Hammett

by Joe Gores

  Hammett was silent. If he tried to speak, Lynch would stop him anyway. All he’d have to show for it would be a smashed face. He watched his last hope turn and start up the stairs.

  ‘Better leave me the handcuff key, Dan.’

  ‘Oh. Sure.’ Laverty tossed down the key. He looked like walking death.

  ‘Don’t let it bother you, Dan,’ said his friend. ‘I didn’t mean for you actually to shoot Pronzini, but at least it allowed us to unmask this vermin in time.’ He grabbed Hammett by the upper arm. ‘All right, you. Inside.’

  Lynch waited until the door at the head of the stairs had slammed behind the departing policeman before he actually opened the door. When he thrust Hammett ahead of him, the lean detective knew why he had waited. This was nothing for straitlaced Dan Laverty to see. It was the damnedest thing Hammett had ever seen, that was sure. A… what?

  A bower of carnality.

  Huge ornate four-poster, dominating everything. Silken coverlets. Oriental carpets three and four deep on the floor. Rich folds of damask draping the walls. An ornate brass oil lamp that probably heated incense: The faint scent of musk still lingered on the air.

  Pictures. Aubrey Beardsleys with their richly embellished decadence. Illustrated scenes from De Sade.

  And mirrors. No matter what you were doing on that big four-poster bed, you’d be able to watch yourself doing it.

  ‘The room tells it all, doesn’t it, Lynch?’

  But Lynch seemed untroubled by conscience. He jerked Hammett roughly toward two waist-level brass rings that hung from brackets embedded in the concrete behind a break in the damask. He rammed Hammett face-first against the wall, and kept a shoulder in the small of his back while working.

  ‘I’m taking off one of the cuffs for a moment. I’d love it if you tried something. You’ve caused me a great deal of trouble.’

  Hammett was quiescent. A curious lethargy had seized him. He just wanted it to be over. The open cuff was threaded through the ring so the chain between the bracelets was now through the ring. The steel bit deeply into Hammett’s wrist as the cuff was resnapped.

  Lynch stepped back. The gleam in his eye was close to madness. What Hammett couldn’t understand was what had pushed him to the edge, after all the years of seemingly rigid control.

  ‘I suppose I should say that I’m sorry about what’s going to happen to you.’

  ‘But you aren’t.’ Hammett found his voice was steady. ‘You’re going to enjoy it.’

  ‘Yes. I must admit I am.’

  ‘Quite a lot, up until now, makes a sort of sense. Using the fact that Molly was in trouble as a way to break with the Mulligans and let them go down in the reform committee probe. I finally figured out there had to be someone like you behind them, someone with a subtle mind pulling the strings. The Mulligans were just too crude. But why did you want them to go down? You could have run this town for years yet from behind their-’

  ‘It was the only way I could be sure Bren would be elected governor. He’ll make a great one. And also, Boyd Mulligan is a fool. He doesn’t know who I am, but he knows there is someone behind his uncle. If Griff should die…’ He shrugged. ‘This way I’m safe.’

  ‘And God knows it will have made you rich enough, over the years.’ Hammett stood up straighter. His hands were so numb that he couldn’t feel the steel shackles cut into his flesh any longer. ‘And I can understand why Vic had to die. He saw you at Pronzini’s and knew what your being there meant.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And Tokzek because with that dead girl in his car he’d have crumbled as soon as police got to him. And Pronzini because you didn’t know how much he knew and how much he’d told me. But where does it stop? Now it’s me…’

  ‘You were going to the grand jury. If Dan got up and told them the story I’ve given him, they’d see through it instantly. As you did.’

  ‘As Laverty himself’s going to someday. When he admits to himself that Tokzek didn’t rape and kill that little girl.’

  As he spoke, Hammett glanced over at the door by which they had entered. Ajar! Had Lynch left it that way? He couldn’t remember. Or had Laverty…

  ‘He’s going to realize that kind of murder takes a particular sort of sickness, and then he’s going to realize who it was, and he’s going to come looking. So that makes him expendable too, doesn’t it?’

