Hammett

by Joe Gores

  ‘And be careful on that phone after Monday.’

  ‘Right ye are,’ he lilted again.

  He hung up and went down the office, cat-quiet, to stop behind his nephew’s chair. With a great deal of relish he swung his right arm to explode his fist against the side of Boyd’s head. The younger Mulligan was knocked sprawling out of his chair, the scalp under the oily hair split by his uncle’s ring. He sat on the floor with a hand to his head.

  ‘Ye stupid git!’ snarled Griff Mulligan. ‘Who told ye to go after Hammett?’

  ‘But… but I thought… Shuman said…’

  ‘Now get y’rself out o’ here and find where Molly is, before Hammett finds her for us.’

  The private office was heavy with the smells of leather and saddle soap. It was just across California Street from the new Robert Dollar building. George F. Biltmore stood up behind a huge rolltop with innumerable pigeonholes lined in green felt. His white walrus mustache was ragged and yellowed at the edges from being chewed on; snarled thickets of white brow bristled above his deep-set eyes.

  ‘Going to clean up this town, are you?’

  ‘So they say.’

  ‘So Evelyn Brewster says.’

  Hammett matched the power of Biltmore’s massive hand with his own wiry strength. Biltmore sat down in his deep leather chair with a surprised look on his face. He had captained his own five-masters around the Horn and in later years had made his fortune from shipping and marine insurance.

  ‘She’s a fine woman,’ he said. ‘Fine woman. You’re a close friend of hers?’ When Hammett didn’t respond, he added challengingly, ‘Hey?’

  Hammett, remembering everything he’d heard of this tough old man, said, ‘She hates my guts.’

  ‘Then why’d she ask if I’d see you? Hey?’

  ‘She thinks I’m going to smite the wicked.’

  ‘But you ain’t.’ He made it a statement.

  ‘I’m going to find a murderer and smite him.’

  ‘Murderer, hey? Humph.’ He drew the tangled white thickets down over piercing blue eyes that had never seen the need for eyeglasses, and burst out, ‘Clean up San Francisco! I remember when that husband of hers was fifteen, his father Derry — God rest his soul! — and I took the boy to Diamond Jessie Hayman’s parlor house on Ellis Street to start the lad out right. Then he marries that whey-faced ninny! Reform committee, had the gall to ask me to be on it! Why…’ He jerked his head around toward Hammett. ‘What do you want from me? Hey?’

  ‘You have a houseguest in Mill Valley-’

  ‘I have a lot of houseguests at various times.’ He got to his feet and went to the window. There was no fat on his seventy-year-old frame, no sag of age. ‘I’ve been a seafaring man, I remember my friends.’

  ‘This houseguest is a woman, a client of Phineas Epstein’s.’

  ‘A gentlewoman from back east,’ he boomed. ‘Tragic personal loss-’

  ‘Molly Farr,’ said Hammett. ‘The missing madam.’

  Biltmore returned to his desk to select a cigar from his humidor. He raised shaggy eyebrows at Hammett and, when he was rebuffed, clipped the cigar and lit it with a wooden match. He watched Hammett sideways through clouds of aromatic smoke.

  ‘I’ve got dogs on the estate, son. Hounds, a whole pack of ’em. The sheriff in those parts, I own a good piece of him, too. Not because I’ve tried to, but because it’s the natural order of things, power being what it is…’

  ‘Sure,’ said Hammett readily. His voice was thin; he hitched his shoulders unconsciously. If he read the old man’s temperament wrong, he wouldn’t get to Molly. He said: ‘When I was a Pink, I worked for a lot of men like you, Mr Biltmore. Men having labor trouble at the mine or the factory who needed somebody to bust heads and put the workers back in line. You’re big and old and tough and mean, and you think you’re never going to die. So you take what you want and do what you want, and worry about the consequences afterward.’

  Biltmore seemed unangered by this appraisal. ‘You’ve drawn your full ration of gall, son, I’ll give you that. But tell me: Why was I supposed to be hiding out this Molly Farr?’

  ‘Because you get a hell of a kick out of it. Or because Epstein has something on you that even your money and influence can’t-’

  ‘Nodody’s got anything on me, son,’ he snapped. ‘I came up rough and I came up hard, but I came up clean. I don’t have to look behind me on dark streets…’

  ‘“I’ve picked up my fun where I found it,”’ quoted Hammett. ‘Only Evelyn Brewster wouldn’t call it fun. She takes her sin seriously.’

