by Brian Lawson
“But not to see your poor old mamma, right? The fruit doesn’t fall too far from the tree,” she said. “I taught you better than that?”
“Better than what?”
“You know,” she said, pausing in the litany of remembered discomfort and looked at him with clever eyes. “You come here when you need something, that’s all. Just like Chuck.”
“Momma, I don’t want to get into this again. You had a bad marriage, you left. Things got better for you. Why not let it lie?” and he pulled the letter out of his pocket and put it on the table between them. “This is what he sent me. Why don’t your read it for yourself?”
But she sat immobile after one quick look down her nose at the pages, then refocusing over his shoulder, staring into space. He reached over, opened it and flattened the yellow legal pad sheets and held them out to her. The pages trembled in the air between them; she looked at it but made no effort to reach out and take it.
“I don’t need to read it.”
“Alright, don’t read it,” he said. “Will you at least listen, please?”
She crossed her arms and sat back, shrugging. Finally she nodded, yeah, sure. “I’ll listen but that doesn’t mean anything.”
He nodded. “I’m going to read it just the way he wrote it. No changes, just the way he put it down, okay?” She sat, staring at something over his shoulder, waiting like the tree she leaned against, implacable. He began to read in a slow, steady voice, trying to find the rhythm of the words and Chuck’s sadly old fashioned syntax:
“Danny, by the time you read this I will be gone and in the ground. So if you are reading this it is curtains for me for sure and I am murdered,” Danny read aloud.
“I am not alone in this. Three guys have been killed in ‘accidents’ in the past couple of months or so, and I will be next. There is a list in here with the names and dates they all died. I knew them all from when I worked at Pinkerton’s Detective Agency back in ’59 on what they all called the ‘Sam Spade Case’ because they all helped me out with that The Maltese Falcon thing. Now all of them get killed and it is all because of what happened back then. Or maybe it is because I am out looking around, asking questions again, who can say? All I know is that I let this all go once, but I will not let it go this time. I am going to find out what happened to those guys and raise a stink about it. There are no accidents.
“If Maria has not told you, all this started when I was working at Pinkerton’s and I got into some trouble because of nosing around, looking in old files and asking questions of a couple of old timers who were there when Dashiell Hammett worked there, back when he wrote The Maltese Falcon. I always liked that book. Maybe that is why I went to work there, I cannot say, but it was fun and the pay was okay and we needed all the overtime because you were just born and everything.”
Danny stopped and looked up at her; she hadn’t changed position or expression. “You okay, momma? These are his words, remember, not mine.”
“You wanted to read, read. Finish and be done with it,” she said, not taking her eyes of the spot far beyond his left shoulder.
Danny bent back to the pages and began reading Chuck’s leader out loud again:
“Well, I found some notes of Hammett’s for the book and guess what? I figured out the book had clues to a real crime hidden in there, written right into the story. He must have got onto something he found out working for Pinkerton’s but he had no proof maybe or maybe it was just too hot, so he stuck it in the book. I found them wedged in back of his old desk and typed on the back of some old Ops Reports that had his name on them. He didn’t sign them, but one of the old timers told me he was real cheap and used the old paper from the office trash to do his writing on the back. So who else would have used his old Ops Reports?
“None of it would have made any sense to anyone who did not read the book, but I had and I put that together with the notes and figured out what was going on. Most of what Hammett wrote was just about this character or that character in the book, what they looked like or where they lived, stuff on a restaurant he did not name, but at the bottom of one page he had hand written a couple of lines scribbled in pencil said “don’t let S. see & cover up, he’ll figure out who G. and the girl are?” That made me start checking, because see, there is nobody whose name starts with “S” in the book, so that had to be a real person. It made sense back then that somebody named ‘S.’ was trying to cover something up. ‘G’ could be the Caspar Guttman heavy in the book, but maybe even he was somebody real that did something that this ‘S’ wanted to cover up. I never did find out who the “girl” was because there are so many in the book.
