by Joe Gores
Harry put out a calloused palm. After a full thirty seconds, her hand laid the teeth on Harry’s hand.
The radio had stopped playing. The silence of the room was broken only by the softening hiss of the kerosene lantern.
Harry dropped the plates on the floor. He carefully brought his heel down on them, then twisted and turned the heel. The teeth gnashed themselves to rubble beneath his boot.
Tears spilled over to run down Heloise’s satiny skin and into the corners of her shrunken mouth.
‘Goddamn you!’ she cried mushily. ‘I was beautiful once!’
‘Where’s the chink?’ said Hammett.
25
‘Brighton Street,’ lisped the fat woman on the front seat between them.
The main street of Bolinas, Brighton wound around the point of the peninsula and dead-ended at the ocean.
‘Point out the house,’ said Hammett.
It was a plain white Victorian in midblock; the gas lamp on the corner gave just enough illumination to show them the porch pillars. The yard was overgrown with weeds; the house was still and dark. A black flivver was parked in the driveway beyond a white picket fence that needed paint.
‘Right on by,’ said Hammett, before Harry had a chance to slow the big car. ‘Park on the other side of the street facing back this way.’
Animation entered the lisping voice. ‘You won’t hurt my baby.. ’
‘He’s the one with the shotgun.’
‘He ain’t but seventeen.’
‘The girl was eleven when you sold her to the cathouse in Illinois.’
Heloise did not respond.
Harry stopped the car. He started to get out, but Hammett forestalled him.
‘Streets and houses, Harry. My kind of hunting. Remember?’
Harry made a face and nodded. They had planned their strategy after Heloise had given them the layout of the house, but the big South African still felt his role was too passive.
The fat woman quavered. ‘My boy. Don’t hurt my…’
Hammett leaned back into the open car. His irrational fear of the irrational boy with the shotgun lay on his stomach like an undigested meal.
‘Your boy!’ he said in a low tight vicious voice. ‘In the south they keep his kind behind the stove.’
He walked away feeling slightly nauseated. It had been a destructive night, and it wasn’t over yet.
The gate was ajar, the front porch solid and uncreaking underfoot. Only one window was open, that of the second-floor bedroom in which Heloise had said her son was holding the Chinese girl. Hammett’s skeleton key worked the simple mortise lock without difficulty. Nothing came out of the inner darkness at him, but his hands were clammy by the time he had been through the downstairs rooms. There was no way to duck a shotgun blast if it came.
He checked his watch, then started up. Harry and the fat woman would be getting out of the car in another thirty seconds.
He stopped with a foot half raised. Above his head, the boy’s muffled voice. Door of the room shut. A muffled laugh, remarkable for its idiocy, then an answering female voice. What sounded like a pleading tone.
Hammett raised his head slowly above the level of the hall floor. Pitch blackness. From behind the unseen door, the girl’s voice again. The idiotic laughter. Harry and the fat woman would be coming up the silent street now, Harry’s cannon half buried in her side.
The bedsprings started that cadence that can never be mistaken for anything else. Go or not? He went up the final stairs in a quick silent rush.
The tempo was increasing, becoming frenzied. He felt his way down the hallway to that door, traced enough of its surface to know which way it opened. Downstairs, the creak of a floorboard told him that Harry and the fat woman had come in.
The boy started making animal noises. The girl cried out, a wild lost sound. Hammett was flattened against the wall beside the door, his gun in his pocket, his soap-weighted wool sock in one hand and his flashlight in the other.
Three… two… one… now!
From downstairs came Heloise’s terrific bellow. Another. A cry, a curse inside the room.
The Chinese girl shrieked, the sort of shriek that brought the hairs erect on Hammett’s neck.
Scuffling noises downstairs. Harry’s cursing. Then the fat woman’s yell of warning.
‘ANDY! LOOK OUT!’