  ‘Mmph. How’d you find out I was hiding Molly?’

  ‘Epstein got so clever he got careless.’

  The big ex-seaman stared at him from eyes that were blue chips of ice. ‘What d’ya want her for? Hey?’

  ‘Talk, that’s all. The man who got killed talked with her the day before she lammed. I think one reason she lammed was because she didn’t want to talk with him again. I don’t intend to put her on any witness stand and I don’t intend to turn her over to the DA, but I have to know if she has anything that would help me find my friend’s killer.’

  Biltmore brooded a moment more, then slapped the desk in sudden vast delight.

  ‘Yes! All right, goddammit! Tomorrow afternoon. If you know a presentable lady friend, bring her for a social afternoon. Then you just slip away — Molly spends her time in one of the guest cottages, you can go talk to her there and no one else the wiser.’

  They shook hands. At the door, Hammett paused. ‘Why are you hiding her out? And why are you letting me see her?’

  ‘I like Molly. Within her own limits, she’s an honest woman. As for you…’ Biltmore’s expression became that of a gleeful schoolboy. ‘I’ve been waiting for years for somebody to come along who could stick a thumb into Brass Mouth Epstein’s eye.’

  18

  Chinatown wore a new aspect at night, especially with the sea fog drifting through its narrow alleys and steep side streets. The hurrying pedestrians were mere undetailed forms in the swirling mists. Only the sound of heels on concrete betrayed their passage.

  Hammett turned up Jackson past a group of tourists huddled under a streetlamp, ingesting their guide’s lies about the labyrinths six and seven stories below Chinatown streets. Hammett knew you could work your way down the hill from cellar to cellar, but you were never more than one flight below the pavement.

  In Ross Alley — known as Old Spanish Alley before the Chinese pushed the Mexicans out — he went down a shallow set of stairs from street level into deep gloom. At the foot of the steps was a small concrete alcove holding a pair of battered stinking garbage pails. Hammett slapped his hand with a measured beat on the naking red door behind them. Nothing happened. Hammett kept on. Finally a voice inside called something in Chinese. Hammett persisted. The voice repeated its high-pitched exhortation. Hammett continued.

  ‘Go ’way,’ the voice finally called in English.

  Hammett didn’t. There were sounds of a whole series of bolts being drawn. The door opened a bare two inches on a stout length of chain.

  ‘Go ’way.’

  ‘Chin Kim Guy,’ said Hammett.

  The door was slammed shut and bolted.

  Hammett sat down on the steps and lit a cigarette. He finished it and started a second. Mist wet his face. The bolt ritual began again. He ground the butt against the pale brick wall, dropped the shredded remains at his feet, and was waiting in moody patience, hands in overcoat pockets, when the door opened again.

  ‘You come,’ said a different voice from the darkness.

  A dim unshaded lightbulb at the far end of the twenty-foot hallway showed that his grossly heavy Chinese guide was as tall as he, and wore Occidental clothing. He stopped at a door halfway down the hall and called out in Cantonese. The door was unlocked. They went through into a passage like the one they had just left, only at right angles to it.

  Near the far end of this hall they paused before another d
oor, different from the others. Its seasoned oak panels were thickly studded with the square heads of iron carriage bolts.

  This door had a buzzer, which the binder pushed in a quick uneven rhythm; no voice could have carried through the two-inch hardwood thickness. Noise and lights and tobacco smoke came out at them — underlaid with incense and the faint sweetish reek of opium. The voices, high-pitched and singsong and excited, all male, mingled with the clack of buttons. Which meant fan-tan, not a pai gow parlor or a do far lottery.

  Blocking Hammett’s way was another Oriental, dressed in loose baggy trousers of a coarse material, wearing slippers and a wide-sleeved buttonless jacket cinched at the waist with a two-inch sewn cloth belt. Between the parted edges of the jacket were the shifting planes of his immense hairless chest. He was six-six and two hundred and fifty pounds, none of them fat. His head too was hairless. His features were more Mongol than Chinese.

  He stepped back a pace, crossed his arms into the wide sleeves, and bowed deeply from the waist. ‘We are honored, Prince of Men.’

  ‘You been demoted, Qwong?’ asked Hammett cheerfully.

