He needs it. A few days ago I saw him on Upper Grant, stalking lithely through a grey raw February day with the fog in, wearing just a t-shirt and jeans—and no shoes. He seemed agitated, pressed, confined within his own concerns, but I stopped him for a minute.
“Ah … how you making it, man? Like, ah, what’s the gig?”
He shook his head cautiously. “They will not let us get away with it, you know. Like to them, man, just living is a crime.”
“Why no strollers, dad?”
“I cannot wear shoes.” He moved closer and glanced up and down the street, and said with tragic earnestness: “I can hear only with the soles of my feet, man.”
Then he nodded and padded away through the crowds on silent naked soles like a puzzled panther, drifting through the fruiters and drunken teen-agers and fuzz trying to bust some cat for possession who have inherited North Beach from the true swingers. I guess all Victor wants to listen to now is Mother Earth: all he wants to hear is the comforting sound of the worms, chewing away.
Chewing away, and waiting for Victor; and maybe for the Second Coming.
KNIVES IN THE DARK
BY DON HERRON
Nob Hill
(Originally published in 2002)
I.
The hunt began when Blackjack Jerome swaggered into the office, looking for talk. A lusty pirate, .45 tucked into the pants belt under his jacket as usual, the man was slicing out his pieces of the pie on the rougher edges of the San Francisco business scene and signing cheques on a lot of billable hours for the agency. My first assignment when I transferred in from Chi after the war involved a little head-busting he needed done down on the docks, so we had some history. If Blackjack wanted talk, he’d get talk.
I pulled my hat off the rack and caught the eye of the office girl on the way out the door. Five other operatives lounged around reading and playing cards, waiting for assignment, so I could be spared to keep a good customer contented. We took the rear exit and I stepped toward John’s in 57 Ellis, when Blackjack yanked my sleeve.
“Naw. I just ate there last night.”
“Okay by me. I don’t much care where I put the meat on my bones.”
We walked toward Market Street along the row of restaurants and pulled up chairs in Hartman and Maloney’s. While Blackjack unburdened what passed for his soul of his recent doings, I dug into a plate of Hangtown Fry, a meal that keeps you going for a few hours. You couldn’t know when some action was going to pop and hold you away from the table, and I never liked going hungry.
As I listened to the new tales of navigating his business around our city officials and police force, I thought as I usually did that Blackjack might step across the line someday and become fresh quarry I might be sent out to find, haul in and put behind bars. With his temperament, he could even commit a hanging offense. He’d make a fine trophy, a great shaggy head to put on the wall, but I enjoyed his company, so maybe instead he’d live to be an old man, ripe from his privateering. Unlikely as it seemed, seated listening to him, death in bed was a possibility. If it came to that, a man was long out of the game.
When my turn to bend ears came I was prepared, and said, “I saw The Fin last week.”
“No kidding? He out of jail or—”
“Walking the streets like a white man.”
The Fin was a local boy no one could find a use for until Blackjack came along with an angle, sending the kid armed with folding money into the waterfront speaks. Gin flowed until a sizeable crew sailed under all sheets, then some tougher members on Blackjack’s payroll would appear, load them into trucks and drive boldly through the strike lines on the docks. The shanghais could unload cargo all day to pay off their binge and be driven back out come nightfall, or walk away right then across the lines of maddened union men armed with clubs and shivs. The arithmetic was simple enough.
If I heard the kid tell it once, though, I heard it a hundred times, how when he was in short pants growing up out in the Mission, his family marched to the top of Bernal Hill with a picnic basket day after day and watched San Francisco burn in the distance. The whole downtown was brand spanking new, a land of opportunity, that’s all The Fin ever talked about. You’d think someone with one grand idea like that might have others, but that was as far as the kid’s intellect wandered. At the height of his success recruiting for Blackjack one morning he walked into an Italian grocer’s with a rod and boosted the till for close to an even fin. When he returned to that very same store in the early evening to buy tobacco, of course the old coot recognized him and managed to pull out a shotgun. The grocer held him arms high for the police instead of blasting him, which was a break, but that’s where The Fin picked up his moniker, which he hated. The kid could never see the humor in the situation.
