Chasing Sam Spade

by Brian Lawson

  “What about my father? He died. Maybe he fell, maybe somebody pushed him down some stairs. An old man. Didn’t take much.”

  “A tragedy, such things happen, however, in the city. You have my condolences.”

  “Fuck you and fuck your condolences,” he said, and he could feel the anger building. The fear and the anger and the gnawing fatigue he could feel right down to the bone. “What about that?”

  “As I said, I know nothing. I am only here as a counsel. If you don’t want that kind of advice, please say so and I’ll leave. In fact, I think our conversation is over.”

  Danny could see his eyes small, bright, in the fading light; it was like being watched by a dangerous, thoughtful animal.

  “That’s all of it. Nothing more, but certainly nothing less. And you will ignore that at your peril. In fact, the best thing you could do would be to go back to Seattle and never come back to this city, or mention my family’s name. In fact, as a gesture of good will, to help a weary traveler, I’ve taken the liberty of procuring an airline ticket, one way, here to Seattle, tonight at 8:40.”

  Danny stared at him and Skelley stared back. Now, now it comes. “Let Larkin go, unharmed, and we’ll see.”

  He shook his head, “I know nothing about your friend, as I told you. But, hypothetically? My counsel would be that in a situation such as this, you would likely have to meet the terms in advance. Say, return to your home in Seattle and, after a quiet period....”

  “No, you’re not going to get away with this. I’ll stop you. Let him go, now, and you have my word I’ll drop all this.”

  “Don’t bargain with me,” he said so softly Danny had to lean forward just to make sure he caught it all. Suddenly Skelley stepped forward, so quickly Danny didn’t have time to move and his small, hard hand balled up in Danny’s lapel; Danny’s head jerked forward and sideways until Skelley’s lips were brushing Danny’s ear.

  “If you’re wired, nobody hears this, you little fuck. This is the end of the line. My people will be at the airport. You get on that fucking plane or I kill Larkin and your mother. And everybody else that matters to you,” he said, his voice now an icy hiss in Danny’s ear. “I will salt the fucking earth you grew out of you little cock sucker. Do you understand me now, is this sinking in?”

  Just as suddenly Skelley let go and shoved him back.

  Danny stammered, “It’s that, then?”

  “My god, you sound like some Hammett character. I don’t know what you’re talking about. My advice stands. Take it, or not, the choice is yours,” and he turned and stalked off, gray suited in the gray afternoon fog, and Danny stood alone, cold and damp, his heart hammering. In the far end of the lot he saw the dim lights of the Porsche come on; then the car was gone, red lights melting into the fog.

  Danny stood in the fog. Slowly a smile spread on his face until he was grinning from ear to ear. He reached in his pocket, pulled out his phone and called Johnny Larkin. Waiting for the pickup, he reached in his jacket pocket and pulled out his Video PenTek and clicked it a couple of times until Johnny picked up.

  “Yeah, got it all...yeah, you were right, they all trip over their ego...ah huh, all of it, digital immortality...we’ll download it tonight... no Facebook, some tweets, stuff like that...yeah, he never got past the phone... right, right, no, he was thinking audio and we were thinking video...”and he started laughing out loud then, clicking off his Video PenTek camera pen, sealing Skelley’s fate in two gigabytes of solid state posterity.

  * * *

  Danny looked around the room at the Cow Hollow Inn on Lombard. It was worth the $90 to have some place to sit and look out at the City; Telegraph and Nob Hills to the east, the Marina District’s jumble of buildings and streets and colors like some orderly version of a 19th Century Paris rooftop painting. The lights were coming on, cutting through the night fog.

  He still felt Skelley’s icy breath in his ear, the hissed threat: soften them up, set them up, then close. He had played Danny like the old time litigator and back room politician he was and now Danny was on the edge, out of options and feeling like the room was slowly shrinking to the size of a refrigerator crate. And old John Larkin was still a prisoner of a man Danny now knew was capable of anything.

  He dialed Ben’s home phone. Hearing his voice was like tonic, a warm, comforting release moved through him.