  Lynch’s eyes gleamed. Hammett wondered again what had sent him out of control.

  Lynch said, ‘I’ve done all I can for Dan. If he becomes expendable

  … well…’

  ‘Don’t you mean all you can to him? How many years, Lynch? With Heloise and her brother periodically supplying you with girls and making sure they disappeared back east into the whorehouse pipeline once you were through with them? Maybe you didn’t even violate the first ones. But then the raping started. And the beatings. And the beatings got more violent, and finally one of them died. It was inevitable, couldn’t you see that?’ He answered himself. ‘Of course not. You thought it would go on forever.’

  ‘I had no one…’ Lynch was speaking to himself, his eyes glassy. ‘No one. My wife, gone. No children. Whores sicken me.’

  ‘But not virgin girls you’ve turned into whores?’

  ‘I had no one. But now…’

  ‘Now you can go on with the double life. And when the pressures get too great, you can have another little Chinese girl brought down the back way. Down here where nobody can hear her when she starts screaming-’

  ‘Oh, stop it,’ snapped Lynch impatiently. ‘It’s over now. Finished. I’m fulfilled. I don’t need any of that any longer. Once you’re dead…’

  Hammett shook off that premonition of the evil that should have been unthinkable, and said, ‘ Is my death going to end it, Lynch? What if another one survives everything that’s done to her in the whorehouses and cribs of Chicago, and comes back the way that Crystal did? And calls you up, as Crystal did on that Monday? Calls you with demands you have to meet? What then?’

  ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘I know you were horrified when you found out the Mulligans didn’t know where Crystal was. Is that why Heloise died, Lynch? Because Crystal had ended up back with her? After you borrowed the Preacher’s car to go over there, so if anything went wrong he’d take the fall for it?’

  Lynch laughed. His laughter was unforced.

  ‘Well, that’s enough, Hammett. I thought I would hate killing Vic Atkinson. Only I didn’t.’

  ‘I know,’ said Hammett. ‘I saw his head.’

  ‘So I think I’ll use the bat on you, too.’

  ‘As you did in the cemetery. Keeping her alive and screaming while you smashed-’

  The door slammed open and Dan Laverty stumbled into the room. He stared about wildly at the bizarre carnal trappings, his face dazed, crumpled, drawn in and down as if he had suffered a stroke while listening outside the door.

  ‘Owen,’ he said, and even his voice was tortured. ‘Owen. He… I had to come back, had to listen… had to…’

  ‘Dan, you don’t understand-’

  ‘I was a straight cop. I… I murdered for you! You… the little girl in the car…’

  He left the doorway to start hesitantly toward his friend. Lynch was backing away. ‘And Vic Atkinson? And the girl in the cemetery? You? That filth? That sickness?’

  Lynch had backed into the wall beside the ornate bed. He was reflected in a dozen different ways in a dozen different mirrors. He looked from side to side. Laverty was in front of him, crowding him. Hammett could see only Laverty’s massive back, but a mirror gave the policeman’s expression: puzzled, almost frightened.

  The black Irish rage. How to trigger in him the…

  Lynch did it for Hammett. He broke. He came off the wall in a leap, trying to reach the other, interior door leading up to the main floors of the house. Laverty was on him like a gorilla. Of their own volition those huge hands closed about his windpipe, spun him about, slammed him
up against the wall again.

  ‘Owen!’ cried Laverty in an anguished voice. ‘Don’t run from me. Talk to me. Make me understand.’

  With a convulsive movement, Lynch tried to tear free. The thick back and shoulders hunched and tensed to pour their strength into the fingers. Past that back and shoulders, Hammett could see Lynch’s bulging scarlet face.

  Lynch swung a fist without effect. He tried to ram his locked hands up between the iron arms.

  Laverty’s right knee pumped, twice, up between Lynch’s spraddled legs. The horror of it was that Laverty himself cried out each time, as if he were taking rather than giving the rupturing blows.

  The knee pistoned twice again. It moved of its own volition.