The wheels were turning in Blackjack’s head, figuring out some new purpose for The Fin when he found him. To Jerome the kid was like a box of matches, waiting to be slipped opened and burnt a stick at a time until the fire was all gone. The box must not be empty yet, with The Fin still walking around and breathing.
“Say,” Blackjack said, reminded of old times, “do you remember those guys horsing around in the blood?”
“Sure.”
Dawn was just breaking on East Street when we had come across a group of our strike-breakers, squatting around in a circle. Blackjack and I had strolled over to see what the action might be. On the pavement gleamed a fresh splash of blood, and a couple of the crew used sticks to play Tic Tac Toe in it while the others gambled on the outcome.
“It helps,” I added, “to have some boys working for you who know how to keep themselves entertained.”
Blackjack laughed in agreement. He loved that particular strike, because he came out on top, with lots of stories everyone liked to hear.
Scraping back our chairs, we tossed some coins on the table for the luncheon and stepped out the door. As we hit the sidewalk I saw a face float by in the crowd that rang some kind of bell for me. Why was this mug sticking in my mind? Yeah. I had it. Oak Park.
“Catch you later, Jack. I just spotted a bird whose feathers may need picking.”
I fell into step with Riordan, a shadow two dozen paces back, intent on hanging at his heels until I determined what he was up to in my burg. I wasn’t sure if Danny Riordan’s rep had traveled to the coast, but his face once decorated the Chicago papers for a couple of weeks when I worked out of that branch. A banker over in Oak Park had hired a rival agency to guard jewels and other presents bought for his daughter’s wedding, but the operative working the perimeter had been run down and killed. At least he’d gotten a couple of rounds snapped out of his gun before they plowed him over. Riordan was the inside man for Burns, and he was found with a lump on his noggin, his unsmoked pistol in a side holster. The jewels were gone and I had never heard of a recovery.
The whole set-up sounded hinkey, but the DA couldn’t convince himself to charge Riordan with a crime. After a brief stir he was clear, though the Burns management allowed him to take his services elsewhere. It was a black mark for Burns, the sort of affair that made all of us in the business look bad.
Riordan reached the Powell Street corner just as a cable car was pulling forward, heading north toward the hill. He swung easily onto the front running panel and the gripman allowed the cable to heave the machine ahead. I had to swing out my beefy legs double time to overtake the rear steps and grab the railing, hoping I looked like nothing more sinister than the short fat man I am, anxious to make the train.
As far as I knew, Riordan and I had never crossed paths, so I had an advantage. His photograph was in a thousand newspaper morgues. I’d managed to hold my picture out of the papers by keeping my killings legal.
II.
I dropped off the cable car a block after Riordan left it, and had to hustle to pull him back into sight. He’d looked around for tails when he put foot to the pavement, and checked again as he crossed Powell and hoofed west on Clay. I was beginning to feel good about al
l this exercise. If he thought his movements were worth watching, then maybe he was involved in something I needed to know more about—or he may have been holding on to some basic caution, which you learn as a detective. He didn’t impress me as being someone you could just sap across the head without a single pill fired. I was confident that whoever had insured the banker’s gifts could be talked into picking up the bill on this job.
Riordan went into an apartment house on Clay off Mason. It was barely noon. Odds were good that he wouldn’t come back out instantly, the same odds that told me that if he had gone crooked, chances were he was living off a woman. Most crooks don’t work steadily enough to make rent or even buy smokes, and need that female with a job to baby them along. If he had honest labor, these daylight hours should see him on the stick.
I figured I had some time, and hiked to a phone in the Fairmont and told the operator to ring the agency.
