Chasing Sam Spade

by Brian Lawson

  “Shit, you’re starting to look like mom,” he said, raising the glass and toasting his reflection. “To John Larkin. John boyo, you’re right. That’s why they got a word for it. Coincidence.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN:

  Wednesday, Meet ‘Whitey’ Dugan

  The voice cracked out from the dim end of the four-bed room. It was an old man’s voice, thin but somehow still vital. “Who the hell’s there.”

  “Ed, it’s me, Johnny Larkin and I brought a friend. You up to seeing company?”

  “Frig you, you little punk bastard. I’m up to anything. Maybe to be putting the blocks to your old lady and wiping off on the drapes,” the voice cackled.

  “Good to see you’re your old self,” John said, pushing Danny deeper into the darkened room. The heavily curtained window was only a thin sketch of light around the edges

  “Where’s the lights?”

  “Leave the frigging lights alone, you little pissant. If I wanted lights I’d have turned them on myself,” the voice cackled, then stopped in a thin, wheezing cough that seemed to rattle around inside the man’s chest, bounding off ribs for emphasis before issuing. It was a voice like a dusty wind out of the gutter. Finally the coughing stopped and he said, “Don’t be afraid of a little cancer, it’s not catching. Come on in, boys, come on in.”

  The man propped up in the slanted bed made John Larkin look like a teenager. Thin, fish belly white face and liver spotted hands, a blotchy red face topped with gray wispy hair. Even wasted almost to a skeleton the man looked big. Danny could see that he must have been powerful in his day; the skeleton outline poking through the pajama top and thin white sheet took up the entire bed: big shouldered, long legged, hands balled up the size of knuckled bowling balls on top of the sheet. Except for the voice the only things that seemed truly alive were his clear, blue eyes that almost shone out of the murky room shadows.

  “Sit down, for Christ’s sake,” he said. “I didn’t live ninety one years so people could stand above me. Sit down, sit down.” And so they sat, Danny on the edge of the adjacent empty bed, John Larkin in the small, hard chair pulled up closer to the gaunt old man.

  “You tell him about me, Johnny boy?”

  “I sure did, Ed. How you were famous for having walked the beat in the Mission and the old South of the Slot for more than forty years and never fired a shot or had an arrest thrown out of court.”

  He paused, waiting for the terribly old man to say something, then continued. “I told him you were the last of the breed. A good, tough Irish cop, and nobody had a word to say against you.”

  At first Danny thought the rasping sound was the old man crying dry, bitter tears over lost youth and vigor. Then he realized Ed Dugan was laughing, slowly, steadily and with as much vigor as he could muster. Finally the sound broke into a cough and it was over; they waited.

  “Well, that’s as big a pile of horse shit as a man’s likely to step into any time soon,” he finally whispered, then the old man fell silent. He had dozed off and the minutes passed slowly in the dark cool room.

  “What day is it?” He startled them both. John told him it was Wednesday morning. He seemed to drift off again for a moment then asked, “What’s his name?”

  John said, “He’s Danny Boyle. Irish boy looking after some business of his father’s.”

  “Come here,” he said and Danny walked a few feet and stood by the bed, his thighs pushed against the hard chrome frame barely covered by the thin blanket and sheet. The old man looked at him and smiled a thin, gap toothed smile full of yellow age. “Feel that grip boy, feel that grip.”

  Danny reached out and Ed grabbed his hand, moving faster and stronger than Danny would have thought possible, squeezing his hand. His hand was huge, engulfing Danny’s, long stiff fingers wrapping him in hard, callused grip formed from nearly a century of hard scrabble living. And it was dry and firm, and then Danny could feel the pressure as the old man squeezed. Then it become uncomfortable and suddenly he felt a knuckle pop and a quick shot of pain ran up his forearm; he jerked his hand away from the other’s.

  “What the hell?” he said, rubbing his right hand and shaking it.

