by Nathan Ward
This dispute clearly went back and forth, at least sometimes leaning toward yes. After hinting in several letters that she did not feel well, Jose left Cushman for an unexplained visit home to her family in Anaconda. Following his hospital discharge, on June 2, 1921, Hammett wrote her from Spokane to explain his own plans. He was healthier but nearly broke, and the “fat heads” in charge of Camp Kearney had offered “a ticket to Spokane or nothing.” He inquired innocently about the timetable for Jose’s “vacation,” and sometime later in June learned the truth behind her leaving her job. She was pregnant. The letter in which he discovered he would be a father is missing; nor does Jose seem to have saved his answer, in which he presumably offered to marry her. Perhaps she wasn’t proud of the circumstances around her marriage, or simply didn’t want to help her children figure out the math behind the proposal’s timing. “I haven’t any plans for the future,” he wrote her that June, “but I reckon things will work out in some manner.”3
From Spokane he went to Seattle for about a week, and then, if the Hammett-like narrator of his novel fragment Tulip is to be believed, he planned to visit San Francisco for perhaps two months “before going home to Baltimore.” But he would never move back, staying on in San Francisco, a wide-open port town whose hills ran spectacularly down to the sea and whose people were taking the recent Volstead Act in easy stride in its wine flats and speakeasies. The town was run, in the grateful words of the city’s most successful madame, by “municipal swashbucklers.” This was probably the most beautiful place Hammett had ever been, a “sunpainted” town when the mists burned away, where he could find weekly fights at the Mission Armory, and trolleys and cable cars made it easier to do without an automobile.
“You’re from San Francisco?” a character asks in one of his Op stories. “I remember the funny little streetcars, and the fog, and the salad right after the soup, and Coffee Dan’s,” a downstairs speakeasy that guests entered by a slide and could beat the tables with wooden mallets if they liked the show. There was nothing like that in Spokane, Tacoma, Seattle, or Butte.
Hammett was thoroughly charmed by San Francisco, despite its being a steep city on foot, prone to a fog that was “thin, clammy, and penetrant,” and not ideal for his recovery. But beyond its hillsides and mournful ferry horns it was home to a criminal class that was growing with Prohibition—rumrunners, racketeers, and high-living politicians—a range of characters irresistible to a man trained in the cultivation of crooks. The city’s profitably lenient mayor, “Sunny Jim” Rolph, was a far cry from the dour preachers Hammett encountered elsewhere around the country. The combination made the town heady and attractive, if he could find any money for a family and his lungs improved. With nothing saved and having been in the hospital again since his discharge from Camp Kearney, Hammett asked Jose to join him in San Francisco and start their life together.
She came out by train from Montana the first week of July, and for chaste appearances he put up his pregnant fiancée in a hotel off Union Square, the Golden West (now Hotel Union Square), while they waited to get married. Hammett himself stayed in rooms across Ellis Street from Jose’s hotel. The wedding ceremony occurred on July 7 at St. Mary’s Cathedral,** in the rectory rather than the nave because Hammett was not only undevout (“I haven’t any God except Josephine,” he’d written her) but also vague about whether he had been baptized (in fact, he had). Then the couple moved into a ten-year-old apartment building in the Tenderloin district, at 620 Eddy Street, the Crawford Apartments.
“I … brought my still-frayed lungs to San Francisco,” he remembered, “and returned to sleuthing.” In the Crawford Apartments, the couple would start their family life and Hammett, frayed lungs or not, would have a few more detecting adventures before he was invalided out.
* * *
* Like “Joe’s.”
** Some errors about Josephine’s family history were clearly introduced by Hammett himself while hurriedly filling out the marriage certificate, making the same mistake (“Josephine Anna” instead of “Annis”) he had made in his love letters and mixing up her father’s and mother’s origins.
Chapter VI
THE LAST CASE
“Jerry Young,” she repeated, as if to herself. “That’s a nice name. And you are the bootlegger?”
“Not the,” I corrected. “Just a. This is San Francisco.”
