Hammett (Crime Masterworks)

by Gores, Joe

  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 Hélène. 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 Hélène’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.’

  You’re going to have to come up with the story, kid, he thought grimly. You just don’t know it yet. He said solicitously, ‘How did Heloise Kuhn . . .’

  ‘How did Heloise Kuhn get hold of her?’ Goodie was in a new blue crêpe de Chine negligee decorated with darker blue flowers made of lace and ribbon. She poured more coffee into Hammett’s cup. ‘Are you sure you don’t want an egg?’

  ‘People keep sticking food in my face,’ he complained. He waved out the wooden match he’d used on his cigarette. ‘She thought the house would be empty, so she went there. And got tagged out.’

  ‘I . . . don’t understand.’

  Hammett paused to feather smoke through his nostrils. He drank coffee.

  ‘Working for Molly Farr she picked up gossip about a fat woman living in Marin who’d just retired from the skin-trade and had left town, and she figured it had to be the same woman who’d grabbed her years before.’

  ‘Why did she give that address to her parents as her employers’ address?’

  ‘It was the only address in Marin she knew, and she’d already told her folks she was working over there. She couldn’t really tell them she was maid in a cathouse . . .’ He broke off to exclaim, ‘Hey! It’s seven thirty! You’d better get ready for work if—’

  ‘Oh, I . . . ah . . . quit my job.’ Her blue eyes were troubled. ‘I’ve gotten a better one, at a lot more money.’

  ‘Hey, that’s great. Secretarial?’

  ‘Personal secretary.’ She was momentarily enthusiastic. ‘I start the first of the week, when the girl I’m . . . replacing, leaves.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what, sweetheart,’ said Hammett, ‘I’ll take you out tonight and we’ll celebrate. The works! Dinner and—’

  ‘Gee, Sam, I’d love to, but . . .’ She found a tentative smile. ‘I’ve . . . got a date already . . .’

  Hammett was surprised at his own reaction. A stab of jealousy. Wasn’t this what he’d always wanted? Goodie at arm’s length, just for laughs? He made himself lean back in his chair with a wry smile.

  ‘That’s good, sweetheart. Have yourself some fun.’

  Jealousy, for God’s sake. Kid’s stuff. Not since Baltimore had he . . . Baltimore. Three-story red brick house with white marble steps. They’d gather on the front stoop at dusk, boys and girls together. Long dresses and long hair for the girls then; girls with short hair were considered loose – perhaps even free-love advocates. Who was that girl who . . .

  Sure. Lil Sheffer lived next door, and her girlfriend was Irma Collison. Irma’s kid sister was in school with Hammett, but he had a terrible crush on Irma. Worshiped from afar . . .

  He realized that Goodie was interpreting his long silence as censure. ‘. . . you’re never around anymore, Sam.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Sure not.’

  He didn’t see the tear glint in the corner of her eye. He returned to Crystal’s story.

  ‘When Molly’s got raided, Crystal was arrested along with the girls. She realized that if she showed up at the arraignment, news photographers were liable to be there and might get her picture. So she had to hide somewhere. Then she saw in the newspaper about Egan Tokzek being shot – and with a dead Chinese girl in his car. She was sure that would make Heloise cut and run because if Tokzek had been carrying any papers that showed her address, some smart reporter would make the white-slavery connection. So she went over to Marin on the ferry right after leaving Brass Mouth Epstein’s office. She—’

  ‘Why didn’t she just go stay with Molly Farr?’

  Hammett jerked his shoulders in an almost irritable shrug. ‘You’re not thinking, sweetheart. Look how easy I found Molly. Somebody else could. And if somebody else did, then Crystal’s picture would be all over the papers for sure. As it was, of course, she walked right in on Heloise, who shoved her into an upstairs bedroom and put Andy the idiot boy on duty outside the door with a shotgun while she contacted her mob friends back east and offered to sell them Crystal all over again. For keeps, this time. Of course Andy didn’t stay outside all the time . . .’

  ‘How terrible for her!’

  In apparent callousness, Hammett said, ‘Well, it wouldn’t have been an exactly unknown experience. After I showed up, she was hustled over to Bolinas, and was there until Harry and I pulled her out last night. A couple of times a day Heloise would come in to tell her that the negotiations were under way, and then were closed, and that the killers were getting on the train, that they’d gotten to Denver, they’d gotten to Salt Lake City, that—’

  ‘Then you showed up,’ breathed Goodie.

  ‘The White Knight to the rescue.’ Hammett yawned and stood up. ‘I’m dead, kid. Almost forgot what I came for. Could you run down to the Post-Jones Pharmacy and pick up whatever you think she might need? Toothbrush, toothpaste, anything . . .’

  After she had gone, Hammett began pacing the room. He’d taken the little Chinese girl out of the hands of the fat woman and her dim-witted son – she had nothing further to fear from them; but what had he really learned? Despite what he’d told Crystal about them still running, he doubted if they’d even begun. Why should they? They sure as hell knew he and Harry hadn’t been cops.