“I started checking out things and asking people around Pinkerton’s who might know who this ‘S’ was and these guys who just died, they were helping me, asking questions around, you know how you do. I probably should have kept my mouth shut about all this, but you know, you have a few drinks with friends and get to talking, with guys you work with and all and it must have gotten back to somebody because next thing I know they sure put me behind the eight ball. I ended up getting arrested for stealing company property and lost the job and everything else. They found about the guys who were helping me, too, and they got in dutch although they did not lose their jobs things went pretty hard for them for a while.
“The charges were dropped about stealing when I gave back the Hammett stuff and the cops let me go but they fired me. I can still remember it, the cop who rousted me said ‘…you dummy up and keep your nose clean or it goes hard for the wife and kid.’ I was no genius but I didn’t have to be one to know what that meant so I had to get you out of there and stay low in the grass from then on. It wasn’t easy. Somebody really put the hard word out and I kept getting the cold shoulder every time I tried to get another job like Pinkerton’s and somehow the arrest kept showing up, so I just gave up and got into selling. It was okay, but there was never much dough in it and, well, things just sort of petered out for me and…”
“…no more, no more,” she interrupted
“What? That’s only half the letter. There’s all this other stuff, about the other guys that got killed and….”
“I said, no more,” she said, her voice deep, heavy in the slow, dead air. “I won’t listen to any more. It’s the same as I said over the telephone. It’s crazy talking. He waited a long time to say too bad things went wrong, too bad you had to go work in the fish factory, Maria. Too bad you had to raise your little boy all by yourself. Too bad, huh?”
He let the pages drop to the table. His throat felt thick, dry and he picked up the glass and took a long swallow of the sweet, tepid tea. “Momma, I don’t want to get into that,” he said, taking a deep breath and letting it out in a long, thin sigh.
She glared at him and said, “How can you believe such things? People killing old men, who cares enough about old men to do such a thing.”
“But something happened.”
“Yes, something happened. He drank, he fell down the stairs and he’s dead. Old men die like that.”
“And the others? Those other guys from Pinkerton’s?”
“I don’t know about the others. Who knows? Maybe something happened, maybe not. What difference does it make? Old men, gone. Let the dead rest.
His chest felt tight as though he were sitting at the bottom of deep well, the water pressing in on his chest. The same feeling he’d had when he first read the letter sitting at his kitchen table in Seattle. It was tougher than he thought, then and now. He said, “But he wasn’t dead, not then, not when he wrote it. Maybe we could have done something.”
“Like what? You would fly down here and find this old man and tell him, no poppa, don’t worry, I won’t let anybody hurt you?” and she spat at the grass by her thick, black shoe. “I spit out the lies you’re telling me and yourself. You wouldn’t come. So why say yes for no? Let it be.”
She was right, of course. Getting the letter before his death wouldn’t have brought him running. “That’s fair.
You’re right. So, maybe it doesn’t matter. But I’m here now and maybe I can do something.”
“You’re forty years late.”
“Well, maybe I can make it right.”
“You should have thrown that letter away. No good can come of it, none,” she said, spitting the words out. “He made his bed. He did what he wanted to do and I did what was right. He understood when I left what had to be done. It was all he deserved and he knew it.”
He felt himself slipping into one of the endless cycles of accusations and denials so tightly woven into the old woman’s past even she couldn’t separate the fact and fiction of her memories. He had avoided more than occasional grunted responses to her rambling diatribes on the phone for ten years; now she had him and she was going to make up for lost time. The afternoon air was growing heavy, thick in his lungs and he felt like he was swimming against some strange, unseen current.
“Momma, this isn’t about you or me or what happened back when you left. Let’s keep this about Chuck’s letter, okay? You sure I can’t just finish reading it to you?”
“I said no, I mean no,” she said, leaning forward and jabbing a thick finger at him. “So now, big shot college professor, what are you going to do. I won’t listen to what you want and you don’t want to talk about anything but what you want. So what do you want from me, then?”
SShe eased a battered shoebox across the wrought iron tabletop, pushing it with those stiff blunt fingers as though she wanted the least contact possible. “I shouldn’t let you see this. But you want to know so bad.”