Bare feet hitting the floor inside the room. Pause to get gun. Running feet. The door was ripped open…
Hammett was already spinning off the wall. His right arm swept the homemade blackjack as his left hand thumbed blinding light into Andy’s face. The soap-weighted sock caught the youth between the eyes with such force that his head snapped back and the shotgun squirted from his nerveless fingers unfired.
Hammett’s light followed him down, the arm swinging the sock with the tireless rhythm of panic even as Crystal, inside the room, cried, ‘Look out! He’s got a gun!’
Hammett dropped the sock and straightened with the. 38 in his hand, his light arcing the other bedroom doors. None of them opened. Andy had been a lone jailer.
‘Hammett!’ yelled Harry from below. ‘Is…’
‘He’s out.’
The Chinese girl hurled herself into the lean detective’s arms, crying and clawing at him, tears streaming down her face, her naked body twined around his.
‘He was… they wouldn’t… he forced me to…’
‘That’s all right, it’s okay now, that’s all right…’
Hammett’s voice was soothing. He tried to disentangle himself from her. Her body was hot and lithe, arousing.
‘Get some clothes on, Crystal, we’re getting out of here.’
He got her back into the room and himself out into the hall. Harry followed his flashlight up the stairs.
‘Heloise get away all right?’ asked Hammett.
‘Should have seen the fat bitch run.’ Harry was chuckling.
‘We can be damned sure she won’t go to the police,’ said Hammett. ‘But she’ll be sure we won’t either. She’ll be back to get Andy, so you’d better get back to the car just in case she tries to disable it or something.’
Hammett turned on the hallway light for the first time, and broke the fallen boy’s shotgun to jack out the shells. Andy was breathing regularly, still out cold.
Hammett could hear Crystal’s muted sobbing as she moved around the room. Through the closed door, she called, ‘I will be ready right away.’
She came out looking very young and very fragile, her long black hair pulled back and tucked under a rope-stitch wool hockey cap with an incongruous bushy pompom on top. She wore tweed knickers and argyle socks and a leatherette sport jacket with a corduroy collar. The clothes were rumpled and coated with the sort of thick dust that accumulates on the floors of closets.
The girl’s huge, famished, tearstained eyes looked at Hammett across the boy’s naked body. ‘Thank you,’ she said.
The boy stirred and groaned at the sound of her voice. She looked down at him gravely. Her shoes were heavy square-toed sport brogues of imitation alligator. With all the force at her command, she kicked him in the side of the head.
‘Now I am ready to go,’ she said to Hammett.
At the head of the stairs she faltered, so he half led, half carried her down, uncomfortably aware of the slight, beautifully formed body beneath the cheap clothing.
When they reached the car, she thanked Harry with simple dignity and added, ‘I’m sorry she escaped. I wished to kill her.’
‘Do you think you’d of been able, dear?’ Harry grinned.
A ghost of a smile touched her small mouth. ‘I could have kicked her.’
‘You’d have had a big enough target,’ said Hammett. To Harry, he said, ‘How’d you make her yell right on cue?’
‘Jabbed her in the arse with my knife. Could have put it in six inches without touching bone.’
Crystal fell asleep on the drive back to Sausalito. Hammett picked two splinters from the ribbed wool of
his sweater, and wondered how he was going to get the whole truth out of her. It had become complicated again.
Dawn was breaking behind the Oakland hills as the four thirty car-ferry churned its way toward the Hyde Street pier. The light made pastels of the harsh gray granite and cruel yellow-stone disciplinary barracks as they passed Alcatraz. Hammett was blear-eyed and yawning. It had been a hell of a night.
Crystal clung to him like a little child as they went down the worn timber gangway to the pier, her head lolling like a puppet’s against his arm. The pompom on her cap came just to his shoulder.
‘Are the mobsters on to you?’ asked Hammett. ‘I have to know.’
A look of terror entered her eyes. She pulled her childishly small fingers from his hand.
‘Molly said something about trouble back east.’
‘Molly? But Molly is hidden where even I do not know-’
‘I found her.’
They walked a block over to Polk, where an early Number 19 streetcar waited to start its run. One of the beefy Italian conductors collected their fares and went away. The other manipulated the controls to send the heavy car up the Polk Street incline with a rush of power.
