Hammett Read online

  Hammett

  Joe Gores

  Joe Gores

  Hammett

  A good many things go around in the dark besides Santa Claus.

  — Herbert Hoover

  1

  Samuel Dashiell Hammett guided Goodie Osborne out of Loew’s ornate Warfield through the jostling midweek crowds.

  ‘Oh, Sam!’ she exclaimed. ‘I just love Billy Dove!’ She had watched the whole of Yellow Lily enthusiastically, her baby-blue eyes even wider than usual.

  Hammett grinned. He wore a maroon worsted Shaker coat over a wool shirt, an ideal outfit for the chilly San Francisco May evening. ‘You hungry?’

  ‘I’m always hungry.’

  She tucked her arm in his. They made quite a pair: Hammett a lean six feet two, Goodie a petite blonde who came just to his shoulder. They crossed the foot of Powell Street, past gripmen and passengers heaving one of the rattly little cable cars around on the turntable for its next trip up Nob Hill.

  Hammett’s thoughts were a long way from food. He was thinking about a one-time carnival showman named Felix Weber and his run-down rooming house. Weber was the trouble, all right. Weber and his damned Primrose Hotel.

  Goodie was looking wistfully across Powell at the all-night Pig’n Whistle when Hammett said, ‘You ever been to Coffee Dan’s?’

  ‘Oh, Sam!’ She danced almost sideways for a few quick steps, skipping to keep up with his forgetfully long strides. Her eyes were alight with excitement. ‘ Could we?’

  ‘Coffee Dan’s it is.’

  ‘Do gamblers really hang around there, and does the man on the piano really sing dirty-’

  ‘Just hymns,’ Hammett assured her seriously.

  They went uphill on Powell under the marquee of the sprawling at-night Owl Drug Store. Across the street, Bernstein’s jammed itself out over the sidewalk like the prow of a fifteenth-century Spanish treasure galleon.

  ‘Can I ride the chute?’

  ‘Ladies don’t. Too much stocking shows.’

  Pure flapper, Goodie Osborne, from her cheap green felt cloche hat to the hem of her green jersey sports skirt a daring half-inch above her knees.

  ‘Then you ride the chute,’ she persisted.

  ‘I’m too old. Pieces tend to fall off when you get-’

  ‘Thirty-three isn’t old.’

  ‘Thirty-four on Sunday.’

  Her face fell. ‘Three days from now? Sam, you didn’t tell me! I don’t have a present…’

  ‘Just get me a rocking chair.’

  Hammett turned in at a narrow basement stairwell on the corner of O’Farrell.

  ‘Sedately, sweetheart,’ he warned the glint in her eyes.

  She made a moue with her small soft carmined mouth. ‘In Coffee Dan’s, who’d care?’

  But she didn’t try to jump on the shiny chute that flanked the stairs to curve down out of sight below street level. Despite her short skirt and bobbed hair and rolled silk stockings, she was still really just a twenty-year-old small-town girl from Crockett who earned twenty-three dollars a week as receptionist for a credit doctor on Market Street.

  The din, mingled with smoke and the odors of good food and bad booze, rose around them like cloudy water as they descended the narrow wooden stairs. A rinky-tink piano was bashing out ‘Ja-Da’ in time with a heavy baritone almost lost in the thunder of mallets on wooden tabletops.

  That’s a funny little bit of melody It’s so soothing and appealing to me,

  It goes Ja-Da, Ja-Da,

  Ja-Da, Ja-Da, Jing, Jing, Jing.

  At the foot of the stairs, Goodie unconsciously posed for the room’s male eyes as she looked about. How fast they learned to use it, Hammett thought with open delight — even the Goodies of this world.

  He leaned down to shout over the babble of voices and rattle of crockery. ‘They don’t seat you at Coffee Dan’s, angel.’

  ‘ What? ’

  The sleeve-gartered, derby-hatted man at the piano, who was champing a dead cigar despite his singing, finished in a shower of tinkling notes. The mallets thundered out applause.

  Hammett leaned close. ‘They don’t seat you, you’re lucky if someone doesn’t knock you down trying to beat you to a — there’s one! ’

  He grabbed Goodie’s hand and dragged her across the sawdust-strewn floor. They plopped down facing each other across a plank table, a relic of the wooden wharves of prequake days. It was deeply carved with intertwined initials, names, dates, and nicknames.