“What is it?” But he was already reaching for the box, lifting the lid, poking with questioning fingers.
“It’s nothing. Throw it away, keep it, it doesn’t matter, not now.”
“No, I can’t do that. It must mean something, or you wouldn’t have kept it all these years,” he said. He reached into the shoebox and lifted out thick bundles of letters tied together with thin ribbon. He untied a packet and fanned them out across the yellowed map. Each was carefully addressed with Chuck’s tight, polite cursive script. The post marks were all the same: mailed from San Francisco, the one on top dated August 14, 1959, the next a week later, the third another week, the last in the packet now June 9, 1960. He dropped the packet back in the shoe box, lifted out another and glanced at the faded red postmark: February 23, 1963. He tossed that back in the box and looked at the old woman.
“How many are there?”
She shrugged, opening those thick callused hands in the universal gesture before letting them drop back to her lap. She cleared her throat, “Who knows, maybe a hundred, maybe more. Who counts things like that?”
“You have all this and you never told me?”
“What should I tell you? That your father wrote me letters? What is that to you, these are for me, things between a man and a woman, a husband and his wife. These aren’t things for children.”
“But I grew up.”
“Sure, you grew up. But the letters stopped coming by the time you were old enough to read them. By then, I had other things on my mind. I had to raise you, I had to work. Our life was up there in Canada again, not here.”
He took a deep breath, let it out, then another. “Okay, so what’s in them?”
“I said. Things a man writes to a woman. Anything else he might say about those times, it’s in those things.”
“Can I have it all?”
She shrugged again, opening and closing her hands slowly like she was squeezing or maybe kneading bread out of some distant memory. “He’s gone. Now it doesn’t matter so much,” she said, nodding at the shoebox as though it might have contained some animus, some part of the old man. She sighed, a deep, heavy sigh out of old lungs. “Everything it there, everything I have. There’s nothing more, so you might as well take it all.”
“And about his letter, that somebody wanted to kill him?”
“I don’t know anything about that. He was maybe crazy at the end, the drink will do that. Who knows? I don’t know what and I don’t want to know. And I don’t want to talk about that now. Again, ever.”
Sitting up and squaring her shoulders, she fixed him with that clear, cold eye. “You want to know, you read the letters. You look at all this stuff. But remember, you wanted this. Things in there you never should know about him. About me. You got to know so bad, read, but think first. Now, you had lunch?”
CHAPTER THREE:
Danny Has a Francisco Sunday
Sam Spade’s 1928 cool gray city of fog was gone; Chuck’s 1959 pastel city of hills and bridges and charming neighborhoods hugging the tender edges of the storied hills was nowhere to be seen; what was left was a mutation, a charming corpse of a city with a hard edged modern urban skin grafted on. Danny suspected neither Chuck nor Spade would be comfortable in the place.
He looked out the window at the city he had avoided so long. He’d checked into the Days Inn early Sunday despite his Mother’s suggestion he spend another night with her; Saturday had been enough.
The ubiquitous patterned bedspread designed to hide the nameless dread and tired stains, tightly woven industrial grade carpet, the probably septic bathroom grinning its white tiled grin, an $82 a night bargain in one of the most expensive cities in the world. His few belongings spread around the shabby room didn’t help.
At least he had a window into Spade country, the corner of Larkin and Geary, just two blocks up Larkin St. to Hammett’s apartment at 891 Post and the setting for so many critical scenes in The Maltese Falcon.
Danny’s view onto Larkin St. was a streaked snapshot in sepia of the decaying Hotel Hartland across the street with its weary attempt at decorative stonework, bay windows and its preposterous empty rooftop flagpole. The view didn’t matter; he had arrived in Spade Country.