  He paused to light a cigarette.

  Could they somehow be made to take it on the lam? Where would they run, and to whom, if they got the wind up?

  He stopped pacing again to
chuckle aloud. Hell, he could use that ploy he’d invented for one of his Continental Op stories back in ’24, just after Phil Cody had taken over as editor of Black Mask. In ‘The Golden Horseshoe’ the Op had caught up with a murderous Englishman named Bohannon and his equally murderous teenage doxy in Tijuana. He had nothing evidentiary on them, so he scared them into admitting their guilt by taking it on the lam.

  How had it gone? Yeah. He’d very earnestly urged them to give themselves up to stand trial for the murder of Bohannon’s wife.

  So why not have the real op, Jimmy Wright, do the same thing with Heloise and Andy? He rang up the Townsend. In thirty seconds he was explaining to the fat little detective what he wanted.

  ‘Who am I supposed to be?’ demanded Wright.

  ‘A Pinkerton operative looking into the death of the girl found in Tokzek’s car. You know Heloise is Tokzek’s sister and you know, although you’re not sure you can prove it, that she supplied the girl to Tokzek. You want her to come back to San Francisco to face arraignment on kidnapping and white slavery charges.’ A new thought struck him. ‘Make it even stronger by reminding her that the hired killers she was bringing out from back east aren’t going to be too happy with her when she doesn’t have Crystal to give them. Tell her she’ll be safer in jail than anywhere else.’

  ‘And you think that’ll make her and the kid do a bunk?’

  ‘I guarantee it.’

  ‘Sounds awfully complicated to me.’

  ‘It’ll work,’ Hammett insisted. ‘It worked before, on a case that you . . . that I was involved in. Just throw a scare into her, and after that it’s just a straight tailing job.’

  The op sighed. ‘What’ll you be doing all this time?’

  ‘Sleeping,’ said Hammett. And hung up the phone.

  27

  The op pulled on the handbrake of the ’25 Marmon 8 Sedan he’d rented from a Third Street hire-car outfit. By God, Hammett had been right. The fat woman and her idiot son had stuck around. At least their flivver was parked behind the farmhouse.

  Dragonflies hovered on gossamer rainbow wings in the scorching sunlight, but the op wore his overcoat as he trudged stolidly up the creaking porch steps. In the right-hand pocket was a big black Colt .45, just in case Andy the idiot boy mistook him for a gorilla from Chi-town and started waving around that twelve-gauge.

  He used the heel of his hand on the screen-door frame. It was warped enough to rattle loudly. By pressing his nose against it he could see the fat woman waddling toward him from the kitchen. Fat? That was like saying that Babe Ruth played baseball.

  ‘This here’s private property, mister.’

  ‘And this here’s my ID as an operative for the Pinkerton Detective Agency, lady,’ said Wright in his nastiest tone.

  He didn’t expect her to fall on her knees and babble out a confession of white slavery, but he’d hoped for more than a crossing of fat-huge arms on her immense bosom and the single monosyllable she dropped at him.

  ‘So?’

  ‘So we’re looking into the death of the little Chinese girl your brother raped and murdered . . .’ He went through the pitch that Hammett had worked out, but could see it wasn’t taking. He finished up barking, ‘So you’d better come over to the city with me now, sister. We can do our fighting in court.’

  She turned her head to yell, ‘Andy! You, Andy! Git on down here.’ She turned back to Wright. ‘You ain’t got nuthin’, gumshoe. Nuthin’. Me ’n’ my baby boy hadn’t been over’n the city in weeks, and cain’t you nor nobody else prove no diffrunt.’

  Andy clattered down the stairs from the second floor. Hammett had done a job on him, all right. His lips were puffed and split, one eye was swollen shut, and there was a nasty bruise on one temple. The fat woman was now standing arms akimbo like Strangler Ed or the Scissors King squaring off for a wrestling card at the State armory.

  ‘You move outta here quick, mister, afore Andy moves ya.’

  The op hesitated, then with a muttered curse turned away. It rankled, but Hammett had wanted him merely to throw a scare into them and depart. He went back down the steps. The only one who’d got scared was him. The look on that witless kid’s face . . .

  He fired up the Marmon, adjusted the spark and smoothed out the mixture. Hell, maybe Heloise had been acting, raising his call, riding out his bluff.

  Two hundred yards north of the farmhouse lane, the main road took a curve. Here he pulled the Marmon off into the weeds and got out. No place to leave it, close enough to keep the mouth of the lane under surveillance, where it wouldn’t have been seen. That meant he’d have to go up through the woods afoot to take his plant on the house.

  Sweating and swearing and slipping, he swarmed up the steep earth bank and into the greasewood. And him in city suit and shoes! Nettles stung his face and hands; once he stepped squarely into a red-leafed cluster of poison oak. Damn Hammett, anyway. If they didn’t run . . .

