by Brian Lawson
“it’s the Monaco now, I’ve walked by it three or four times already...art deco looking, Grand Cafe right on the corner...inside it has inlaid marble floors facing the front entrance a huge fireplace big enough to roast an ox, art deco nude over the double stairs up from lobby...just the kind of place where an effete world traveler like Joel Cario would be comfortable in, not quite posh enough to be stuffy, elusive and delicate enough to make him happy and hidden.”
The front area with the bar was delightful, open, light without being too bright, three levels for the bar, Geary side dining and the big back dining room. The facing windows looked out through glass bareback shelves jammed with brands known and unknown to him, and a great selection of single malt scotch. He slid onto a barstool, smiling at the female bartender and breathing in the thick, rich aroma of booze and strong coffee and just the slightest hint of her perfume.
“What’ll it be,” she said. Bright, friendly, strong fine features, auburn hair tied back casually.
“I’d love a single malt,” he said, looking at his watch. “But I’ll take an espresso if it’s fired up.”
She nodded, sure, and went about the busy work around the polished brass and stainless steel machine that ruled the back bar, her thin strong tanned hands moving easily and fluidly around the machine.
“How long’s this been the Monaco? What happened to the Bellvue?”
She talked over her shoulder and between small hissing espresso bursts of noise and steam that carried the fresh smell of burned coffee. “They closed it I think in ‘93 and worked on it a year. The Cafe and hotel are open about three years or so.”
“Interesting look,” he said, swiveling to face the huge vaguely art deco trio of rabbits that guarded the Geary door. “Why dancing rabbits?”
She turned, fussed around the stuff and put the small steaming cup down in front of him complete with miniature spoon, sugar cube and twist. She smiled, leaning forward with her hands on the bar, breasts nice and firm against the starched white shirtfront.
“Who knows, but they’re everywhere,” she said. “I think he did most of the light fixtures too, sconces and things. Some are left over from the Bellvue and the ceiling in the big room.”
He swiveled around and looked into the cheery, high ceilinged room still half full with late morning breakfast traffic. Looks good, he said, nodding and turning back to the bar.
“Yeah. Used to be the ballroom. There’s even a little balcony just on the left when you go in? Stairs up and a table up there. I guess people used to sit up there and watch the dancing and everything,” she said, smiling and sliding the computer tab across the dark, highly polished wood before heading down to the far end to make an order of four Bloody Marys.
He rimmed the cup with the lemon and sipped at the strong, bitter coffee, feeling the warmth move through him. He watched the traffic on Taylor, the City movement so different on Monday than Sunday.
He slid a five onto the bar, smiled and nodded, and went back onto Geary.
* * *
That evening he was sitting in front of the television while unattended situations moved across the screen; something was nagging at him, scratching at the back of his mind like a lost memory, waiting to come back. Somehow, he felt he had missed something, walked right by something he should have tripped over. He felt sure it didn’t have anything to do with John’s Grill; Chuck liked the bar but he liked a lot of bars and there was no memory attached to it.
It might be Hunter-Dulin; it was a dead end only because Chuck had left out the critical information on the office number and whoever occupied that office. Maybe that’s what he had missed, and would forever miss if he wasn’t prepared to plow through musty records looking for name associations he wouldn’t recognize if he saw. He’d like to have that as a lead but that would mean tracing the ownership of the building, finding the occupancy records and hoping all that meant something other than an exercise in Chuck’s paranoia. It would be possible to check every business license in issued in 1959, cross check those for addresses, find out who was in Hunter-Dulin that year, but he still wouldn’t be able to narrow that down because he didn’t have the office number and neither Hammett nor Chuck Boyle had given the Spade & Archer office floor or number. It was a possible angle, but just the idea of that kind of City records search made him feel tired. Maybe, but only as a last resort. There had to be something else.
Maybe the concern was that he was expecting Hammett to have been so subtle that Chuck never found the truth. How subtle could that be? He’d already played around with numerology, he and Ben trying every combination of street address, dates and days of the week, the names of the characters parsed as letters and the numbers of those letters, combined and recombined like some madman’s DNA term paper, but nothing.