The one thing that came through was the sense of disappointment that the City looked so much better from the air than it did from the ground. He clicked the small Sony micro cassette recorder onto play, listening to the raw impressions he had made of the cab ride up from Burlingame:
“Sunday morning...bumping our way between the surprising Mediterranean spread of Brisbane on the left and the fading monstrosity of Candlestick Park on the right...as the fog burns off close to the ground and as it thins it takes on a surreal, watercolor quality, the barest wash of graying white, diffusing light that blends the city and skyline and hills and bay into one flat, translucence with the high hard point of the skyline poking through in front of us....
“dim milky white skyline of buildings fade in and out of the mists at the foot of the Bay Bridge...the driver cheerfully described as the “damnedest dangerous place, Hospital Curve” and then another view of the City suddenly flashing up through the windshield, closer and thicker now with buildings rushing up to meet us...
“pulling off freeway onto Harrison heading to the Days Inn, everything closes in...there’re too many buildings too close, people and cars, it’s thick with everything... the city’s dirty, gray, used up as though the weight of the years and millions of souls who have lived here and moved through here or maybe it’s using itself up, the thick dense history and myth consuming its own tired heart and the people move on...
“four or five story brown skinned hotels, the corner and mid-block bars, the heavily barred liquor stores and shuttered businesses seem to shoulder each other out of the way toppling over on each other running up and down the hills...it’s a dirty, squat, compressed place...
“don’t know what I expected, not the charming city of 1958 with working class neighborhoods and rows of tidy sun drenched apartments running over the hills like Chuck described... but I don’t think I’m ready for today’s San Francisco that’s just shades of gray and washed out sandstone brown... bright murals against dirty brown walls and barred windows... but give it the benefit of a small doubt, this could be a lousy part of town and it gets better...
He switched off the recorder, turned from the window and leaned over the map and Chuck’s othe
r materials and letters spread over two tables.
The number of letters suggested Chuck had been a child of pre-modern times, an enthusiastic if not gifted letter writer. The 147 letters were sorted chronologically into nine stacks for each year from 1959 through 1967: from the high point of 62 letters in that first year of separation, a yearning letter of several pages every five days or so, down through the terse half page notations of flagging passion and memory of 1967, little more than notes on birthdays or such, some referring to meager inclusions of perhaps ten or twenty dollars “for the boy” honoring some misplaced anniversary or birthday or imagined milestone. Danny had read the first two years’ worth and marked the Hammett letters with small yellow Post-its referencing specific comments about either Pinkerton’s Detective Agency or The Maltese Falcon. Danny’s Post-its held a few brief words highlighted with an occasional “TMF” and page annotation sticking like pale yellow tongues out of three stacks of letters. He knew he’d sooner or later have to open every envelope and read every letter, but he didn’t feel up to the task.
He looked at the tables, expecting some order to form out of the chaos: nothing, or as close to nothing as possible. And once again it seemed impossible that the old man could write so much and tell so little. Reading them he had gotten the feeling they were written with a will and purpose, to try and make his life sound normal and his longing for his family real as he slogged through his booze-fueled obsession.
He pulled the strange, sad letter addressed but never mailed out of the pile on the table, and leafed through it until he found the spot where Maria had insisted Danny stop reading aloud:
I gave up on the whole Hammett thing and just put everything away when you and your mother left. I could see no point. They had won and I had given up.
I never forgot about it, though, and sometimes I would wonder what would have happened if we had found out the truth behind it all. Then last month I saw this story in the paper on one of the guys who worked with me at Pinkerton’s, Bert Johnson. It said he got killed by a hit and run driver. It said he was he was the second ‘senior citizen’ killed by a hit and run driver in two weeks. The paper made a big deal out of it, how old people are not safe even in cross walks and everything. I had not talked to Johnson in years so maybe he was blind or crippled and could not move very good and got clipped by a car. But I went to the funeral and his widow was there. She said he was fine, not a sick day in his life, still went down for a swim just about every week. So it was just bad luck for him, maybe he should have watched where he was walking. But while I was there I bumped into Emelia Flores. She was married to Benny Flores, the first guy to get killed, a nice Mexican guy used to work in the Mission District on immigration case? Now, that is a coincidence I remember thinking.