  “I used to have a hand on me could break your knuckles not just pop ‘em. Many’s the scofflaw and Sunday morning drunk out in the Mission came along easy when I got that hand on them,” he said, chasing the words with the dust dry laugh. He held up his hand to the weak light leaking in around the window drapes. “ Look now, damn near see through the thing. Goddman it, sometimes I think I’m going to just disappear. Frig ‘em all and the hell with the lot.”

  “Who?”

  “Them that did me wrong and them that wanted to,” he whispered, sounding suddenly tired, as though his last burst of strength and taken everything out of him. “I have a memory and I don’t forget. No Dugan ever forgot or forgave.”

  The old man’s huge hand flopped down on the white bedding, nearly disappearing for a moment, then he said, “what do you want? You got questions, ask ‘em, then get out and let me get some sleep.”

  Danny sat down on the corner of the old man’s bed, watching him but staying out of reach of that claw. “I won’t bore you with the whole thing. It’s really about my dad, Chuck Boyle. He came here and worked for Pinkerton’s in 1958 and a little in ’59. Things went kind of sour for him he says, sad really, he’s dead now. He said he got into some trouble with some people over an investigation he was doing.”

  The old man’s paper-thin eyelids were closed but Danny could see the eyeballs moving slowly behind the lids. Finally he said, “Pinkerton’s you say? Detective?”

  “Something like that,” Danny said. “Anyway, he got the idea that there was a real crime hidden in that book The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett?”

  “I know who wrote it, sonny,” he coughed dryly. “Most Irish can read you know. So, what’s this crime your father said was hidden in there?”

  John Larkin chimed in, “We don’t know, John. Danny here thinks it has something to do with one of the people in the book, young girl, maybe on dope, sex slave, that sort of thing. You remember anything like that?”

  “When?”

  “Would have been, Danny what’d you say, probably around when you started out on the force, maybe 1927, 28 or so?”

  They waited, listening to the almost imperceptible respiration of the old man in the bed. John got impatient and said, “You want us to come back later, Ed? Maybe you get some sleep now?”

  “Naw, can’t be sure there’s going to be a later laid up like this,” he said, and he seemed to have gotten a second wind: eyes opened, voice stronger and he even shifted a bit on the pillows.

  “You know, boyo, when I’m gone it’s all gone. Me and Benny the Kike and Frankie Thumbs and all the flying squad used to work the Mission,” he rasped and found the energy to shake his head, a sound on the starched pillow like dry leaves scuttling in front of a cold November wind. “No, history don’t count. History is what them that thinks they know tells about things. It’s got no blood in it. You want to know, you got to talk to the people who were there. What they we’re thinking about, why they done what they done. The rest is just lies we tell each other to keep warm on a cold night. Don’t remember any such thing, but that’s a long time ago. Sorry boys.”

  Danny fished in his pocket and pulled out the newspaper Xerox. Larkin gave him a puzzled look; Danny realized the old man might resent not being let in on the lead, but so be it. “Let me read this to you and see if it means anything.”

  He read through the article slowly, looking up every paragraph to see if John Dugan was awake or even still alive. His thin, fluttering eyelids were down but all he could do was hope the recitation was getting through.

  “Well, Mr. Dugan, does that ring a bell?” Nothing and they waited; it was a long shot, the hope a dying man could remember one crime of ten thousand from so many years past. John sighed and shrugged, stood slowly and patted the sheet in the general area of the old man’s bony
foot. The human touch seemed to restore the old man who waved them both closer. John seemed to want to draw Dugan back into talking and said, “So Ed, any of this make any sense to you at all?”

  Standing next to the head of the bed Danny could smell the stale, old smell of the man that was like dust and some bitter disinfectant mingled. He said, “That’s right, get my blood boiling and me on my death bed.”

  “Ah John, you’re going to be just fine in a few days, no worry,” Larkin said, smiling that great yellowed tooth smile.

  “Frig you, you rat bastard. Likely I’ll be dead in a few days. But what the hell, what difference does any of it make now? I’d like to have my youth back for five minutes and us both in a dark alley, me and this David Skelley you just read to me about. Former mister district attorney, former party boss, former weasel little fuck,” Dugan said. “Oh I remember him, all right. Had a face on him like the lookout on a gang bang.”

