envelope. He slid out several sheets of yellow note paper, a thin faded blue ledger with worn maroon leather corners bound with a folded street map by ancient rubber bands, and a battered paperback copy of The Maltese Falcon, all held together by thick red rubber bands that crossed the faded, lurid 50’s style cover of an avenging Sam Spade with smoking .45 standing over a crumpled figure beside a terrified, busty young woman. The letter unfolded to the first page, the sheets of yellow lined paper lying like some broken-backed insect on the table in front of him.

  The room was full of the sound of his own breathing; he sat without moving, then picked up the letter by its edges and held it, just looking at it without even trying to read the densely packed script. The paper fluttered in his hand; he took a deep breath, and began to read.

  He read the post-mortem message of murder, betrayal and more than just a little madness straight through twice without stopping, the tight, cursive script spilling from one page to the next. He took a swallow of tepid coffee and sat back with a groan and dry washed, rubbing at his rough cheeks and digging at his eyes, then running his hands through his tangled hair.

  “You son of a bitch. Crazy Charlie Boyle. After all this time, you son of a bitch,” he said, and reached for the cellular phone, dialed his mother’s number and waited. He got the answering machine.

  “Mom, it’s Danny. I just got the Coroner’s notice and your letter. And the envelope you sent up from Chuck. There’s a letter in there he wrote and a book and a map, I don’t know what all and you’re not going to believe it. Look, we’ve got to talk. You’re not going to believe this. He says he was going to be murdered, not to believe anything about an accident. Give me a call, okay?”

  He disconnected and laid the cellular down, waiting. She p
robably was home using the machine to screen calls. If she held to her pattern she’d call back after listening and had time to think of what she wanted to say. She was a careful woman.

  The wind had shifted and the rain was hammering at the other side of the building. The window was streaked. He got up and walked to the coffeepot and poured another mug full and turned off the kitchen light. The room was filled with gray morning; he sat down at the cluttered kitchen table and waited.

  She didn’t call until after noon; when he read the entire letter to her over the phone she dismissed it as “crazy talking.” She didn’t want to talk about it, it was wrong to talk about the dead over the phone, she said; if he wanted to ask her questions, he could just come down to San Francisco himself; then she hung up. He knew all he’d get for the rest of the week would be the answering machine.

  CHAPTER TWO:

  On Saturday, Mom Gives up the Past

  The slanting gray fog outside the plane window grew thicker as the plane dropped like a slow stone toward San Francisco.

  They banked over the Bay to approach SFO from the south. Below the wingtip the lights of the Bay Bridge City emerged from the gruel, then the tops of a few tumbled together towers appeared, fanning out from the Frisco side of the Bay Bridge anchorage. It was nearly noon, Saturday, and although the Peninsula south looked clear, the fog over the City wasn’t close to burning off.

  It seemed a tossup whether it was worse watching for safe landmarks in a fog-shrouded descent or rereading his father’s letter, again. He split the difference and tried to piece together how he came to be flying into San Francisco in the middle of the school year. By late Thursday night, half drunk and cursing the dead man’s hold on him, he had realized he’d have to go to San Francisco to find the truth of the letter. He tried that logic on Ben Steiner, another associate prof at the college; and he had watched his friend’s face run through the gamut of emotions, looking for the assumed joke, then a vague confusion, finally hardening into doubt as he read through it. This is the damnedest thing, Ben had said, handing the letter back to Danny and he had nodded, yeah, isn’t it though.

  They debated Ben’s suggestion of handling it long-distance, calling the San Francisco police, sending them a copy of Chuck’s letter and letting them handle it; and Danny had nodded along with the earnest argument to stay away, stay detached. Yeah, sure, I thought of that, he had said, but they finally agreed it was a waste of time, that big city cops probably didn’t pay much attention to rooms full of screaming relatives with wet blood on their shoes, so what were the chances they’d bother with a cockeyed letter from a stranger in Seattle? The best bet then, Ben had finally said, would be to put an end to it, assume it was madness and put the envelope in a drawer and maybe think about it some other time, maybe never at all, but certainly not right then.

  He had agreed, said he would forget about it probably and certainly not waste his time calling the police; but the strangely affecting post-mortem plea for vengeance, the cryptic ledger he finally realized was coded to a map grid and cross referenced to pages in the novel, all of it already had taken hold with some strange, powerful sense of truth that conspired with a grinding inevitability to drag him into the dark places of Chuck’s life. By Friday he had booked a Saturday flight and called the college to tell them they’d have to find a substitute for next week’s classes, that he had to go out of town, family emergency. Then he had called Maria Boyle to tell her the prodigal son was on his way.

  The plane floated the last few feet onto the runway and shuddered as the wheels bit into the concrete. He had arrived in Chuck’s nightmare.

  After bumping to a landing, it was an easy out through the airport. He traveled light, wearing his one sport coat and chinos, blue button-down and carefully selected Rockports to handle the pavement and hills; everything else was stuffed into a small onboard bag: one side half empty, with only a second pair of pants, shirts and tee-shirts, a sweater and underwear, socks; the other stuffed with Chuck’s bulky envelope, several legal pads and half a dozen disposable mechanical pencils, several blank tapes plus batteries for the Sony micro cassette recorder and the cellular phone he carried in his jacket pockets, a couple of blank floppy discs and his laptop computer. No ties, no suits, no garment bags for doing-the-town clothes; he had told Ben it was get in, talk to the old lady and the San Francisco cops, chase some ghosts and get out.