  ‘Demoted, oh King of Pursuers?’

  ‘Chin has you on the door.’

  He bowed again. ‘Merely awaiting your August Self.’ He made a graceful gesture. ‘My Master is impatient for the unutterable joy of your presence.’

  Hammett bowed himself. ‘Lead on, O Giant of China.’

  ‘That’s terrible,’ said Qwong Lin Get.

  Hammett’s earlier guide manipulated the heavy swiveled bar on the door back into the cleats that held it in a locked position. The lean detective followed Qwong down the square low-ceilinged basement room. It was crowded with a couple of hundred male Chinese, massed around a dozen four-by-ten fan-tan tables. The din of voices flowed and ebbed as the buttons were drawn down.

  Qwong indicated the tables with an almost contemptuous sweep of one steel-muscled arm.

  ‘What your friend Mau Yee would give to know of this!’

  ‘You think he doesn’t?’

  The enormous homosexual bodyguard caressed Hammett with his eyes. ‘I know that you would not tell him.’

  Hammett nodded wordlessly. He wouldn’t have to. It was from Manion that he had gotten the current location of Chin Kim Guy’s fan-tan parlor.

  He stayed a moment to watch the play.

  The table was covered with a mat, in the exact center of which was diagrammed a twelve-inch square divided into quarters. Each corner bore the Chinese character for a number from one to four.

  Across from Hammett was the dealer, an Oriental ancient in skullcap and silk jacket. Fastened to the table in front of him was a leather bag filled with small black and white buttons.

  ‘My Master awaits his Peerless Friend.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Hammett.

  The venerable dealer dipped into the sack with a colorful lacquer bowl, brought it out full of buttons, and turned it upside down on the table under the avid eyes of the players. As Hammett moved off, he had begun drawing buttons, four at a time, out from under the bowl with a hooked bamboo stick. By placing money on a numbered quarter of the diagram, the players were betting whether one, two, three, or four buttons would be left under the bowl for the final drawdown.

  At the rear of the room was a partition of antique Japanese screens, which had been among Guy Kim’s most valued possessions. They had partitioned the players from the dealers in one of his do far parlors. Now they were his son’s.

  Inside the carefully guarded little chamber was a hardwood table bearing piles of crumpled bills, a black-beaded abacus, and nothing else.

  Chin Kim Guy bounced to his feet behind the table, hand extended. ‘Hammett!’ he exclaimed. ‘Long time no see. Hear the one about the minister and the little boy he caught swearing? He says, “Little boy, when you talk like that the chills run up and down my spine.” And the boy says, “If you’d heard my ma when she caught her tit in the wringer, you’d of froze to death.”’ He burst into high-pitched laughter and waved Hammett to a chair across the table. ‘Rest the dogs.’

  Hammett sat.

  The dapper Chinese was dressed in a gray Glenurquhart plaid and a knitted silk tie with a fancy crocheted weave. He looked like a Chinese pimp, not the king of an illegal gambling empire stretching from San Francisco to the Chinese colonies in Stockton and Sacramento. As long as Hammett had known him he’d been telling terrible jokes and laughing uncontrollably at them.

  Now he uttered a short burst of Cantonese at another of the giant bodyguards, who was leaning against the back wall. The man quickly disappeared through an unframed door at his elbow.

  ‘Did your father get the magazine I sent him a few years ago?’

  Chin laughed. He had very white buckteeth and wore his black hair parted in the middle and combed tightly to his skull. His utterly black eyes glittered with amusement under delicate brows.

  ‘I read the story to him, he got a hell of a wallop out of Chang Li Ching. He didn’t know he impressed you as such a bloodthirsty character. You knew he’s Kam Sam Hock now?’

  ‘I’d heard he’d gone home from the Golden Mountain,’ Hammett admitted.

  The Golden Mountain was what the old-generation Chinese still called San Francisco. One who had been to the Golden Mountain and had returned home to China, wealthy and respected, for his declining years, was known as a Kam Sam Hock. Only Chin Kim Guy’s generation had begun to consider America as home.

  The bodyguard returned with a delicate china pot and two small handleless bowls set on doughnutlike saucers. The tea was pale amber, clear as spring water, and steaming hot. With it was a dish of four small round sesame seed cakes baked to a pale brown. Hammett nibbled at one and sipped tea.