  “Ben, I’m so glad to hear your voice, man, I can’t tell you...no, well yes, something’s wrong, I had a meeting with Skelley,” and he waited for his friend’s quick surge of questions to pass, waited for the time to tell him how far down the rabbit hole he was preparing to drop.

  “Listen, Ben, he kidnapped Johnny, snatched him right off the street...no, I’m not kidding, I saw it. I was on my way to meet him and they must have been following him, or maybe me, I don’t know, but this guy jumped out of a blue van and just took him...no, goddamn it listen, they kidnapped him...no, no I’m not coming home until I get him out of this, I owe him....

  He waited for another pause in Ben’s questions, waited until his voice had calmed down, to tell him. He said, “No, I know it was him, I met with Skelley...he didn’t admit it, no, he’s too smart for that...no, this isn’t a game, he isn’t playing around, he said he’d kill me...yes, kill me, and mom, and Johnny...Ben, you’re not listening, man, this guy is stone crazy, he even said he’d salt the fucking earth...yes, exact words, I don’t have that good an imagination...yeah, like father like son, sure, why not....”

  He paused, listing for a moment, then continued. “No, everything was going along fine, I did not fucking provoke him, I didn’t yell, he didn’t yell...no, he says there is no crime, just that Chuck was screwing up some real estate deals, it was all about money, that’s all, not truth and justice and the American way, just capitalism at its finest...yeah, they ruined him just so he wouldn’t screw up their deal...I’m not kidding, I can’t make this stuff up, I told you he’s crazy, his old man must have been crazy, I don’t know...no, we were just talking about getting Johnny back and he went nuts on me....

  “Ben, listen, I’ve got to do something...listen, please, I have to get Johnny back but I can’t tell you how...no, no, I can’t...I tell you and something happens and you’re an accomplice...no, don’t worry, I’m not going to hurt anybody but I’m going to play his game...no, it’s too late for that, this is it...listen Ben, just be around, okay, I’ve got to go, bye....”

  He hung up and sat down on the bed slowly. The hard, cold core of the plan already forming. It was time for payback, for all of it. “Ben you really don’t want to know. I’m doing you a favor, man.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN:

  Danny Makes a New Friend

  It was easier since the man had stopped screaming. Danny wheeled the anonymous dark blue Malibu into another in an endless chain of interchangeable City garages, picked a slot on the nearly deserted top floor away from the only other car and killed the engine.

  His eyes were gritty from driving around the City all night since picking him up, and his cracked and bruised ribs had stiffened into a steady, pulsing ache.

  “I’ll get you,” the voice rasped from the back seat.

  “Sure, whatever,” Danny said, popping open the top of a two liter sport bottle of Alhambra water. He shot a long stream of tepid water into his mouth, then another, before turning to Patrick and holding up the half-full bottle. “Open up.”

  “Go to hell.”

  “Suit yourself,” Danny said, snapping the pop-top closed and dropping the bottle on the passenger seat. “You want something to eat?” He glanced at the portable larder on the seat: two one-pound resealable bags of trail mix, a large Safeway plastic bag with bananas, apples and grapes lumped together, a half dozen protein bars, a handful of candy bars and another four large bottles of water. He wasn’t hungry but the sudden, unbidden thought of a Bloody Mary and order of Eggs Benedict at The Metro Grill made his mouth water. No, stick with the high energy, low bulk foods until this was over.

&
nbsp; “I want to get out of this piece of shit car,” the man growled. His voice had gotten progressively more hoarse since the early morning screaming jag that had left him weeping in the back seat and Danny seriously thinking about killing somebody.

  It had been surprisingly easy to pick up Patrick Skelley.

  Maybe he should just call it what it was: kidnapping. Yeah, that was it, call a spade a spade, and he smiled to himself in the rearview mirror: Yeah, okay tough guy, what would Sam Spade do now? Handcuff Skelley to a chair in some seedy Tenderloin hotel room, maybe? Slap him around, the dirty brown bloodstain splatter on the kid’s sweat-soaked athletic tee shirt a testimony to hard men making tough choices. The stale, rank air heavy in the bare room, light and shadows playing hide and seek across the dirty cracked linoleum every time a tired puff of air from the vertical grave of an air shaft twisted the naked 50-watt light bulb dangling from the ceiling by the frayed cloth cord. Better still, tie his hands with duct tape, throw him in the back seat of a rented car and spend the evening driving around the city with the nearly hysterical man screaming curses at the back of his head.