—“THE WHOSIS KID”
Up on the roof, where the couple liked to take pictures with a box camera and where Jose would later bring their young children to play in the sun, they could look out across the rooftops at the beautiful city, so much of it built new since the desolation of the great quake and fire in 1906. Out there Hammett would set many of his bank heists, blackmail killings, and wandering-daughter cases in a wide swath that curled around the couple’s new home on Eddy Street, a furnished three-room affair arranged along a skinny hallway. Their landlady bootlegged on the side, as many now did, and downstairs they heard patrons come and go in the night.
Four blocks away was the San Francisco public library, a handy walk when Hammett’s health behaved, an institution filled with the raw materials for his continuing education in German criminology or medieval history, animal husbandry or the novels of Henry James, as well as its racks of pulp adventure magazines, whose daring sleuths often drew his professional contempt. The main reading room, with its high windows and long wooden tables, was a place of sanctuary away from the detectives’ room or the happy noise of his family apartment.
For all its attractions, it is hard to imagine him getting around this hillside city he somehow learned to draw so surely, despite his bad lungs, climbing Telegraph Hill or walking over to the Latin Quarter or the ferry terminal and Embarcadero; riding the California cable line down into Chinatown, searching its alleys and “dark corners” behind the chop suey houses.
Eight long blocks from home was the James Flood Building, where he went to work again for Pinkerton’s part time in the fall of 1921. A slight improvement in his health had gotten his disability pension halved to forty dollars per month, five dollars short of the couple’s rent, and with a child due in October he returned to the familiar work of an operative, while petitioning the Veteran’s Bureau to send him to secretarial school to learn typing and shorthand for some kind of writing. The risks of returning to detecting were considerable: of the 914 TB patients discharged from the San Francisco Tuberculosis Hospital from 1918 to 1921, according to a report, some 247 of them died after attempting to “resume their normal occupations before they had gained sufficient strength.”1
The Flood Building was a twelve-story, sandstone-faced structure downtown on Market Street, beside the cable car turntable on Powell. An appealingly solid survivor of the earthquake and fire, its offices followed a central oblong courtyard. In room 314, Pinkerton’s made an exotic presence among the building’s dental and medical tenants. If you walk the Flood’s marble hallways today, long after the agency’s departure, the clatter of stone underfoot and the sunlit frosted glass of each office doorway evoke films from the Sam Spade era. Hammett’s time as a working sleuth in San Francisco may have been no more than six or eight vivid months, due to the cycles of his illness, but in these halls he formed our idea of what a private detective’s office should look like.
The branch manager was Phil Geauque (pronounced JEE-ack), Hammett’s final boss as a Pinkerton. Unlike “Jimmy Wright,” the name Hammett gave for his first supervisor in Baltimore, Geauque undeniably existed, turning up in the press from time to time and going on to a later career with the U.S. Secret Service.* Short, fortyish, balding, and a heavy smoker, he was not a desk type but kept a hand in working the field. Physically he resembled Hammett’s Continental Op and had many experiences worthy of detective fiction: The con man who staged a car wreck, and then faked amnesia in order to hide from police inside a Stockton asylum. Or the Yellow Cab cashier who filched twenty-two thousand dollars in Chicago, and then increased it gambling his way to the El Paso boa
rdinghouse where he was arrested. Or the Menlo Park family taken hostage by liquor thieves stealing dozens of cases of the estate’s collection; a neighbor was finally alerted when a nanny tossed a note from an upstairs window.2
Discussing these days in later years, Hammett packed an impressive caseload into his months as an operative in San Francisco. Some of the jobs, such as working the docks for the strikebreaker Blackjack Jerome or climbing a smokestack to search for missing gold, seem physically ambitious feats for a tubercular man whose weight fluctuated during this time between 132 and 126 pounds,3 nearly 20 pounds below his healthy weight. He was especially too weak for this kind of work on first arrival in San Francisco, when the army judged him 100 percent disabled.