“I need someone to take over on a shadow job. Who’ve you got handy?”
“Everyone else went out on a robbery, but Arney just walked in.”
“He’ll do. Have him meet me in front of the Fairmont. Tell him to hire a taxi and get here quick. And tell him to leave every bullet in his arsenal behind.”
I liked the Arney kid, and was putting in a hand training him. Enthusiastic as hell, he looked on jobs as Wild West Shows, carrying twin .45s and enough extra clips and ammo boxes so that he walked around bowlegged, like he was trying to ride a hog in a trench. You had to explain things to him a few times to make sure he understood—it wasn’t until the war was nearly over that finally he’d changed his name from Von Arnim, tired of taking the ribbing. A new all-American, from his mother’s mouth he was fluent in Yiddish, a common language of the underworld. If we got him trained properly, he’d be good to ship east and work from those offices, a fresh face to send out against crime.
I was lighting another Fatima when he piled out of the taxi.
“Young Wilhelm!” I greeted him.
“Cut it out. My name is Bill now.”
“Sure it is. Come with me, youngster.”
I guided him to a stakeout a few doors down from the building Riordan had entered and pointed it out to him.
“How will I spot him?”
“A Mick, County Cork sort. Sandy-red hair. Six footer. He had on a teal two-piece with yellow pinstriped vest when I tailed him here. Brown hat, yellow ribbon.”
Arney stood there, absorbing this information.
“Stay behind him. See where he goes, who he meets.” Looking upon the youth, I couldn’t resist saying, “Oh, yeah. He’s only got one arm.”
Arney looked startled, and then asked, “Which one?”
I grinned at him. “I’m kidding about the arm. He used to be a detective, Burns out of Chicago. When he steps out the door, he’ll look left and right and he’ll check again quickly. Same at every intersection. Just trail along slowly in his wake, do us proud.”
I climbed back to the Fairmont and grabbed a hack down to the office, where the lazy atmosphere of the morning had given way to some real bustle. The secretaries were working the phones and typing reports based on the field notes operatives were handing in. More bodies had been pulled into the fray, going in and out the doors. The only note of calm was Vincent Emery, a thin agent of a couple years standing, fast asleep in the waiting room. They must have hauled him out of bed before his proper rest was finished up.
“Who got robbed?” I asked the first secretary I came to who looked less than fully occupied.
“An old money family, South of the Slot. Jewelry, looted from a safe, valued at—” she consulted the notes, “—hmm, extent of loss not yet determined. Their butler was killed, but the family members were all someplace else at the time.”
Little Foley strolled easily into the din and told me, “Patrick Helland had some caper cooking.”
“Said who?”
“A source.”
“Reliable?”
“Sometimes.”
“And who is Paddy working with these days?”
“Shaky Squires. Plus some yegg out from Hackensack.”
I filed this information away for subsequent chewing and strolled across the room to where Emery sawed away at his dreams. Kicking his foot, I said, “Wake up. Don’t you know that we never sleep?”
While the operative struggled toward consciousness, I instructed him to wire Chicago, and have the boys there do some backtracking on the old Riordan case. Talk with the banker. Phone the insurance agency and give them hope that funds might be returning to the coffers.
I sat around smoking, offering advice when asked on the new robbery down in the Rincon Hill mansion. Two hours passed in this fashion. Then Arney rang in from the trenches.
“He went to the Warrington in Post Street,” he reported, “walked all the way. Like you said, he kept his eyes roving.”
“You find out why he likes that building?”
“The doorman told me he’s been coming around for a couple of weeks, seeing this woman and a man who just moved in there.”
“A couple?”
“They’re keeping separate suites. The woman is pure dynamite.”
I took that observation with a pound of salt. Young Wild West thought that everything with a minimum of two legs covered in a skirt rolled off the line in a TNT factory.
“What about the man?”
“About the same build as Riordan, brown suit, black applejack. He’s really mean-looking.”