  He caught his breath, feeling his chest tighten, afraid to say anything to break the dying man’s sudden lucid conversation. But there suddenly seemed little chance that ex-cop John Dugan would expire very soon; he was on a roll and his voice got stronger as he talked about an enemy years dead but never forgotten.

  “What’s he to you, Mr. Dugan?” Danny asked.

  “Listen up will you boyo? The bastard went back to whatever pesthole he climbed out of back in ’64 or maybe it was 1965. I still remember the two-day drunk I had when I heard the news that he had died,” Dugan said. “I don’t remember this terrible crime you were talking about, this little girl. A shame, really a shame such things. But I remember the man, yes I do indeed.”

  He paused, seeming to gather his thoughts and breath, then went on. “Had a run in with him back in what, ’32, after I’d been on the force just a while? Those were hard times. Guy named Lawson, cousin to a good friend of mine, had a bar down on my beat at 17th and Guerrero, nice little corner thing it was, cool and dark. A man’s bar, honest drink and nobody talking unless you wanted. Didn’t let no jigs or spics in. Didn’t roust them, just let them know they’d be better off with their own kind. So it was nice and quiet, family place, you see what I mean?” He paused and when he started again his voice got stronger as he went on, the past like food to him.

  “So, this guy Lawson had some trouble with a license or something but he couldn’t get it cleared up and could I help? You know, good man from County Mayo, family almost. I tell him, ‘I’ll go downtown, show a little of the shield to the right people, get this all straightened out in no time at all.’ Those days you didn’t go see no pasty faced clerk, in this county city department or that. No, you went straight to the boys at the Democratic Committee HQ. They ran things. Kept everything on the up and up. It was nice and tidy back then. They helped you out with things like that, licenses and the sort. And you remembered them come election time. Nothing wrong there. Own taking care of own, don’t you know.

  “But this little prick Skelley had jumped like a rat from the DA’s office. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was involved in that shameful thing with the little girl. If not him, maybe his family. He had a brother, name of Seamus I believe, and he was always getting his fingers dirty. Kind of man that would hold your dick when you pissed if there was money in it. Bet you it was him and the other Skelley involved somehow. See it figures, if David Skelley got something in the DA’s office, he’d blackmail his own mother for another potato. Yes sir, that he would do.

  “So, with him in solid, if he had something on one of the high up mucky mucks, it figures he’d end up running things downtown, making money as some shyster lawyer for all the lace curtain Irish he could catch. So he’s getting to be rich, buying this building and building that better men then him had to fire sale because of the Depression. But that ain’t enough, of no, he’s got to get his hooks into the boys downtown. They let him in the door and the little thief stealing the pennies off dead men’s’ eyes,” he said, catching quick, shallow breaths that rasped out of him as quickly as he sucked them in. Finally calmed, he went on.

  “That Skelley, a little shanty fuck, grew up on Protrero Hill, nine of them I think, living on potato skins. He forgets all that, though, oh no, moves away from there and up on the hill, dragging all them shit assed brothers with him, out in the Marina or something. Forgets.

  “So now this rat hearted little bastard runs with the downtown boys. People out in the Mission and up the Hill living six to a room, fighting for jobs in the Depression and trying to keep their families fed but he doesn’t talk about that. No sir, he wants to know what’s in it for him and the boys. ‘What’s this guy done for me’ he says. Got my goat, him supposed to be helping people like Lawson and already forgetting where he come from and now wanting to put the bite on them.

  “Makes everybody call him Mister S., like his name isn’t good enough no more without him lording it up. But not me, no sir, not me. I just looked him in the eyes and I said, ‘what’s in it for you is I don’t slap you silly, you little fuck bastard.’ I always had a mouth me.” He shook his head, neck cords standing out from the strain of keeping that large head balanced. “Well, that did it, next thing it’s out of the squad and down rousting bums and whores South of the Slot. It’s all gone now, all built up and everything, but down there around Third and Howard? Lord, that was a hard place. Drunks and whores and blind pigs on every corner where you’d as likely get hit up the side of the head as not, things you couldn’t believe. I learned about them Skelleys the hard way. Kept my mouth shut after that, I did,” he said.

