Chasing Sam Spade

by Brian Lawson

  His side ached, his face felt puffy and somehow distant from his fingers. Doris had been very good about not pushing on the bruised places, not trying to turn or pull or roughhouse him into anything. But he had stiffened up later sleeping on the thin soft bed and now he felt a bone weary ache that seemed to fill his chest and back, his shoulders and arms.

  He thought about Denise and the dark Seattle nights with her for the first time since he’d hit town. Lying in the dark, in a strange woman’s bed, the same old sense isolation, of being slightly out of joint, settled in. It was a strange time to be thinking about anything, least of all another woman and the differences between the one left and the new one found.

  Stranger still, what people heard or wanted to hear.

  Before the bedding, after the meal, in the slow building anticipation of the night but before the questions began, he had told Doris everything he could remember about the incident that had finally pushed him toward San Francisco, about a bum named Charlie in a Seattle storm drain. She had sat there in the corner of the sofa, untouched glass of after-dinner bourbon on the table, hugging her knees in some delicious wonder and embraced the mystery, chased after the odd, extra normal heart of the thing, endorsing his interpretation of signs and portents; tell me more about the bum in the storm drain, she’d said, and he did:

  “I’d walked away from the campus. I didn’t really know what to do about Chuck, the letter, but I remember I had this feeling I had to do something, that time was flying by. I just sat in this deli, by the window, waiting when this shadow just floated across the tired glass. It was a bum, with the traditional bag and baggage shopping. Not a bum, really, you know, more like a caricature of a bum, swaddled in layers held together with twine, broken shoes flopping like an Emmett Kelly nightmare, a bum parody. He looked at me through the window, eyes expressionless. His face was a this matted tangle of beard and crusted wrinkles like some huge, knotted carving that had just burst out of the earth with small, dusty holes for eyes….”

  “It’s hard on the streets. Makes half of ‘em crazy and the other half look dead. Takes the best right out of everybody and leaves the rest,” she whispered, then reached out and laid a soft, gentle hand on his arm. “I’m sorry, I just forget and get gabbing. I’ll shut up and you talk.”

  “Don’t worry about it. It’s just, you know, he looked so beaten up by everything. His mouth opened and closed like a landed fish, a black, broken tunnel ringed with half a dozen cracked yellow teeth and rotted stumps. He was saying something, mumbling into the glass, words and spit ending up on the window. Then, he just stopped and turned, shuffling away, without gesture.”

  “For some reason I wanted to catch up with him, do something, anything. I was going to give him a few bucks, I don’t know. I ran outside and he was pushing his shopping and talking to himself. I remember pulling out a bill, a single, then a five and made ready to hand it off as I passed him, then held back at the last moment. I don’t think I could figure out how to break into the rambling monologue. So I just walked past, giving him a wide berth, and headed down the street, walking to the north, away from the campus and into a park.

  “I ended up on the edge of a concrete spillway that took the runoff from the hills and channeled it down and under a fire road and into the channel along the edge of the park. I remember feeling a vibration move up through the concrete, run up my legs and into my spine until my skull seemed to vibrate with it; but, before I could identify the vibration, it was gone. Then the first large drops of rain hit and the wind came in quick, cold puffs. The sky went suddenly dark, almost black.

  “I scrambled down the slope and ducked back into the storm drain just as a clap of thunder hit. It was like climbing into the wrong end of a giant megaphone, the sound seemed to be funneling down the gully, bouncing off the concrete, filling the culvert with a steady rumbling. A thin rivulet of water started somewhere under the curtain and bubbled down to me, so I sat with my back against one wall, feet propped up against the other, sort of a bridge for the water.

  He had paused, took another drink, and looked over at Doris. She was still listening, focused. He had gone on, “Then I hear this rough voice yelling, ‘Okay if I come on in, buddy?” and that bum pushed his shopping cart into the tunnel and came in shaking like a dog and spraying dirty water on the walls. He said something like, ‘Looks like a gully washer up in the hills. We should be heading for higher ground, that’s the rule, yessir, that’s the rule all right. Good advice, don’t you know, don’t hide in a storm drain when there’s a storm in the hills, no sir, don’t do that. Just a little rain down here but it must be dumping a lot up in the hills, don’t you know, wash your ass right out of here, yessir, yessir.’