  He pulled the rearview mirror down to look at his back seat captive, catching a glimpse of himself in the mirror: eyes heavy with fatigue, dark smudges underneath and bloodshot, stubbled chin and what looked like the start of an angry pimple on the side of his nose.

  “What do you want?”

  “Jesus Chris, Patrick, are you that dense? Don’t your remember the conversation we had with your dad? It’s simple. I want John Larkin free.”

  “I don’t have nothing to do with that, I told you that,” he mumbled thickly. “It’s his business. I don’t have anything to do with it.”

  That seemed likely. Danny had listened to his pitiful, sobbing pleas to his father on the cellular last night, followed by the nighttime drive around the sleeping city and into the gray, fog thick morning, with Patrick whining, begging, threatening or simply blubbering like a child; now he was convinced the Skelley gene pool had gotten remarkably shallow in only three generations. The time spent in close quarters with Patrick Skelley was all the proof Danny ever needed that son Patrick might have a future in politics as the old man planned but he was probably best kept out of the family business where he might annoy serious people.

  “Are you really going to run for office?”

  “So I’m told,” he muttered. “How about the water?”

  Danny nodded, already numbed to Patrick’s capricious refusal to eat or drink or talk, followed by the next moment’s whining demands. He popped open the bottle and turned to squeeze a stream into the open maw in the back seat. He squeezed, waited while Skelley swallowed, then squeezed another mouthful. “Enough?”

  “Yeah. I need to take a piss.”

  “We’ve been through this, okay? Hold it.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Self control is kind of tough for you, isn’t it Patrick?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Yeah, good response.” Soon he was going to have to deal with it: either tell Patrick to go in his pants and put up with the stench and complaining, or figure out how to get a man with his hands tied in and out of a public restroom. Neither alternative was very appealing, and it was just one more in a long line of issues he’d never thought of before; what did kidnappers of the past do? “I’ll think about it. Just hold it for a while.”

  “How long?”

  “Christ sake, just wait,” he said, looking around the garage. Nothing up here on the roof, certainly, probably a public restroom of some kind on the ground floor, probably near the cashier’s cages, near the most heavily trafficked part of the garage. It wouldn’t do. Maybe just wait until it was quiet, maybe mid morning after all the shoppers rushed through, and let him piss on the nearest tire. That meant either untying his hands or giving him a hand; Danny was in no mood to act out a scene from Crying Game with the uncooperative Patrick.

  “How long you going to keep me tied up like this?” It was the question he’d heard in one of several variations, in as many tones and volume levels, throughout their twelve hours in the car. He was as tired of answering as he hoped Skelley was in asking.

  “Until your father makes up his mind to free Larkin. Simple, quid pro quo. You for the old man. Should be a simple trade for a dad to make,” he said, realizing it was probably both simple in his personal calculus and difficult in acceptance for the tough, shrewd old lawyer. “All he has to do is call and tell me when and where to pick him up and you’re free.”

  “Shit, we’ll be here until I drown in my own piss,” he grunted. “You got it wrong. He won’t do it unless he wants to do it. Only for him. Not for me, or you or that old fuck. Just him, always about him.”

  “Yeah, good genes,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Never mind,” he said, watching the man’s face twist with bitter memories Danny couldn’t follow. For a moment it didn’t even look like him. Granted, he didn’t look his best: puffy, second day’s thick, dark growth on his sagging jowls, bloodshot eyes, formal tuxedo shirt stained and wrinkled, black tie hanging limply around his neck. And he smelled, a rank, stale stink that gagged Danny with the windows rolled up.

  “Look, at least let me take the jacket off. This is an Armani tux, man. For Christ’s sake, five grand and you’re ruining it,” he snarled.