But there was something, somewhere he missed. The idea of going through the book again, cross checking it and covering the first few chapters that corresponded to the City scenes was overwhelming. Something he’d heard during the last couple of days, something somebody said stuck in his mind.
Maybe Ben had said something, and the association was enough; it wasn’t the key to the mystery, just a little thing left undone.
He pulled the shoebox stuffed with a dead man’s memories onto the bed and started leafing through, looking for the point he’d stop reading. His fingers stopping at the thick envelope; he could make out the 1961 in the postmark but the date was blurred beyond reading; he opened it but there was no letter, just a yellowed newspaper clipping.
He unfolded the brittle, yellowed paper; it had been torn roughly from the page. Penciled down one thin margin in Chuck’s writing was the date “October 23, 1927, Call & Post.” He could imagine Chuck sitting in some quiet corner of a library somewhere and brutalizing the bound copy of the old newspapers convinced perhaps the need to find the mysterious crime justified the vandalism.
He looked at the newspaper clipping in his hand: everybody gone now yet it seemed contemporary in its world-weary tone and Assistant District Attorney David Skelley forever giving the party line against crime and corruption. Below the fold a grainy picture of what looked like a thin blond child wrapped in an oversize raincoat was forever led up station house steps, perhaps a hooker caught in a raid, a bereaved parent coming in to see a child, a notorious movie starlet picked up in a sweep of gin joints; but it was none of those things.
“What the hell, the library police aren’t going to kick down the door now,” he said, and began reading the clipping:
NAKED TEEN FOUND IN PARK
DA’s office claims “no link” to February “sex slave” case
Police were summoned this morning by residents along Stanyan St. out for morning constitutionals who reported a nearly naked blond woman wandering through the morning fog in the Panhandle Park where it adjoins Golden Gate Park. Officers dispatched to the scene said the woman, identified only as Jane Doe, appeared to be a minor female said to be of approximately 14 years of age. She was dressed only in a single undergarment and one stocking.
This was the second such incident this year. In February a minor female was found at the 7th and Lincoln Avenues entrance to Golden Gate Park. She too was naked when taken into custody by police, a deranged escapee from a home for wayward girls in the Sacramento Valley.
According to Police Officer on the scene Ed Dugan, the victim was taken to Park Emergency on Stanyan before being transferred in the company of a SFPD matron to the downtown Hall of Justice.
The young woman was said to be dazed, suffering from mild exposure and malnutrition as well as bruises around the face, arms and legs.
One observer when she was brought into the emergency facility said she appeared to have large bloody welts around her wrists and ankles. A police officer on the scene said the appearance of the victim’s wrist and ankle wounds appeared to come from restraints tied about the young woman’s limbs.
The police observer, speaking on condition of anonymity, added the girl also appeared
to be under the influence of some kind of narcotic, had what appeared to be hypodermic syringe marks on her arms and was heard to be mumbling incoherently about being chained and abused by two men, one older and one youth.
The Assistant District Attorney in charge of the case, David Skelley, said officials would continue the policy of not speculating on the cause of the injuries or the young woman’s identity. He said the inquiry into the matter would be aggressively pursued.
“There is no place in this City for children to be mistreated in this way,” Skelley said.
On the DA’s staff since last January, the six-month veteran added in response to inquiries, that there was no apparent relationship to the February incident reported in this newspaper which also involved a minor female.
“It would be the worst type of speculation to once again label this as a ‘teen sex slave’ matter,” Skelley added. “The February incident was unrelated to this incident. It would be inappropriate to link the two events, or to label this as criminal activity until we have completed our inquiry.”