Another useless observation, in all likelihood. How few people who’d gladly kill you bear some mark of Cain?
“Where are you now, kid?”
“The theatre lobby on Geary. They went to eat across the street.”
“All three?”
“Yes. It looks as if the men are both interested in the woman. She’s a knockout. Beautiful silver eyes.”
“Silver? You mean gray or bl—Did you make eye contact with the dame? I told you never to make eye contact.”
“Well, no, I—”
The youngster had looked in her eyes. Bad procedure. It would have been worse if he’d exchanged a look with either of the men, because they were no doubt more dangerous. But still, the skirt might see him later and remember his face, and tip the fellows with stronger arms.
“I’m pulling you off. I’ll have a couple of other operatives there in five minutes to relieve you. Once they get on the tail, you back out.”
“I can handle it, I’m sure I can,” Arney pleaded. A good lad.
“If you had more hours logged on the chase, maybe. But you don’t know what you’re facing and you don’t have your rods with you, because their weight in your clothes would have sang out to Riordan. You back off. Go home. Get some rest. We’ll take it from hence forward.”
I figured that was the best play. The child might not be safe out on the streets, without his brace of pistols to blow many mighty holes through Frisco.
III.
Reports from the Chicago branch would be awhile coming, so I left the office by the front entrance and cut like a cat across the streetcar tracks on Market to the Pacific Building. I wanted dinner in the States Restaurant before returning to the Clay Street apartment house. Fortified with bratwurst, potato pancakes, and black coffee, my plan was to relieve Riordan’s new shadow and catch up on my prey’s doings until something more stimulating happened.
Neither of the men I’d sent out to double for young Arney was in evidence, so I took a position in a doorway and set fire to a Fatima. The light changed rapidly, as a bank of clouds to seaward blotted up the setting sun. The only activity in the block was the appearance of a couple of Flips, dressed to the nines, moving east down the hill toward Manilatown off Portsmouth Square. If they were lucky, they’d see some kind of action tonight. Knives could get yanked out and wetted under the very shadow of the Hall of Justice, and if their skin didn’t get pricked, they’d come home happy.
I smoked and contemplated the merry pursuits of the species, when
I heard the roar of an engine pushed to sudden agonized life.
A gunshot boomed. Another. Where? Up the hill. I dropped the fag and ran against the grade toward Mason Street just as a black coupé came skidding on screaming tyres into Clay, driven by a dead man.
The corpse took his machine smack into a flivver parked in the gutter, pushing it up on the kerb and spraying glass shards around. I glanced at the carnage. No question about the driver being dead, because Paddy Helland had the bone handle of a throwing knife lodged in his left eye socket, with the gleaming point of the blade showing above his right ear.
I made the corner with caution, leaving my own gun pocketed so I might appear as just another excitable citizen until circumstances dictated otherwise. A figure went pounding across the weeded lot west of Mason. Fast. I’d never catch up.
From what I’d seen, I figured Helland for the shooter, yanking his roscoe and firing off a couple of shots as he tried to make a getaway. Whoever tossed the blade was good with it, some farm boy with years of no other gags or a city kid who’d gotten inspired reading Fenimore Cooper. I almost turned back to investigate Paddy’s pockets and check the smell of his gun, when I saw a slight movement in a doorway up Mason.
Walking over, I found The Fin crouched back in the vestibule with fear printed bold on his face like a headline. If he hadn’t risked a look, I might have missed him. I guess his experience of the rough and tumble stopped with head-busting, so he was having trouble adjusting to homicide.
“Well, well. The kid himself,” I greeted him.
He stared at me with a blank look, but stuck his head out of the doorway again for another gander. Then he said, “Where’d you come from?” The kid didn’t quite recognize me.
“Your mother sent me out to find you before the city burns down again. She’s made sandwiches.”
Comprehension came to him. “What are you doing here?”
San Francisco Noir 2: The Classics Page 10