But the versions he spun for interviewers bore the hallmarks of his splendid storytelling, what the Ellery Queen writer Frederic Dannay called the “skin of realism,” which helped sell them. His claim of going undercover in the San Francisco jail, emerging only with a case of lice, may or may not be true, but it certainly has a grubby plausibility; his story of being hospitalized for months as a Pinkerton befriending a suspect in an adjoining bed, however, is less likely than that he was simply bedridden for one of his TB attacks. But even the half-experiences he had had as a Pinkerton he later learned to parlay vividly in stories and interviews, a method described best by his own Continental Op in “Zigzags of Treachery”:
I talked about myself with the evasiveness that would have been natural to a crook in my situation; and made one or two carefully planned slips that would lead him to believe that I had been tied up with the “Jimmy the Riveter” hold-up mob, most of whom were doing long hitches at Walla Walla then.
The Jimmy the Riveter mob was in fact apprehended by the Pinkertons near Seattle in the fall of 1921, during Hammett’s last months on the job. It’s possible he was even there, despite his bad health and the impending birth of his first child, Mary, who arrived on October 16, since it made enough of an impression on him that he later traced two of his characters to the gang (Babe McCloor and Hymie the Riveter). But he didn’t have to be a witness to exploit an incident for his writing, as he did with his account of staking out the Minnesota jewel thief Gloomy Gus Schaefer in Vallejo, California in 1921: “While trying to peer into the upper story of a roadhouse in northern California one night—and the man I was looking for was in Seattle at the time—part of the porch roof crumbled under me and I fell, spraining an ankle. The proprietor of the roadhouse gave me water to bathe it in.”
He’s not claiming he caught him, just that he watched his house, which fell down. That’s good storytelling, whether it happened or not. The anecdotes he fed to reporters can feel like “carefully planned slips” by the ex-detective. “This is what you wanted to hear, wasn’t it?” he asked the Brooklyn Eagle’s Helen Herbert Foster in 1929. “All reporters want to hear such experiences from detectives. And these are authentic enough, goodness knows.”
* * *
By the early 1970s, sadly little proof remained of Hammett’s employment as a Pinkerton beyond the word of his family. David Fechheimer would change that. While working out of the very same Pinkerton branch, he had become increasingly interested in the history of the man whom no one at the businesslike Flood Building seemed to remember.
When people meet Fechheimer today, his stealthy profession doesn’t seem at first to jibe with his trim white beard and rimless glasses, which might suggest a professor of American studies, perhaps, or constitutional law, instead of a detective. When he arrived in San Francisco in the early sixties, it was still “Hammett’s city. Men wore hats, everybody drank.”4 But by 1965 the city was entering its countercultural bloom; Fechheimer was a “budding flower child” and poet on his way to a literature degree at San Francisco State when he encountered the books that got him off his academic track.
“We all lived hand-to-mouth then,” he says, and all were looking for work; after admiring the collection of Hammett’s other jobs listed on the backs of his novels, Fechheimer called up Pinkerton’s San Francisco branch and began his own detecting career where the writer had finished his. He learned all the skills of sleuthing and, later, under his longtime boss Hal Lipset, quite a few tricks unknown to Hammett, before eventually going into practice himself as a San Francisco private eye. Like Hammett, he began to learn the city around him right down to its bones.
As an investigator, Fechheimer noticed things: While waiting for the M car on the traffic island opposite the House of Lucky Wedding Rings, he met Albert Samuels Jr. who was out sweeping the sidewalk and whose father had once employed Hammett to write jewelry ads. Fechheimer got his hair cut by an old barber named Bill Sibilia, who remembered trimming Hammett’s graying pompadour and that he was a good tipper. Fechheimer also located a woman Hammett had written poems for in San Francisco; she talked to him in whispers outside her house, having never told her husband about her admirer. He next found and interviewed Mrs. Hammett, long presumed dead by scholars at the time. Then, hoping to find any of his hero’s old colleagues, he used the same method that had drawn Hammett into the agency to begin with: he placed a simple newspaper ad.