  The shoulders hunched further, writhed with effort. A muted pop. Another. A muted tearing noise. The calloused fingers were sunk almost out of sight in the corded neck. Laverty’s body began to shake and buffet with its own sustained and total effort. There was a sharp snapping sound.

  Lynch’s heavy handsome head dipped sideways against the clutching fingers. The fingers began unburying themselves from the ravaged throat. They opened. Moved away. Only their purple shadows remained embedded there.

  Laverty turned slowly away. The blind look was dying from his eyes. Behind him, the body slid down the wall like a collapsing puppet. It ended in a heap on the floor. Laverty didn’t look back.

  ‘Forty years I knew him. Forty years I loved him. He was closer than any brother could have been. Do you understand that? Do you?’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘You wanted me to come back and hear. You.’

  With a sleepwalker’s movements he took out the long-barreled police positive with which he had shattered Egan Tokzek’s spine. He thumbed back the hammer.

  His mad eyes glared into Hammett’s.

  ‘You,’ he said.

  He rammed the muzzle of the revolver, upside down, into his own mouth and blew the top of his head up against the ceiling.

  Hammett sagged against the shackles. He squeezed his eyes tight shut so only the pink nothingness of the lids moved against his pupils. But when he opened his eyes again, nothing had changed. Nobody had gone away. And it was still there. The blackness he had first glimpsed in the cemetery, the blackness he had fought by telling himself it was the result of eight years as a detective, eight callous years of brutality and cynicism. And of the years since, writing about that brutality and cynicism.

  But it was no good.

  Too many indications, too many clues for a good detective to ignore. And goddammit, he’d been a good detective.

  Like, why had Crystal suddenly begun dutiful visits to the parents she had previously ignored? Could it have had something to do with Heloise finding it more difficult — and dangerous — to procure girls who wouldn’t be missed?

  And why had Crystal told Hammett that Tokzek broke her in, four years ago, when the man already had been a hopeless junkie, incapable of even normal sex, let alone the determined sexual effort necessary to rape and condition a child?

  And how had she known who Lynch was and where he could be reached on that Monday she had disappeared?

  And why had she called Lynch to come and remove her from the Weller Hotel, where she was safe?

  And finally, why had the fat woman and her son died, unless to protect — and perhaps delight — someone? And why with their faces blown away in Marin, unless to insure that no one would question a Chinese girl’s face being blown away in San Francisco?

  He was not even surprised when the interior door across the room swung open. He merely said, ‘Hello, Crystal.’

  33

  ‘How did you know?’ cried the Chinese girl in great delight. With a joyous laugh she stepped over the policeman’s exploded head as if it were a section of curb. ‘How did you figure it out?’

  For one of the few times in his life, Hammett was speechless. He was looking at evil: sprightly, beautiful, and totally corrupt. She was dressed in a spun jersey bloomer dress, hand-embroidered around the collar and cuffs, with sweet little pearl buckles on each side of the front pleats. It was the outfit a girl of nine or ten might wear, with bloomers of lustrous sateen just peeking out from beneath the hem of the childishly short skirt.

  Crystal pirouetted slowly in front of him, then curtsied like a child completing her number at the school recital.

  ‘Do you like it?’

  Her lispy little-girl voice literally raised the hairs on the back of Hammett’s neck. The voice, the slight body in the child’s dress, even the curtsy — these all belonged to a little girl. But beneath the bodice were a woman’s breasts, beneath the sateen bloomers a woman’s hips. And the naked pale legs were a woman’s, beautifully rounded.

  The face, framed in its gleaming mane of ebony hair, was a child’s face. But it was made up as a woman’s — and had a look of innocent depravity that was terrifying.

  Crystal batted her eyes and stuck out her tongue at him.

  ‘Mean Mr Hammett doesn’t like little Crystal’s dress!’

  She darted to Lynch’s body, and swooped over it to take the handcuff keys from his pocket. In the process, she gave Hammet a flashing look at the tautened shiny bloomers. She looked back at him with childish delight as she did.

  ‘ Daddy liked my dress.’ She straightened. ‘Daddy liked to take my dress off me. I was Daddy’s little girl. ’ She kicked the dead man in the temple. She smiled sweetly at Hammett. ‘Daddy wasn’t a very nice man.’