  The cab dropped him off at her Burlingame house a little before one o’clock. He hadn’t been there for more than a decade; it wasn't the house of his youth but something out of her old age, a crouching Victorian out of the sleepy 1920’s when Burlingame was a long drive of little interest down the Peninsula from San Francisco. The house itself was the inheritance from a long-dead second husband Danny had hardly known.

  He headed across the lawn and ducked through the tenuous bushes that screened the backyard from the street. The sun was shining, so she’d be outside baking in the spring sunshine.

  She was turned to the sun like some desiccated flower, parchment thin eyelids fluttering; her heavy hands with thick, muscled fingers, large knuckled from the years of farm work calm in her lap. In her youth she was a woman so stunningly lovely that men would stop on the sidewalks and turn and stare as they walked by. He still had the few pictures of her in her full blush, perhaps thirty or thirty one years old: dark hair, full mouth, sparkling teeth, complexion still the peaches and cream of the farm she had left when she was sixteen, large busted, slim waist, wide hipped. She was of the type that was so popular during the war and for several years after, the Ava Gardner or Jane Russell type, full figured women, well fleshed, with strong, handsome distinctive faces, full sensual mouths, dark eyes, volumes of wavy shiny hair. Perhaps the price of youthful beauty was seeing its dramatic fading in old age; now she had become a sunken, brittle boned woman, that glorious nimbus of hair gone thin and gray, teeth gone and skin shrunken into shadows of her youth. Still, that dark sparkle remained in her eyes somehow undimmed now in her 74th year, always watching, darting about, seeking something.

  She sat on a battered, straight back wooden kitchen chair beside a tiny, wrought iron café table. She was expecting him; she’d set out another straight back chair near the shifting shade of the willow tree. She sat there as though she had grown from the very ground, thick knees parted and feet firmly planted, hands heavy on her thighs, leaning slightly forward, backed by the thick trunk of the willow tree, watching something in the grass between the old, laced ankle boots she still insisted on wearing in the face of all changing fashions. Despite the warm weather she was wearing a lumpy wool sweater over a faded print dress. The pink of her scalp showed through the thinning gray hair she still gave a hundred brush strokes every morning before torturing it into a tight bun.

  He crossed the lawn to her side, bent down and kissed her. Her skin was dry, almost dusty, and she smelled faintly of some odd soap. Despite the slump in her shoulders, the sagging skin at her throat, she was in something like geriatric good health.

  "Danny, how are you?" The greeting after more than a decade was the same as though he had just stopped in for a weekly visit. And her voice was still the same, a thick, warm sound from deep in her chest.

  She leaned over, one hand on his arm. "I know you like to tell me about what you're doing, Danny. But first, some tea, eh Danny?"

  Sure Momma, he said and walked up the back stairs. The interior of the house held the cool, darkened musty air and heavy smell of old people in old places: dusty cloth and something just this side of mildew and at least one part old mothballs and unwashed wool. He fussed about the kitchen, making the tea using the Oolong she always liked, letting it steep in the small, fine bone china pot for the required five minutes while rustling up the milk and pouring it into a small pitcher, putting the lemons, sugar cubes and the old fashioned, filigreed Russian tea glasses, on the tarnished silver tray. He carried it back into the bright morning sunlight, the sun shimmering on the silver and the oily surface of the tea. H
e poured her a glass of tea, careful to add the three sugar cubes and milk and stir into a fine, light brown before running a quick rim of lemon around the lip of the glass. She held it on both sides and drank in slow, steady slurps as she always did.

  He poured himself a glass, just lemon and one sugar and sipped at the fragrant liquid. It made no sense, but he had been taught since very young that a glass of hot tea was the best thing on a warm day and it seemed no visit was complete without the tea.

  "Ah, good you remember the way I always liked tea," she said, setting the glass carefully on the uneven tabletop. He reached out and gathered it in, putting it on the tray. "So many years you don’t visit, yet you remember where the tea is and how to make it. That’s a good son.”

  He felt the tight smile on his face but she was right, maybe he deserved the little nudge about staying away so long.

  “I’m here now, Momma.”

  “Yes you are and it’s a sad time,” she said, but she didn’t look sad. She sat staring off into some distance beyond the crowded back yard. “Chuck is finally gone. In the grave and maybe peace for him. I don’t know. But it was not a good way to die, alone like that, falling down stairs. Not a good way.”

  He nodded, sure, of course. “Maybe it wasn’t an accident?”

  She shook her head. “No, you said that on the phone. But I don’t understand, that’s crazy. Who wants to kill an old man? For what?”

  “What about what he says in the letter he had ready to send me. He said it was for something he found out was in that book?” he said.

  “What book?”

  “You know. The Maltese Falcon?” and he could feel the afternoon stretching out like dreamtime, slowly, in strange, discontinuous jumps backwards and forwards. It was the way she thought, and had always talked, when it wasn’t her chosen subject of poor health and the world’s mistreatment of a simple farm girl. “I told you about the letter but you said you wouldn’t talk about it on the phone and come down. So I came down.”