Two old men answered his query: Jack Knight had been a well-traveled Pinkerton in the early twenties who never worked directly with Hammett but who knew of his reputation as one of the “fellows with particular ability.” The other, Phil Haultain, said he had learned to shadow from “Sam” Hammett himself, and was his partner in the last months of Hammett’s career as an operative. Fechheimer went to meet Haultain in the office of his conveyor belt company in Emeryville, California, in early September 1975. Their conversation remains the only eyewitness testimony about Hammett as a detective.5
Shaking the old operative’s hand, Fechheimer must have felt, in the words of A. J. Liebling, “joined onto the past like a man’s arm to his shoulder.” Haultain, at eighty years old, looked paunchy but stockily powerful at his desk. He wore a buff-colored Stetson, dark plaid shirt, flower-pattern tie, and thin white mustache. “I was telling my wife today,” he said, “Sam Hammett made me a good shadow man.” Haultain recalled his Pinkerton mentor as “tall, thin, smart as a steel trap. He knew his business. He wasn’t a drinking man in those days, not that I know of. But he used to smoke like hell. Rolled his own cigarettes.” Their supervisor, Phil Geauque, was “an exciting guy to work for. He was sharp, and I think that’s probably why he liked Hammett.”**
According to Haultain, Hammett schooled him in shadowing that fall of 1921, when Pinkerton’s was hired by the defense in the first manslaughter trial of the film comedian Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle. The two men were tailing a couple from Los Angeles who were likely witnesses for the prosecution, and Haultain remembered “we circled round them, and even with this hat [of mine], they didn’t get wise. He was a wonderful investigator.”
They were tailing potential witnesses because of what had happened at the St. Francis Hotel on September 5, 1921, when a wild Labor Day party took over three suites on that hotel’s top floor. The partiers had traveled from Hollywood to honor the star of The Butcher Boy, Crazy to Marry, and Good Night, Nurse, Fatty Arbuckle, who had recently signed a new million-dollar studio contract. The Arbuckle group had come to the wide-open “City That Knows How” for a bash featuring plenty of bathtub gin, but the party, reported in newspapers to have been like a Roman orgy, turned as disastrous as it was debauched, leaving one woman dead and Arbuckle accused.
Far from the funny man the public knew, Arbuckle suddenly became a rapacious symbol of dark Hollywood; in forcing himself on a young actress and party girl named Virginia Rappe, he had, prosecutors claimed, crushed her beneath his 260-pound body and ruptured her bladder. (She died several days later, in another room of the hotel.) Other theories explaining Rappe’s death—that she was suffering from the clap or was injured from a recent illegal abortion—could not compete with the more sensational charges made by an alleged witness, an older woman who swore she had seen Arbuckle emerge from the crime scene room in hi
s pajamas; her background as a madam and extortionist kept her off the stand but not out of the papers.
If he had appeared in a Hammett story, Arbuckle would probably have been villainous, too, like a number of the writer’s sinister hefty characters, culminating in The Maltese Falcon’s Casper Gutman, with his “bulbous pink cheeks and chins and neck” and “great soft egg of a belly … and pendant cones for arms and legs.” Hammett felt instead that Arbuckle had been the victim of a “frame-up” by a careerist district attorney and a fervent gang of newsmen. As he set it down in an unpublished piece:
I sat in the lobby of the Plaza, in San Francisco. It was the day before the opening of the second absurd attempt to convict Roscoe Arbuckle of something. He came into the lobby. He looked at me and I at him. His eyes were the eyes of a man who expected to be regarded as a monster but was not yet inured to it. I made my gaze as contemptuous as I could. He glared at me, went on to the elevator still glaring. It was amusing. I was working for his attorneys at the time, gathering information for his defence.6
It is unlikely that Hammett headed up the Arbuckle investigation, as some writers have argued, but the case was big enough for Pinkerton’s that most hands would have been pressed into service. Even though his wife did not recall his working on it, if Hammett was well enough to get out of bed, then, based on Haultain’s remembrance, it is believable that he was sufficiently involved to have knowledge of the case, if not enough to brag about it to his wife. But by December 1921, days after the first Arbuckle trial ended with a 10–2 vote to acquit,† Hammett’s TB was back; the army restored his 100 percent disability. This latest crash could have been brought on by all the shadow work, the smoking, climbing, and the cold morning fog.