by Gores, Joe
‘Seeing her isn’t going to make her any less dead,’ said Jimmy Wright.
Hammett removed his hand and wrapped his forearms around his knees and remained squatting with his chin on a kneecap, his face brooding. Without looking up, he said, ‘Worked over with a baseball bat. No wonder she was screaming.’
He shifted the body enough to get a look at the face hidden by the shimmering ebony hair.
He sighed and stood up and wiped his hand idly on his topcoat, then rested it on the upright gravestone. The marble was icy to his fingers. The Homicide cops had gotten still and intense when he had looked at where the girl’s face had been. It was gone right to the hairline, leaving only splintered bone and red meat.
‘Instant leprosy,’ he said with studied indifference. The dicks lost their expectant look when he didn’t throw up or even turn pale. He said: ‘Her name was Crystal Tam or Lillian Fong, depending on when you knew her. She has parents named Fong in Chinatown who’ll need notifying.’
When Hammett and Jimmy Wright reached the place where the path split the two cypresses, both men stopped and looked back. The girl was a rag doll, hurled carelessly against the fallen marble monuments. A gray dripping dawn had harried the fog up enough to show, beyond the cemetery fence, the gentle slope of Lone Mountain and the simple white cross that topped it. The cross was nearly invisible against the leaden morning sky.
‘A lousy way to die,’ said the op.
‘Tell me one that isn’t.’
He needed a drink. He needed a lot of drinks. Vic Atkinson. Crystal Tam. And Hammett at home playing author, instead of being out in the streets where he belonged as a detective. He’d thought he had it pretty well figured out until her death. But now . . .
Jesus! Unless the . . . But that was unutterably evil If . . .
He needed a lot of drinks.
‘You lousy bastard,’ said Hammett distinctly.
‘Sam, please—’
He tipped up the bottle, then let his arm drop limply. The bottom of the half-empty quart thudded on the carpet.
Goodie tried again. ‘Sam, you mustn’t blame yourself for—’
He looked up at her, heavy-ridded. He tried to laugh. His lips wouldn’t work right. They were blue, as if with cold.
‘Mustn’t blame ’self. Then who?’
‘If she herself called up the man who did it—’
‘Shouldda known she’d call ’im.’ His eyelids dropped; he popped them open to stare owlishly at her. ‘Caught you at it, okay?’
‘Sam, you’re not making any sense. I’ll get you some coffee.’
‘No coffee. Hootch. Know where ’at comes from? The Hoochinoo Indians in Alaska who distill liquor just like ’shine. Was in a hospital once with a guy f’om Alaska. Whitey . . .’
When she returned two minutes later with the steaming black coffee, Hammett was snoring. She shook him awake and got him to his feet, where he performed a rubber-legged adagio dance with her until he fell face-forward across the bed and pulled her down on top of him in a swirl of silken thighs. He started to snore.
She stood looking down at him, pity and anger and infatuation playing across her face.
‘Oh, Sam!’ she wailed softly. ‘Why?’
He turned his head enough to open an eye at her. ‘Why? She read ’bout dead Chinese girl in Tokzek’s car, that’s why. Read that, knew she had ’im. Tell lie to Molly, go safe hideout, make contact. Had ’im. Only he got her, instead.’
‘Sam, shouldn’t you get some sleep?’
‘Shleep. Remember, dead Chinese girl in car is key. Key to whole thing. Raped. Get it?’
He started to snore again.
Voices beside the bed were talking around him as if he didn’t exist. Around him and over him and through him, as parents did when you were little. As if you couldn’t hear or understand or reason because you were little.
Or drunk.
Or sick.
Starchy white uniforms. Smell of ether and disinfectant, this won’t hurt much, just an ouch Jesus Christ what’re you doing, good-looking redhead from Butte, Montana, marry that girl sometime. Josie. Ah, shit. Josie. Screwed it up, all up.
Talking around him and over him and through him with the doctor.
Next day, doctor’s office. Desert heat shimmering through the open window, baking out the impurities.
—I got only one year to live, Doc?
—ahem. Never sure with consumption, Sergeant Hammett, but the indications—
—then I’m leaving the hospital.