  Chin’s laughter bubbled up again; it was said he laughed the same way when his binders hacked an enemy to pieces.

  ‘You hear the one about old Nate? Rebecca is downstairs in the front room with Abie, see, and Nate hears some strange sound coming from down there, so he goes to the head of the stairs and he calls, “Becky, are you and Abie fighting?” And Rebecca says, “No, daddy, we’re screwing.” And old Nate says, “That’s nice, children, don’t fight.”’

  His gales of laughter trailed away in chuckles.

  ‘Anyway, Hammett, you want to see the Honorable Pater you’re out of luck-’

  ‘Came to see you,’ said Hammett.

  He jerked a thumb over his shoulder without looking around; he knew the massive bald-headed Qwong would be directly behind his chair with a snickersnee, the swordlike Chinese knife that could take out a man’s throat with a single slash, strapped hilt-downward to his left forearm beneath the flowing jacket sleeve.

  ‘Remember five years ago your father promised to lend me this character if I ever needed someone’s leg broken or eye poked out?’

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘That still good, all-ee-same like father like son?’

  Chin considered gravely for a moment, then gave a very Occidental shrug. ‘Sure, why not, he’s getting fat and lazy anyway.’

  ‘How about all of them?’ said Hammett.

  Chin cocked an eyebrow. ‘Leaving me naked before mine enemies?’

  ‘Maybe that’s the idea.’

  Chin laughed out loud and clapped his hands in delight. ‘Only you could come up with a remark like that, Dash!’ He leaned forward in his chair. ‘You hear the one about the Chinaman asked this fellow, “You telle me where railleroad depot?” And the guy says, “What’s the matter, John, you lost?” And the Chinaman says, “No! Me here, dam’ depot lost!”’ Before Hammett could make appropriate noises, he demanded, ‘What are you doing, starting a war?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Other Chinamen?’

  ‘Wops.’

  ‘Good!’ Chin laughed out loud again. ‘Too many wops around anyway.’ He shifted his gaze to the giant Qwong. ‘I got through four years at Cal without him around, I guess I can… besides, he’s always been in love with you
, this’ll give him a chance to work off his Freudian repressions.’

  Hammett walked home from Chinatown through the fog. Everything was moving. Tomorrow, Molly Farr. He’d open her up and find out what — if anything — she could tell him about Vic’s death. He would also ask her Chinese maid about the fat woman over by Bolinas Lagoon.

  The fog that lay above the city cut the tops off the hills, and made the taller buildings seem to disappear five stories above the street.

  God damn he loved this city! There wasn’t another like it anywhere, and he’d been in a lot of them since he’d answered that blind box ad in the Baltimore paper back in the summer of ’12. He’d gotten bored chalking up stock market transactions from the Poe and Davies ticker tape; because he was big for his eighteen years, he’d been able to lie his way into the job as a Pinkerton operative.

  Eight years of manhunting — interrupted by the Ambulance Corps and the government lunger hospitals in Tacoma and San Diego. Christ, the towns he’d been in as a Pink! Pasco and Seattle and Spokane; Stockton and Vallejo; Butte, Denver, Cleveland, Dallas; Gilt-Edge, Montana, and Lewiston, Idaho; El Paso, Jacksonville, Detroit, Boston; Rocky Mount, North Carolina, Louisville, Kentucky, and the Big Apple itself, New York City. Finally, San Francisco. The City That Knows How.

  At the south end of the Stockton tunnel he looked up to his right above the top of a billboard. Yeah. Just there were the tops of the railing posts through which he had Miles Archer pitch after being shot in The Maltese Falcon.

  Hammett looked up at the concrete parapet where Bush Street bridged the tunnel. He’d lived for half a year at the mouth of the alley just across Bush — 20 Monroe Street — and when he’d needed a secluded, dramatic spot for Archer to die, dead-end Burritt Street had just naturally come to mind.

  He was suddenly in a hurry to get home. The Falcon would have to wait for revision until this whole mess was finished, but not so The Dain Curse. He’d thought of a way to characterize Minnie Hershey’s boyfriend, Rhino Tingley. Let Rhino count out his eleven hundred and seventy dollars, braggingly, bill by bill, in front of the Op’s cynical and Minnie’s terrified eyes. Hell, he’d created Rhino’s name by mating a British slang word for money with the name of a little street off Silver Avenue; so why not let his character be created by the act of counting money?