  “It’ll press out,” he said, but he didn’t know that. Not many people he knew could state from personal experience what happened to a soiled Armani jacket. Maybe they were too expensive to press out; maybe they were never this wrinkled for most people. He pushed the driver’s door open and got out.

  “Where you going?”

  “Relax, will you,” he said and slammed the door on the man’s bellow of anger, or fear or whatever that was driving him at that moment. The damp cold cut at him and he felt the chill run over his hands and face immediately. At least he was away from the murky smell of impounded exhaust and stale oil and damp concrete he had come to recognize over the past few days hiding in the bowels of garages around the City; and it was a relief after several hours in the car just to be outside despite the wet morning cold.

  For a moment he wasn’t sure what day it was. “Christ, it’s Saturday.” His voice was a hollow echo running across the nearly deserted garage roof.

  Danny stretched, trying a little abbreviated tai chi to loosen up, feeling the ache lessen in his back and sides as he ran through several positions: “parting the wild horse’s mane” and “brush knee and push” and his favorite “step back and repulse the monkey.” He could hear a dull thumping from the car and it was rocking on its springs as Patrick threw himself against the door.

  It was a quarter to seven in the morning; held past the dawn by the dim morning, the sickly orange vapor streetlights were clicking off. He walked over to the wall around the rooftop. Traffic was thin five floors down on Lombard, a choked arterial that siphoned traffic off the Golden Gate during the workweek; this early on Saturday most of the movement was heading north, toward the bridge and out of the City. The concrete was cold, slimy and he shoved his hands deep into his jeans pockets and stared away, up toward the eastern skyline that was spectacular even with just the thin, gray morning light behind it.

  “What’s not to love about this place?” he said aloud. It was a city made for vistas, glorious at a distance, hills and apartments and towers sketched against the sky from the dim wraith of Alcatraz in the hidden Bay to his left, up and around on his right to Russian and Nob Hills still hidden in the morning. Closer, the line of a wonderful rococo fretwork along a building cornice next door was just forming out of first light and wisps of fog above the sudden green of a postage stamp backyard erupting beside a dark cut of an oily alley. You either looked at San Francisco from a rooftop telescope, or with a magnifying glass; at the middle distance where the people lived it was gray and bleak and tired beyond anything he would have imagined.

  He hunched against the cold and walked toward the blue car. Now
what? His bluff to hurt young Skelley if the old man didn’t play ball and release Larkin had been called. He had wanted to throw a scare into the old man by threatening his son but the old man hadn’t cracked. Instead, the older Skelley had sounded almost jolly on the phone last night and cheerfully told Danny he didn’t have the balls, that he was bluffing. Somehow Skelley knew Danny was angry and scared, that the beating and the rage and the need had formed into a small, hard knot in his guts, but even that wasn’t enough to push him into actually hurting the kid. Skelley knew he wasn’t going to do anything to Patrick, that all he had to do was wait while Danny’s certain fear that Skelley could, and would, hurt Johnny if needed to break Danny’s resolve: you don’t have it, Mr. Boyle, you don’t...simply send my son home and go away...then, and only then, will your friend be released...and remember, if you ever say anything, write anything, mention my family again, we can take Mr. Larkin again, and hurt him, Mr. Boyle, hurt him very badly indeed.

  Everything Danny had tried had come up short; he had gotten a lot closer than Chuck ever had and he had a part of the truth, but that was as far as it was going to go. “What am I doing, kidnapping,” he snarled, kicking at the car tire. He had followed Chuck’s mania to the truth and now thrown everything away in some terribly ill conceived and unsuccessful ploy, plus he’d given Skelley a weapon to use against him at whim. History had come full circle. “Shit, I’ve turned into Chuck.”

  There was a sour taste in his mouth he couldn’t spit out and he felt the days come crashing down like a weight. It was over and it didn’t feel like anger, or fear; it didn’t feel like anything but a deep, tired ache that filled him so even sliding back into the car was unbearably difficult. He did it in the hope that one last try, one more call might finally end it.

  He opened the driver’s door, hit the power release and opened the back door. “Get out.”