—but without proper care . . . as the disease advances through the lungs . . .
—I don’t mind dying, Doc. I just mind dying here.
He opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling above the bed. The streetlight outside the window cast curtain-patterns across the plaster. The Chinese girl was dead. Vic Atkinson was dead. Unspeakable evil?
‘Where’s that bottle?’
‘Sam, please . . .’
‘Gimme the bottle, goddammit, I know what I’m doing.’
Jimmy Wright’s voice sneered, ‘Give him his goddamn bottle. Sucking on it is what he’s good for.’
Hammett struggled to a sitting position. He looked at the square-bodied little detective. The op looked back. Goodie shoved the bottle into Hammett’s hand.
The op said, ‘How long’s he been like this?’
‘Since this afternoon. He was the same way after Vic Atkinson was killed.’
Beat the drum slowly and play the pipes lowly. Play the dead march as they carry him along. He set the bottle to his lips.
‘Yeah, he’s a sweetheart,’ said the op.
Hammett removed the bottle. ‘Fuck you, Jimmy Wright,’ he said distinctly.
‘That solves something?’
He’d show them. Both of them. As he used to show Josie when she was always at him. He drank in long swallows.
His belly tried to reject it, vomit it back up, but he stopped only when he started to strangle, even as the girl cried out in anguish, ‘Oh my God, Sam, you’ll kill yourself!’
‘Don’t worry ’bout me, sister.’ He giggled. ‘You got old goat with lotsa money, I got wife an’ two kids to worry ’bout me. Josie. Josie’s a woman . . .’
He stopped because Goodie was staring at him with wide terrified eyes. She turned to Jimmy Wright.
‘Is . . . is that true? A wife? A . . . a wife and children?’
Wright was silent.
Her face turned white. ‘But . . . Sam. Last night I . . . didn’t. Because I . . . you . . . I thought . . .’
She ran blindly from the room, hitting the doorway instead of the wall only by instinct; her eyes were squeezed tight shut.
The fat little detective shook his head. ‘I hope you know what you’re doing, Dash.’
‘Gotta do it sometime.’
‘Your timing’s shitty. And your manners. What’s this about the dead Chinese girl in Tokzek’s car being the key to all this?’
‘Beaten an’ raped.’ Hammett felt deliciously sleepy. Good night’s sleep would fix him up.
‘I don’t follow you.’
‘Try ’is one, then. Crys’al never worked in North State Street roomin’ house. English too good. Kep’ couple years. Bright. Listened an’ learned. Chicago, maybe, sure. But . . .’
He fell straight backward from his sitting position on the edge of the bed. His head hit the wall a resounding thump. The bottle hit the floor with a like thump as his hand let it go. Bottle empty. He lay still, eyes shut, as if he’d passed out again.
Drunk on the outside. Outside only. Wish my head was empty, like the bottle. Hope you know what you’re doing, Dash.
He knew. Dying. Dying of rotgut and a head that wasn’t empty and a gone marriage and a lot of fictions he’d never write.
Head full of jumbled ideas, thoughts, intuitions, fears.
Full of facts, too. Facts about the ambush of Hymie Weiss in 1926, for instance. Capone had been seen countless places during the two days Crystal
had him holed up in that rooming house. So . . . her story had been a lie. Why? What had she been covering?
No way to find out now.
Crystal. Thought you could handle him. Thought he . . .
He. Didn’t know who he was. Not for sure. Few clues. Silk scarf instead of wool. Dan Laverty doing what Dan Laverty probably had done, pushed on by . . . God, the man’s control!
Tomorrow. Soon enough, tomorrow, to decide whether he believed that the evil which was unthinkable was, did exist.
Tomorrow. Nobody left to die tonight anyway. Was there?
When he woke again, it was icy and black; one of those predawn hours when sick people die in their beds. Dark. Cold. God the cold! But some guardian angel was working the cool delightful neck of a bottle between his teeth.
He sucked thirstily at it. No whiskey came out. His furry tongue tasted metal.
Someone had shoved the muzzle of a revolver so far into his mouth that it touched the back of his throat, making him want to retch.