  “He stank of something like rotten meat, or maybe spoiled milk and coughed with a deep, tearing wet sound I wanted to reach up and slap him very strongly between the shoulder blades but didn’t want to get that close. ‘Damn lucky, damn lucky. People been swept right out to sea in flash floods from hill rains, yessir, don’t you know.’

  “I guess that’s right,” I remember saying, or something like that while I was looking for some break in the rain. You know, I could feel my gorge rising just from the smell of him. He said his name was Charlie, good time Charlie. I was cold and wet, trapped in a storm drain during a thunderstorm with a madman who was probably crazy, maybe dangerous, and generated a stench that was probably taking the brass off my belt buckle.

  “Finally, I said, ‘Danny. Danny Boyle’ trying to figure out what was good manners, how far did the conversation have to go with a man who was sharing a storm drain with you, what was the etiquette of conversation in a drainage ditch? He said, ‘Seems like I saw you somewheres. Don’t know, though, things ain’t too clear no more’ and then he started rummaging through his layers of sackcloth and I know I was hoping to God he wasn’t going to fish out some bit of moldy bread or two-week old bit of meat to and offer it to me to seal the new friendship. Finally he came out with a blue handled toothbrush, the bristles worn down to stubs and began grinding at his blackened teeth. Between swipes with the toothbrush he said, ‘So, you from around here or what? Not me, no sir, no sir. Just passing through, on the bum you might say, yessir.’”

  “You know, Doris, I think we could have just sat there forever. He was obviously waiting, dark eyes still and watching, hand frozen up to his mouth, clutching the bright blue handled toothbrush in a tight fisted grip. If I hadn’t said anything, I’d still be there.”

  “Maybe that’s the way it was supposed to be. It was just fitting that he asked some of those questions and you had to answer.”

  “But this wasn’t the nature of truth and beauty or anything. It was just small talk, but it felt, I don’t know, bigger than it was. Important somehow.”

  “Anyway, it was as though it was some crazy surrealistic script, or something, because the next thing he said was ‘Hygiene is everything, yessir. Live on the streets and a fella has to take care of himself. Learned that working the docks in Frisco, up and down the coast but mostly there, don’t you know. Learned a fella has to take care of himself. Old Harry Bridges himself told me, he said, Charlie, man has to get his hands dirty to make a dollar but he’s got to clean up too. Yessir, yessir, old Red Harry knew a thing or two, don’t you know.’”

  When the brushing stopped he sticks the toothbrush in some hidden pocket, sits back on his haunches and starts this extended rap on San Francisco. ‘Great town, Frisco. Spent some time there in the late 50s. Worked out at Hunter’s Point, in the shipyards. Helluva town and the best looking broads anywhere. Walking up and down them hills gives them great legs. All legs and tight asses. Great town, Frisco. Best poon around, know what I mean’, sorry about that.”

  “I’ve heard worse,” Doris had said, smiling. “Finish your story, please.”

  “Then, just like that, the edge went out of his voice and he eyes seemed to lose their focus on some erotic memory of a place far away and long gone. He shook himself like a d
og again and changed the subject. He asked if I liked music, and started digging through the wet mound of cloth, plastic and metal heaped in the shopping cart. All I could think to do was stand up and edge a couple more paces uphill in case he came out of the pile with a knife. But instead he comes out with what looked like a battered LP jacket. ‘Here it is, yessir, yessir. This is my favorite, don’t you know’ and I could see it’s a beaten up Barbara Streisand album.”

  He had stopped for a moment and looked at Doris; she was a small, tight ball of attention, arms wrapped around her legs, leaning forward, caught up in the story.

  “So, what happened? Did you hear the music?”