  ‘Daddy’s little girl isn’t a very nice little girl.’ It was the first thing he had said since she entered the room. He felt only that same odd, debilitating lassitude he had felt ever since Lynch had chained him there.

  ‘Well, she’s had a lot of lessons, hasn’t she?’ The lisp was gone.

  ‘Not from me.’

  ‘No. Not from you.’ She sat down on the edge of the bed, her hands clasped between her thighs, just as she had sat on her bed at the Weller a couple of lifetimes ago. He recognized it as a habitual pose. ‘How did you guess? What did I do wrong?’

  Hammett yawned, hugely and involuntarily. He could almost welcome death, he thought. Then at least he could quit talking. He had talked the night and two lives away. Three, counting his own.

  ‘So many things, Crystal. It wasn’t luck. Just logic.’

  Her pout was genuine. ‘Tell me. I thought I was awfully good.’

  ‘At the acting, yes. I’ve never seen anyone better. It was almost too good. The first time I saw you, at Molly’s, you were playing the dumb little chink. Every time I saw you, it was a different role. Once I realized you’d gone into hiding deliberately, for your own purposes and not because you were in fear of your life, I was ready for that whole Capone scenario-’

  The girl made a slight deprecatory gesture. ‘I’d told Molly I was scared of mobsters from back east, just to keep her from asking questions, but I’d never bothered to make up a story. When I saw I was going to have to give you one, I thought the Hymie Weiss killing would work fine. I didn’t know you’d remember so much about it.’

  ‘Yeah. And once I knew you hadn’t spent your three years back east dodging Capone, I had to wonder what you were doing.’

  ‘I could have just been at the Harlem Inn in Stickney.’

  ‘I believed that part of your story,’ said Hammett.

  Her eyes had a quizzical expression. ‘You’re a funny kind of detective. It’s too bad you have to…’ She broke off.

  ‘And you’re a funny kind of ex-whore.’

  His hands in the tight handcuffs had gone numb, but he knew it would do no good to ask her to remove them. Lynch’s death hadn’t altered his peril any.

  ‘So here were three years of your life unaccounted for, and here you were with a command of English, when you forgot yourself, like a college graduate. Molly mentioned that you would have been terrific dressed up as a little girl, driving the older johns wild — deflowering young virgins is a common sexual fantasy. You said yourself
that they dressed you that way at the Harlem Inn. So I thought about the possibility that some rich old man in Chicago had taken you out of the cathouse and…’ He raised his shoulders in as much of a shrug as the cuffs permitted him.

  The girl’s eyes were momentarily far away, as they’d been when she’d told him of her introduction to whoredom.

  ‘He was seventy years old; and important enough in Chicago that he could just tell Capone he wanted me, rather than ask. He kept me in a house on the West Side. After the first year, he trusted me to serve as hostess when he entertained. I watched and listened and learned.’ It was her turn to shrug. ‘Then he died of a heart attack at home with his wife. I just packed up and left.’

  ‘And came out here to go after Lynch. But why him? Was he the one who really-’

  ‘Yes.’ She spat the word, her tilted eyes narrowed and alive with hatred. ‘He liked them ten years old, eleven. First, he’d take down the bloomers and give them a spanking. Then-’

  ‘But it got away from him.’

  ‘Even four years ago I knew it would. He broke one of my ribs. When they locked me in a train compartment with a man who didn’t care whether I had a broken rib or not, I stayed alive by telling myself that one day the one who’d had me first would kill one of the girls, and when he did I would be ready for him.’

  A blood-curdling depth of hatred, Hammett thought. He said: ‘So you came back and went to work for Molly…’

  ‘I didn’t know the man’s name, of course. So I needed the fat woman. After three months at Molly’s I picked up word about her. Once I had her name and where she lived, it wasn’t hard to make her do whatever I wanted. She was a stupid woman. Greedy and stupid. First I frightened her by threatening to expose her for furnishing occasional girls to Lynch, then I offered her money…’