Then the voice came from the darkness above him. It was not unexpected. And somehow, though it had nothing to do with the owner of the voice, he knew – knew – that he was right and that all the whiskey in the world couldn’t drown that knowledge.
Then the voice grated, ‘Okay, wise guy, let’s move. You’re all out of time.’
31
Goodie paused to look around her suddenly bare little apartment. She was dog-tired. But she was packed. Finally, at three in the morning.
Without warning, she burst into tears. She put her face in her hands. So bleak, so depressing, stripped of everything that had made the apartment uniquely her own. She wiped away the tears with the heel of her hand, like a little girl, smearing the dust on her nose. She’d made the call to Biltmore hours ago, when she’d fled Sam’s apartment. Her mind was made up. If only he’d told her! A wife and children. Now, one more phone call . . .
Oh, damn anyway!
She went through to the tiny cramped bathroom.
By the medicine-chest mirror she fitted on her close-bobbed golden head the Copenhagen blue sport tam she’d bought that day. The girl at H. Liebes had said that Clara Bow wore just such a ribbed velveteen cap in her latest Paramount picture.
She could afford to buy things like that now. With the new job as Mr Biltmore’s secretary starting on Monday. And the watch he’d given her, the new negligee and the dresses and the fancy dinners and . . .
She turned quickly away from the mirror. She tore the tam from her head and went back to the kitchen. She sat down and finished her coffee and lit a cigarette. Her hands were shaking and her feet were cold.
The clothes and the job and the dinners meant the same thing as the phone call she was about to make. Harry the chauffeur was waiting for it. He would come and pick her up. Biltmore had promised to stay at the Bohemian Club for a few days, until she was used to his town apartment, until she was ready to . . . ready to be . . .
If only Sam had . . . no! Josie is a woman . . . She hated the very name Josie, she . . .
She looked around the stripped apartment again. The carefully packed bag held everything she owned. Well, next week she could throw out all those awful cheap working-girl frocks. She’d have what every small-town girl who came to the big city dreamed of! A lovely apartment, and servants, and . . . and . . .
She started to cry again. As she did, there was an echoing thump as something heavy fell against the outside of her apartment door. She stifled a scream, stood wet-faced and stiff-legged in the center of the little apartment, heart pounding wildly. Who was it? Some drunk, trying to . . .
Sam!
She crossed quickly to the door and without hesitation twisted the knob and pulled it open. Sam awaking, coming out of his apartment still drunk and shambling, falling . . .
His door was open, but he was not lying unconscious in the hall. Should she go in, see if . . .
She whirled when the elevator rattled behind her down the long hall. Two men were just entering the cage. One was heavyset, his hat jammed down on his head to hide his features. The other was Hammett. Hatless, coatless, wearing the same white collarless shirt he’d been wearing when he’d passed out. His face was haggard, and he almost fell as the other man shoved him into the elevator.
‘Sam!’ she cried.
But the door was already closed. Neither man had heard her.
Hammett’s arms had been pulled back and his wrists handcuffed behind his back. Was the other man a policeman? Only policemen used handcuffs, didn’t they? But then she remembered Sam saying that it might have been a policeman who killed Atkinson and that man who ran the speakeasy and kidnapped . . .
She ran back through her apartment to the kitchen window overlooking Post Street. Hammett and his captor were just crossing to a black Reo.
The fat little sleepy-faced man! He would know what to do. But . . . his name? She rummaged desperately through her mind. No name surfaced. She’d taken a phone call for him, had gone into Hammett’s apartment, had said . . .
Wright! Jimmy Wright!
The sound of the Reo’s starter jerked her eyes back to the window. The engine caught, popped, smoothed as the man behind the wheel adjusted the mixture. The car pulled away, out Post Street. No way to see the license plate.
Jimmy Wright. But how to reach him? He was in a hotel somewhere, that she knew, but she’d never heard the name of it, or the phone number, or . . . Think, girl, think. Like Sam and the dead Atkinson he’d been a Pinkerton operative before . . .
She was sobbing again before the idea hit her. She ran to the phone, sniffling, to leaf through the gray-covered directory while waiting for the operator. ‘Give me FRanklin three-four-one-oh, the Weller Hotel,’ she said in a breathless voice. ‘And for God’s sake, hurry!’