CHAPTER SIX:
On Tuesday, Danny Gets a Partner
The light floated down through the air shaft and brought the small room into soft morning focus. Danny sat in bed, rumpled sheet up to his waist, half rummy from being up most of the night and unsure for a moment what day it was: Tuesday, that was it. He reached for the remote, clicked the TV on and muted the sound, then fumbled in the sheet until he found the VCR remote and clicked “play.” On screen in jittery black and white the opening credits and terse prologue about the Knights of Malta crawled down the screen, followed by the wide shot of San Francisco and the Bay Bridge taken easily ten years after Hammett had left town. He didn’t need the sound; he’d already sat through Bogart and Astor and Greenstreet and now was using it as a flowing diorama for his speculation.
Somehow the newspaper clipping and the book and the movie had tied themselves into knots during the night. He had wrestled his way through strange, fitful dreams that had little connection in daylight. He would head for the library as soon as it opened to follow the 1927 newspaper lead; there had to be follow-up articles on so sensational a case. In the meantime, the question that had haunted him was still there: why wasn’t Rhea Guttman in the movie and did it matter?
Danny would have missed it if the small fact planted by John Larkin hadn’t blossomed into a strange hypothesis worthy of Chuck’s most febrile speculations. When he had finally remembered Larkin’s lapse in ticking off the women cast members in the 1941 movie last night he had grabbed a cab and headed to the nearest video store to find out for himself. The midnight viewing had proved somebody, for some reason, had written Rhea Guttman out of the movie. Maybe she was an unnecessary minor character and her red herring role could be handled more easily, more cinematically, using the blind phone call to Effie Perin. But in the hour of the wolf, he felt a chilling tug from Chuck’s grave and was sure the movie had been manipulated by the same mysterious people “with the juice” that had dogged his father’s steps. They couldn’t edit it out of the 1929 novel, but they might have been able to keep it out of a 1941 movie. Sitting in the hotel room watching the grainy black & white movie, the noire vision of plots within plots had set the conspiracy in concrete; at 3 a.m. it had been obvious that the hidden crime that Chuck had searched for somehow involved a young woman like Rhea.
He opened up the ledger and leafed through the fragile pages until he came again to #23 and reread Chuck’s typically cryptic reference: Hotel Belevedere, who’s in lobby, Luke, Wilmer, SS and the pudgy man and thin legged blond girl. He’d assumed Chuck had focused on hotel detective Luke, Cairo or Wilmer or even the hotel lobby itself on pages 114-116 in his edition of the book. But what if the key point wasn’t any of those but rather the “thin legged blond girl?” Why assume happenstance in a book that was remarkable for it’s precision and tight plotting, or that the reference to an odd couple suggesting Guttman father and daughter was casual?
The idea had intrigued him and he had labored yet again through the novel into the early morning. It was almost four a.m. when he had turned off the light and finally gotten to sleep and by then he compiled a very short list of Rhea citations to go along with the Hotel Belvedere allusion: page 167 where Hammett has hotel staff describe Rhea to Spade as a “...fair haired smallish girl of seventeen” and the brutal six-page scene between the supposedly doped Rhea and Sam that opens Chapter 17.
Chuck’s sense that something had been amiss in the novel, triggered by whatever he had found working at Pinkerton’s, must have taken him down a different path than the one Danny had followed to Rhea Guttman. Danny had only gotten there because of an old man who could list actresses in his favorite movies; now he felt himself standing on the decision point assembled out of the last several days, turning slowly and trying to decide which way to jump. He felt the need to get the logic of the last several hours recorded; he turned on the recorder:
“One, there’s a hidden crime found by Hammett and searched for by Chuck...two, Hammett put clues in the book but made them subtle, oblique and nobody would have tumbled to it if Chuck hadn’t found that scrap of paper...three, the only major talking character in the book that’s not in the movie is Rhea Guttman and her scene with Sam that opens chapter seventeen is an important piece of fifth business in the book because it ties Guttman directly to Brigid for the first time... Brigid had placed the call luring Sam to Guttman’s suite so Rhea could send him out of town... Hammett never says if Rhea is playing a role or truly brutalized but she gives him the drugged out misdirection that sends him racing to Burlingame on a wild goose chase, so Rhea is more than a minor character...