Crystal said, her eyes suddenly enormously yearning, ‘Can I go and stay with Molly?’
‘I found her,’ Hammett repeated.
‘Oh.’ Her voice was very small. ‘You are right. If they find me again, they will kill me.’
‘The fat sow and her dim-witted kid?’ Hammett shook his head. ‘They’re still running.’
‘The ones they were holding me for.’
They left the car at Sutter Street. Hammett found it pleasant walking hand-in-hand with this girl. Her abrupt gaiety was infectious: He found himself swinging his arm in wide arcs with hers.
‘Where is this place you are taking me?’
‘A hotel.’ Then seeing her expression of alarm, he added, ‘Forget it. You’re too skinny.’
She giggled. ‘You’re no one to talk.’
‘I may be thin, but I’m aww-ful wiry. We turn here.’
They entered a basement doorway flush with the sidewalk and went down steps to a narrow concrete corridor the length of the building, which led them across enclosed backyards. They went through a door in a sidewall, down more concrete steps, and across a basement floor. Another door put them in the enclosed courtyard behind a three-story building.
‘Up we go, sweetheart.’
Hammett used a key in the fire door. Very narrow wooden stairs took them winding upward. He used the key again at the first landing, which put them on the building’s second floor. Halfway along the hall that paralleled Post Street, Hammett rang the buzzer under a wooden OFFICE sign. The upper half of the Dutch door swung wide. A tousled white thatch was thrust out so snapping black eyes could regard them.
‘Got a desperate fugitive for you to hide out, Pop,’ said Hammett.
26
The room was small but meticulously clean, with a steel-framed bungalow bed and a steam radiator. Above the bed was a framed print of ‘Spring Song,’ with the little girl sitting on the bench watching a bluebird sing at the edge of a copse of birch trees. Across from it was a dresser set at an angle between the two windows. The single straight-backed chair was childishly decorated with painted vines and garish flowers.
Crystal entered the room like a cat, daintily sticking her head into the closet and around the frame of the bathroom door. Also like a cat, she made the room her own, bouncing on the bed as a child might do to test its springiness. They had come up a very narrow uncarpeted stairway from the rear of the hotel’s top floor, to this single small separate room built right on the tar-and-gravel roof of the hotel.
‘I could sleep for a week,’ she said.
‘Ain’t much to do but sleep, here,’ said Pop from the doorway.
‘Pinkerton’s used to put surprise witnesses up here until it was time to testify,’ Hammett explained. Pop said he would bring milk and doughnuts up from the Eagle Market, and Hammett added, ‘Coffee, too.’
Crystal gestured after the old man. ‘Shouldn’t you… I mean, he’s pretty decrepit…’
‘This lets him feel he’s handling the situation.’ Hammett drew the garish chair closer to the bed and sat down. ‘And gives us time for a little talk.’
‘I… don’t understand.’ Her eyes slid away from his.
‘Fat mama and the idiot boy didn’t put the snatch on you at high noon on Market Street.’
The girl was looking down at her hands. Her voice was very small. ‘No, of course not. But…’
‘Remember Vic Atkinson?’
‘The man with the ten-year-old dog?’ She jerked her head and gave an involuntary nervous giggle.
‘Vic’s dead. Murdered.’
‘Oh! I’m sorry.’ Her eyes went back to her hands, which clasped and unclasped themselves in her lap. ‘I… I didn’t know.’
‘Everybody keeps talking about a threat from the mob back east. You, the cops, Molly. Vic’s murder could have been a mob killing, it had the earmarks. Or it could have just been made to look that way. I’m pretty sure where he died — in the back room of Dom Pronzini’s speakeasy.’ The name had no apparent effect on her. ‘If I knew why, I’d probably know who.’ He added thoughtfully, ‘The mob might be trying to get a toehold in the city through Pronzini…’
The girl said nothing.
‘What did you see in the newspaper that made you start running?’