  “Well, that’s what so strange. Sort of, sort of not. He just sat back down on his haunches, holding the record jacket and began the opening bars of Any Place I Hang My Hat is Home. He hummed what must have been every verse of the song, no words, just the melody, then segued directly into Right as the Rain and Down With Love before sitting back to almost bellow Who Will Buy? From Oliver.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I sat and listened. The rain was pelting down outside and a thin muddy stream running down the middle between us and this sad old man hummed in seemingly perfect recall and pitch the entire album. Finally he stopped.”

  “And? Come on, don’t stop now. This has to mean something. What’s the punch line?”

  “I don’t know, Doris,” he had said. “The rain was letting up and I finally tried to edge my way past the shopping cart without disturbing Charlie’s reverie. I remember digging into my pocket and pulling out a handful of bills, ones and fives and maybe a ten or something, I don’t know. And I just put them on top of the soggy mound in the cart. It had stopped raining, so I just walked out.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it. I was almost outside when I stopped and turned around. Charlie still sat on his haunches, one hand holding the dangling LP and the other gripping the front wheel of the shopping cart, rocking it slowly back in forth to some melody I couldn’t hear. And he said he had more, mostly girl singers, that he liked them best. Then he said, ‘thanks for the dough, Danny Boyle. Don’t forget the music, no sir, no sir.’”

  “And you left?”

  “And I left. I booked the flight down here that night,” he had said.

  “What do you think it meant?”

  “I don’t know, not for sure. Maybe it was just coincidence. Coincidence is coincidence. Things happen that way. The universe doesn’t sit around on hold, waiting for me to give it meaning. It’s random and we don’t really matter in that randomness,” he said. “Somebody told me once, everything isn’t always about me. Everything doesn’t have meaning.”

  She shook her head, her face lined with a strange concentration, or maybe focus. She said, “I think it’s a sign.”

  “Of failing capacity, maybe.”

  Again, the emphatic head shake. “No, I think it’s a sign. People don’t get miracles in their lives any more because they don’t expect them. There is a reason for just about everything, good and bad.”

  “And you believe that?”

  “Sure as I’m sitting here talking to you.”

  “Well, believe it or not, there’s even something in The Maltese Falcon about that. The Flintcraft story. It’s early in the book, chapter seven I think. Sam Spade is telling Brigid about a case he had once, a guy named Flintcraft. Spade said this guy was walking to work one day and was nearly killed by a falling girder. From a building under construction, you know? Okay, Spade said Flintcraft just took off after he got over the scare of it. Left his wife, job, kids, home in the suburbs, everything. Because I think he said something like ‘somebody had taken the lid off life and let him look at the works.”

  “My god, have you just memorized that book or what?”

  “Not quite, but I’ve read it a couple of times. Anyway, Flintcraft had found out there wasn’t any order to things, that it’s all blind chance. And he had tried to keep things orderly in a disorderly universe. He was out of step. There’s no order so he had to adjust to that new view of the world,” he said, feeling the words suddenly tumbling out in breathless rush that would have made his students snicker. “Get it? Once you brush up against that, things are different, you’re different. You can’t unknow something once you know it. You can pretend, you can hide from it, but you have to deal with it. I think that’s what’s happened to me.”

  “That’s exactly it. You could have run and hid out somewhere, but a sign’s a sign. You did the right thing. I believe that.”

  That had been that. She had wanted to believe in the extraordinary and her raw enthusiasm had brought it back, the feeling that something had happened, something out of the ordinary. Maybe it was a sign, as Doris insisted. Maybe it was just the celestial commonality; there were only so many names, so many people, so many things that could happen.

  He pivoted out of bed; the bare hardwood floor was a shock after the warm haven of her bed. The metal frame at the edge of the mattress was another surprise. He could make out a faint edging of city light around the bay windows on his side of the bed

  He fumbled around the bed, crouched and patting the outline of the mattress to find his way. There should be a small table on her side, ghostly in the clock radio illumination. And the ottoman was somewhere. He stumbled on her sweat suit and felt the soft thud on his shin as he hit the ottoman; they’d used it earlier, trying to find a way of coming together that didn’t push or press or twist the half dozen broken and bruised parts of his body, finally kicking it out of the and tumbling onto the couch. Now it was a landmine in the darkened room.