  Johnny chimed in, “What happened to Lawson?”

  “Oh, he lost the bar all right. No license and all they closed him down and the next thing you know, somebody else is running the joint. But I found out later the name on the deed, the man what owned it was a Skelley hanger on. Dirty little bastards, all of ‘em,” Dugan said. “Ah, he’s the man that did me in, all right. Like some dog pissing in the manger he was, soiling what he couldn’t take for himself so nobody else could have anything. Dead and good riddance, and the same to his son and his son’s son. Fuck them, now and forever.”

  It was quite a story, a fragment from a life lived in the tough Irish neighborhoods of a San Francisco long gone. Danny recalled the material he’d read on the Internet, the corruption of the 1920s and two-dollar whores and Chinatown opium dens. All watched over with benign neglect by San Francisco’s finest. How much did John Dugan know, how much had he done? And when John and the few others that were still around were gone, would it truly be lost, glossed over by historical revisionists.

  “So, he had a family, kids? Is his son still alive?”

  “Oh sure. His son’s living high on the hog, still out in this big house out in the Marina,” Dugan whispered. “Another shyster, they’re all the same. Bad seed to bad seed. There must be some Jew got in that woodpile, I guess. He took over when the old man died and did him one better. Mean as a snake they say and blood got thin by the time it got to him. Name’s John Skelley, I think. Fuck ‘em all, I say.”

  The last expletive was still hanging in the air, etched with the last bit of vitriol in a dying man’s liver when he closed his eyes and drifted off, a dry, quick snore buzzing in the darkened room.

  “That’s about all from him,” John said. “Best let him sleep some.”

  They walked down the bustling morning hallway, threading their way through meal carts and med carts and a huge lumbering linen basket on wheels being pushed by the small, jittery Filipino orderly he’d met the night before. The doors sighed open automatically, and they were outside in the bright morning, standing on the sidewalk. Danny said, “Well, what do you think?”

  Larkin stopped and looked at him, eyes shrewd again. He coughed and said, “I think you got to tell me about things like that newspaper story.”

  “Sorry. I just didn’t know if it meant anything. It’s got to be a million to one shot all this is somehow related, you know. But yeah, I should have told you,” he said. “It was just a hu
nch but I don’t know what it means. But did you hear what he said?”

  “About what? He said a lot for a guy dying.”

  “What he said everybody called this guy Mister S.”

  “So?”

  “So, that’s what was sticking in the back of my mind when I read this. David Skelley, Mister S. That’s what Chuck said the police said to him, in his letter to me. That the guy behind what happened to him was Mr. S. Where the hell is that,” he said, tearing the ledger out of the pack and rifling through the pages until he came to the neatly folded letter. He opened it and read the sentence, “Here, it says …but at the bottom of one page he had hand written a couple of lines scribbled in pencil said “don’t let S. see & cover up, he’ll figure out who G. and the girl are?” That made me start checking, because see, there is nobody whose name starts with ‘S’ in the book, so that had to be a real person. It made sense back then that somebody named S was trying to cover something up. And later, down here, he says, I can still remember it, the cop who rousted me said…you dummy up and keep your nose clean or it goes hard for the wife and kid. I was no genius but I didn’t have to be one to know what that meant so I had to get you out of there and stay low in the grass from then on. It wasn’t easy. Somebody really put the hard word out….”

  Heart pounding, hands shaking, he stared into old Larkin’s eyes, willing him to see the connection. “This is it, you see what this means, right? You know what this means? This is it.”

  Larkin rubbed his stubbled chin and grinned the great horse tooth grin. “Yeah, I see how it just might be. Still a long shot, but it sounds like you just got lucky, sonny. You were looking for a crime and instead maybe you found the criminal.”

  “I don’t know about that. The original Skelley’s dead and his son? Maybe he’s a pillar of the community.”

  “Not the way Dugan tells it,” Larkin pointed out.