The girl’s dark almond eyes flashed up briefly at him, then back down to the hands busy in her lap again. She said nothing
‘I need some answers, sister. Was it because of a newspaper article identifying a dead man as Egan Tokzek? The brother of the fat bitch up in Marin?’
The fingers of one hand picked at the other. Her eyes watched. She spoke to her hands, her voice soft and hesitant. ‘If you are to understand, you must know something that happened four years ago, when I was only eleven…’
‘You answered an ad for a domestic and were grabbed by the fat woman and her brother and shipped to a brothel back east,’ said Hammett in a brutally impatient voice. ‘I know all of that. What about-’
‘But how can you…’ Her eyes were wide and shocked. ‘Nobody..’
‘Tokzek did time for white slavery ten-twelve years ago. He and his sister specialized in Chinese girls then. Why would they have changed by the time you came along?’
The girl’s head remained bowed. Hammett leaned forward to raise her face. Tears were welling from her eyes, but she made no attempt to look away.
‘I am so ashamed.’
Hammett took his hand away. ‘It happened.’ He’d learned years before that a matter-of-fact approach worked better than sympathy when witnesses were on the edge of collapse. ‘Talking about it won’t make it happen again.’
‘I… know. All right.’ She knuckled her eyes in a little-girl gesture. ‘First I went to an office in Chinatown, the address listed in the ad. The fat woman was there. She interviewed me and sent me to an address on McAllister Street. It was my first trolley ride, I was terrified. Tokzek was there. He kept me in the attic for three days, putting things into the food so I was always… always foggy…’
Keeping his voice neutral, Hammett asked, ‘Who broke you in? Tokzek?’
She nodded.
‘He beat you? Maul you around?’
‘No. Just… just…’ She overcame the rising note of hysteria in her voice and spoke coldly and clearly. ‘Just taught me how to be a whore.’
‘And then they sent you back east.’
‘In a compartment on the train with a man whose job it was to transport me.’ Her voice, her gestures, even her eyes had taken on a bitter, smoky edge. ‘Part of his pay was using me on the trip. I was put in the Harlem Inn in Stickney.’
Hammett stood up, lit a cigarette, and sucked acrid smoke into his lungs. Crystal went on in her hard whore’s voice, looking straight ahead as if seeing through the wall of the room.
�
��We used to parade for the johns. I had to wear high-heeled shoes and gingham baby rompers with a big bow in the back. It was two dollars for five minutes. The landlady was called Auntie Adelaide. She used to sit in the hall at the foot of the stairs. When you went upstairs with a john, she’d give you a towel and a metal tag with a number on it. The john would give her two dollars.’
Hammett had quit prowling the room to look out a window. Past the edge of the roof he could see the blocky tip of the Russ Building skyscraper.
‘Sometimes I can still hear Auntie Adelaide’s voice.’ In a strident Midwest twang, she said, ‘“Goddammit, Number Eight, somebody’s waiting. All right, Number Five, there’s a girl out here got to pay the rent.” If the john ran over his five minutes, the upstairs madam would pound on the door and ask for another two dollars. That was Tante Helene. We called her tante because she was a Creole from Louisiana. After another minute she’d come in and thump him on the back. She was nice. She used to wink at me past the john’s shoulder.’ She was silent for a moment, when she spoke again, it was in her usual voice, although now it sounded tired. ‘I remember Tante Helene’s wink sometimes, too.’
‘How’d you get out?’ The cigarette between his fingers, he noted with surprise, was crushed and twisted. He’d burned the side of his index finger without realizing it.
‘I just walked away one Sunday morning. The house commission was fifty percent, they charged ten percent of our net for the towels. Mostly the girls netted seventeen or eighteen dollars a night, but they owed me forty-two because Saturday was the biggest night of the week and I was a big grosser. I thought that if they owed me money they wouldn’t be so quick to come looking for me.’
‘Then why is the mob after you?’
She shook her head back and forth exaggeratedly, again like a child younger than she was. ‘I can’t tell you that. Not anyone. Not ever.’