“I think she’s alluded to as the “thin legged blond girl” in chapter fourteen and that ties in with the description that Rhea’s a fair haired girl later...it’s all kinda thin, but when you remember she’s with a pudgy man in Cairo’s hotel lobby across the street from Guttman’s hotel, it’s obviously about her...
“the question is, why is that one quick description of her walking across the hotel lobby important...or is it...did Hammett mean something by it, putting everybody there then running Rhea through looking like an afterthought...it’s the only scene where the major players are in one room except for Brigid, if she is the blond girl and Guttman’s the pudgy man.…”
Danny paused, tossing the recorder slowly in his hand; he felt like waiting, but he didn’t know what he was waiting for. He began talking again:
“Hammett seems too precise in everything he writes about, the places, the time and everything, it’s got to mean something...and if it’s not a hidden message about Rhea then I’m screwed... if the clue is in the one of the hotels or Sam’s office or something else in the book I can’t get inside them except John’s Grill...nobody’s around from those days obviously...I can’t imagine that I’d get into Pinkerton’s files, so what’s left...
“the only explanation is that Rhea Guttman stands for a real case...it’s got to involve a young girl or girls, an older guy who’s maybe even a relative and drugs...or maybe alcohol because the book’s during Prohibition…got to get to the library….”
He dropped the recorder on the bed and looked around the room. “Time to wrap this up and get out of Dodge.”
He grabbed his jacket, shoved the recorder into a pocket. Leaving the fanny pack and Chuck’s ledger, he headed out.
The walk south on Larkin to the new San Francisco Main Library cleared his head. The morning was cool but clear and it looked like the fog would stay out of the Tenderloin through the day. A nice day to be out walking the city, looking for love in all the wrong places, having a quiet drink in a sidewalk boite; he wasn’t looking forward to scanning microfilm records of old newspapers.
The building was on the east side of Civic Center park, a blasted square block of street people and thin grass, both struggling to survive in the arid center that fronted on the impressive City Hall. He went in through the Larkin St. entrance, a cold g
ray tunnel that lead into the central atrium: a six story granite, aluminum and glass block of a building built around an airy atrium that managed to be both suffused with sunlight and cold at the same time.
It seemed more institutional than any library he could remember, all granite and concrete and painted gray steel arcing around each floor. He checked with information and headed up to the Herb Caen Magazine and Newspaper Center on the fifth floor. Searching through the green steel vertical files, he located the 1927 Call and Post files, pulled the microfilm and began scanning the front pages. As he expected, the staff had sometime in the diligent past found another copy of the October 23 paper; there was no gapping hole that suggested Chuck’s handiwork had gone unnoticed.
Three hours later he unbent from the viewer, rubbing his back and neck. Something was rotten in San Francisco, something that made his brain itch: sensational white slavery story, maybe even child molestation, an eager district attorney, and outraged citizenry and angry cops. It all added up to a moveable feast for some ink-stained wretches making their yellow way through journalism in the 1920s. Yet, somehow, the story died. He had covered every page of news up to the time when the Great Crash took over the news in 1929, and nothing: No more comments from the eager young district attorney, no interviews with the unhappy victim, no arrests, no indictments, no further comment. Nothing. Whatever had happened, had happened away from public view, far away. Almost.
After giving up on the crime, he went back to 1927 and scanned forward looking for the name Skelley. It came up twice more in early 1928 and in the late Fall of that year.
First, one more small mention that promising young Assistant DA David Skelley had left government service and opened his own private law practice less than three months after the nearly naked girl wandered in out of the fog and was thought to have several large, prestigious clients already on his roster. Then, later in the year, young David Skelley is appointed legal counsel to the Downtown Democratic Committee. A group described as “concerned private citizens working for the betterment of all of San Francisco through the offices of the great Democratic Party.” It didn’t take much reading to find references to the Committee, its good works, its invaluable service tendered the city, its people and their city government. He had the link.