Hammett’s teeth were chattering so hard that he put his chin on his chest in a vain attempt to stop them. Cold air whistled through the gaps in the canvas top. The Reo panted up the rise beyond Van Ness Avenue, going very fast through the silent deserted midnight streets.
Preacher Laverty turned craggy features toward him.
‘Cold?’
‘Ye-ye-yeah.’
‘I hope you freeze to death, you bastard.’
He returned to his driving. Hammett wasn’t sure where they were going. Then he thought bitterly, to hell. That’s where. He shot a quick glance over at the big cop.
‘Going to kick my balls off, too, Preacher?’
He looked over at Hammett. His big hands convulsed around the steering wheel. ‘I’d like to.’
They entered the rich broad streets of Pacific Heights: thirty-room stone mansions and rich green yards trimmed with exotic plantings nurtured and pampered by Japanese gardeners.
‘Poor old Dan Laverty, fall guy to the end.’
‘You would see it that way.’ Laverty’s eyes were wolfish. ‘To you, anyone who doesn’t help spread the corruption . . .’
‘So that’s how he did it,’ muttered Hammett.
He was sure now. He’d caught up with the subtle mind it had bothered him that the Mulligans didn’t possess. He felt a momentary sense of peace, even knowing that in minutes or hours he would be dead. It was possible that Laverty didn’t realize he was driving Hammett to his death.
Could he make Laverty see what was being done? Doubtful. He’d be battling a lifetime of friendship. A true long shot. Like his stumbling against Goodie’s door. Even if she’d heard it, why should she know what it meant?
He found a grin. ‘How did he get you to do his killing for him, Preacher?’
No answer.
He probed again. ‘Let me guess what he told you. Pronzini killed Atkinson and was going to kill again if he wasn’t stopped. So it was really just an execution. Okay. But what about the woman? And a seventeen-year-old kid? Retarded, at that?’
‘What are you talking about?’
The shock in the voice, the pale cop’s eyes, was unmistakable. But then how . . . Sure. He said: ‘I bet he calle
d you up, asked to use your car yesterday morning, didn’t he? His was broken down. Right?’
He saw the confirmation in Laverty’s ill-concealed reaction. So simple! So direct! The man was a genius! And so foolproof. It explained everything, justified everything. And if things went wrong, there was Laverty to take the rap.
The big detective parked at the corner of Pacific and Presidio.
Hammett was numb and beyond feeling in his arms and legs. Wouldn’t be able to run even if he got the chance. But at least the icy air had cleared most of the liquor fumes from his mind. He was glad of that. He wanted to see it coming.
‘Must be right about here that Tokzek stole that Morris-Cowley.’
The corner of his eye caught Laverty’s momentary hesitation. He tried to widen the breach in the big cop’s defenses.
‘Odd that he’d need to steal a car right here.’ He jerked his head at the fine old brown shingle houses that had survived the quake and fire so well. ‘Didn’t you ever wonder whether the tipster who called knew you, and knew how you’d react to seeing that dead little girl in the car? And knew Tokzek, knew he’d be sniffing dope and so paranoid it would be impossible to take him alive?’
‘Just . . . shut the hell up.’
Hammett slid out of the car awkwardly; and almost fell when his legs took his weight. He stopped on tingling feet in the middle of the deserted street. On the north side of the block were five brown-wood shingle houses, simple of design and timelessly elegant in that simplicity, backed up on the low stone wall that bounded the southern rim of the Presidio.
In one of those houses he would die.
He looked straight up. There was no fog, so he could see a few stars. The last stars he’d ever see. Dead at thirty-four. Well, what the hell? At least he’d beat Christ.
‘Come on. Let’s go.’
Laverty shoved him roughly ahead, up a narrow walk between two of the houses to a plain narrow door.
‘Didn’t it bother you that Tokzek was hooked on the nose candy?’
Laverty didn’t answer. Inside the doorway was a landing, with steps leading both up and down. They went down. At the foot of the stairs was an open area of concrete floor. They stopped in front of one of the doors opening off it. Good. Every second alone with Laverty, to work on him . . .