  Then a new thought made him try to make better time through the baffling underbrush. What if they ran too soon, before he was even in position? He planned to go afoot down the lane behind them if they fled, counting on the Marmon’s eight powerful cylinders to soon catch him up. But if they were gone when he got there . . .

  Twenty minutes later he’d worked his way around through the hardwoods to the ridgetop behind the depression that cupped the farmhouse and outbuildings. He still couldn’t see the place, but he was pretty sure he’d have heard the flivver being cranked up. He paused, spent and blowing, under a live oak tree. About time to start downhill toward the edge of the cleared land.

  A shotgun crumped. He froze, after a moment mopped his tough lumpy face with his handkerchief while listening intently. No repeats. But it had seemed to come from the farm.

  Slick leather soles sliding on the dry grass, he went quickly downhill through the trees, hanging on trunks and branches to keep from landing on his backside. Summer-dry blackberry bushes clutched at his suitcoat.

  Whump. Another shot.

  He broke into a shambling, sliding, stumbling run, cursing and slapping at the mean black-bodied deerflies that seemed to have found him suddenly tasty.

  He pulled up, chest heaving and eyes smarting with sweat, at the edge of a copse of birch trees a couple of hundred yards above and to one side of the weathered sagging barn. The Model T was still in the yard, but he could see the top of a black touring car just disappearing down the lane. Goddammit, anyway. But then he saw that a boy had emerged from the woods in front of him. Not Andy. A much smaller kid, eleven or twelve, maybe, just ambling down across the open fallow fields toward the barn.

  The op still hesitated, the .45 from his waistband now in hand. What had gone on down there while he’d been stumbling around in the woods? Andy shooting crows? Or had he and Heloise been in the car he’d seen departing? Or were they . . .

  The boy burst from the barn before his scream of terror, delayed and thinned by distance, reached the op’s ears. His cap sailed off as he fled down the lane with his head back and his arms working.

  Jimmy Wright went out across the uneven weed-furzed furrows, picking his way. He was in no hurry; he was pretty sure what he’d find in the barn. If he were right, all he had to do was clear out before the kid came back with the law, and find a phone to call Hammett.

  ‘What? Both of them?’ Hammett scratched washboard ribs under his white shirt. ‘Okay. I’m on my way now. I’ll call you at your hotel when I get back.’

  He rehooked the receiver, stood frowning at it, then picked up the phone again and was connected with the Weller. Pop answered.

  ‘How’s the patient?’ asked Hammett. He listened. ‘Fine. Keep her locked in that room unless I’m . . .’ He broke off abruptly to listen, exclaimed, ‘Telephone?’ and listened some more. He finally said, ‘Yeah, okay, I should have thought of getting word to her folks myself that she’s okay . . .’ He interrupted himself. ‘Listen, make damned sure she doesn’t wander around the hotel anymore where someone can see her. All
of a sudden it’s gotten tricky and I don’t know why. Yet.’

  When he hung up, he became aware of Goodie at his elbow, holding the toilet articles she had gotten for the Chinese girl.

  ‘What is it, Sam? What’s happened?’

  ‘Those killers on the train from back east must have gotten in. Somebody gunned down the fat woman and her son a half hour ago.’

  ‘Hell, all I know for sure is that somebody didn’t like ’em.’

  The sheriff was nearly as tall as Hammett, heavier in the way that a bull mastiff is heavier than a greyhound, with direct pale eyes and a mouth made angry by a sullen lower lip. His deputy was an overweight youngster wearing cord trousers and a wide leather belt with a brass buckle.

  ‘Can’t even be sure it’s them,’ said the deputy.

  They lay side by side on their backs in the barn. The straw around their heads and shoulders was sodden with blood and brain matter. The bodies had no faces left.

  ‘Kid had a broken finger on the left hand, improperly set,’ said Hammett. ‘So does the corpse. And you’d raise hell finding that woman’s double outside a circus. Once you get comparison prints from—’

  ‘Who’d you say you was?’ The sheriff’s face was stony.

  ‘Private investigator looking for a wandering daughter from Nevada.’

  ‘Thought you was a mighty observant sort of feller. Missing girl, you say.’ He pointed with the straw he’d been chewing on. ‘Now tell me this? Wasn’t about to mistake her for this one, was you?’

  Hammett chuckled appreciatively. ‘Mrs Kuhn’s brother did time for white slavery before the war. She wasn’t convicted, but she was involved, too. Somebody answering my client’s daughter’s description got off the ferry in mid-May at Sausalito, and had a hire-car drop her at or near the Kuhn house. Once I learned the background, I had to check these people out. But nothing came of it.’

  The three men paused in the weeds outside the barn’s sagging double doors. The flivver that had been parked in the drive of the Bolinas house the night before was now parked near the kitchen door of the farmhouse.