  He found the door, finally sitting down on the cold, hard seat, not wanting to risk the light and wake her up, wincing at the ache in his side that came each time he settled into a new position. Mystery was one thing; trying to go to the bathroom with broken ribs was quite another reality.

  CHAPTER TWELVE:

  Saturday Morning Runner

  San Francisco morning. Fog on Twin Peaks, fog in the Mission District. Fog everywhere. Looking down the block he could just make out the stop sign at the corner. Even the morning traffic noise was soft in the fog.

  “Driving must be a treat around here,” letting the rental car engine idle, waiting for heat to build. He remembered Mark Twain’s famous quote: the coldest winter he ever spent was a summer in San Francisco. He rubbed his hands together and pulled himself down into his jacket.

  “You cold, sweetie?” There was a faint puff of moisture in the still car air. “Doesn’t it get colder in Seattle? It snows up there, right?”

  He nodded. “Yeah, but this is different. This fog just sinks in. I can feel every inch of my clothes from the inside and everything is cold.”

  “It’s not usually this bad hereabouts. Out in the avenues, by the beach and all, it’s so thick you can’t see your own feet,” Doris said. “What you going to do today?”

  “Well, you get off at four, right?”

  “Yeah, but I told you, I can get a ride home. Saturday’s are slow, so there’s going to be more than one of us getting a short shift. You don’t need to come and fetch me.”

  “I thought I’d just walk around some more, maybe check out the Hunter Dulin building again.”

  “The what?”

  “Where Sam Spade had his office. You know, in the movie in the first scene you see out the window past Bogart and see the Bay Bridge and everything, but that wasn’t even there when Hammett wrote it. But maybe if I can get up there, maybe there’s something you can see.”

  “I thought you were going to pretty much give up on that old crime.”

  “Yeah. But the murders are a dead end and the old crime is all I’ve got to go on. It must be the reason Skelley is after me.”

  “Or maybe it’s nothing more than you went after him? Some people get real fierce defending their family. I’m not saying what he did to you was right, and all, but maybe it’s nothing more than that.”

  He shook
his head, trying to keep an eye on the gray gruel he was slowly oozing through while looking for some expression.

  “I don’t think so. People like him send their lawyers after you, not some thug. It’s too strong a response unless there’s something there,” he said.

  “Maybe you’re right,” she said, but she didn’t sound convinced. It had been easier for her to see meaning in a dipsomaniac’s storm drain ravings than to buy into Skelley’s more reasonable anger. “Anyway, I thought I’d drop you off, walk around, and go to John’s Grill for lunch. Just to see what Sam Spade saw.”

  “And Chuck?”

  “And Chuck, yeah. He has it in his diary, the ledger,” he said. “Then I’ll come and fetch you.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “Fetching you was the highlight of the trip so far,” he said and she giggled at him and ran a quick, light hand over his arm and down to rest on his thigh.

  “It was my pleasure, I assure you of that,” she said. Her voice was low, deep in her chest. He wanted it to be a morning voice, not the sound of some shadow passion, but she dropped the tone and the moment passed. “Ok, then, I’ll see you right out front at 4 sharp. Don’t be late, now, the traffic will go from crappy to unbearable if you show up even at 4:15.”

  The heater had finally taken the edge off the cold. “I stand warned,” he said, and pulled away from the curb.

  Downtown the weather was changing again, the fog beginning to thin into long streaks of dazzling morning blue sky and the sun was cutting long clean shadows across Union Square; he was getting used to the City now and the fog-driven weather. When the fog came in it was cold, damp, hushed; when the fog lifted, or burned off or there was a strange open blue spot hovering over this block or that neighborhood, the City filled with warm, golden light.

  He dropped Doris off on the other side of Powell and watched her dash across traffic to Sears, then headed up to Bush and drove downtown past the disappointing Burritt Alley and pulled into the Stockton Street Garage.