  Goodie tried to pick out gamblers and bootleggers from the crowd. There’d sure never been anything like this back in Crockett, a little sugar town under the new Carquinez Strait bridge up by Vallejo.

  Or, she thought, looking across the table, anyone like Hammett. She had met him three weeks before, when she’d been moving into the apartment next to his on Post Street after leaving the rooming house on Geary and Gough where she’d lived while attending the St Francis Technical School for Girls.

  The writer had removed his snap-brim gray Wilton; his fine, prematurely gray hair contrasted sharply with his trim black mustache and expressive black brows. His eyes were penetrating and direct and clear. He weighed only one hundred and forty-five pounds, but there was a stubborn whipcord strength to this man.

  Goodie leaned across the table to shout, ‘Is it always like this?’

  ‘Sometimes it’s busy,’ he yelled back.

  A heavyset, sweating waiter appeared, wearing old-fashioned spats and a food-stained black cutaway over his dingy apron. He balanced a tray of thick white ceramic mugs on one hand with practiced ease. The piano was working on ‘Where’d You Get Those Eyes?’ Two steaming mugs thudded down to slop java across the planks. The waiter beamed fondly at Hammett from an ugly, battered face.

  ‘So?’

  ‘Ham and eggs?’ When Goodie nodded, Hammett added, ‘Looking at us.’

  ‘Punk and plaster?’

  ‘You bet.’

  The waiter picked up his tray and was gone.

  ‘What’s punk and plaster?’

  ‘Bread and butter. Con talk. He pulled a little time at Q once because of me.’

  A wild-haired youth wearing a loud check suit and a pair of the new square-toed sport oxfords came down the chute to whoosh out across the floor. His arms flailed wildly as his feet went out from under him and he lit on the seat of his pants in the sawdust. The mallets thundered their appreciation.

  ‘See what would have happened if you’d come down the chute?’

  He shook a Camel partway from his pack, and extended it.

  After a quick glance around to see that other women were smoking, Goodie took it. Hammett lit them both up and waved out the match.

  ‘Sam, why don’t the police…’

  ‘Coffee Dan’s pays plenty for protection.’

  She watched his hard, angular, mobile countenance as he drifted smoke into the general haze. He could sometimes seem as insubstantial as smoke himself.

  ‘Penny?’ she asked almost timidly.

  He merely shook his head. The tough-faced waiter arrived with their ham and eggs. Hammett ate halfway through his before losing interest and fishing out another of his cigarettes.

  ‘Writing problem I don’t know how to solve,’ he said unexpectedly. He checked his watch. ‘When Frankie Shaw’s tight enough, he gives out lyrics that’d turn ’em toes-up in Crockett.’

  Goodie raised shapely arms above her head in an uninhibited stretch. She wanted it all. Fun. Excitement. Experience. She said: ‘What’s a Crockett?’

  ‘Where little girls come from.’

  She leaned toward him and consciously wet her lips. ‘I know I’m a virgin, but I’m a big girl now, Sam. I know what I-’

  ‘You’re a brat.’ He jerked his head at a far corner of the room. ‘You were askin
g about gamblers. Here comes Fingers LeGrand.’

  ‘Why do they call him Fingers?’

  ‘Everything but the national anthem on a deck of cards.’

  LeGrand was a cadaverous man who moved as if on rubber joints; his dolorous face, with dark-rimmed eyes, was thrust forward on a thin stalk of neck. He wore a very natty double-breasted diamond weave and a hand-tailored silk tie with a wicked purple stripe.

  ‘Miss Goodie Owens. Mr Harrison LeGrand.’

  ‘Charmed, ma’am.’ He turned back to Hammett. ‘Haven’t seen you around lately, Dash.’

  ‘I’m on the hog.’

  He nodded. ‘When you get healthy, I’m banking a little game at twenty Prescott Court — upstairs above the wop speak.’

  He bowed slightly and drifted away.

  Hammett measured the piano player critically. Shaw looked drunk enough to start his special lyrics. Hammett put down their sixty cents with a dime tip, and stood up. On the wall behind his head was a sign reading:

  1000 BEANS

  BREAD, BUTTER AND COFFEE

  Goodie began, ‘Why-’

  ‘I promised your mother I’d look after you.’

  ‘You’ve never met my mother!’

  ‘That’s why,’ said Hammett.

  They caught a rattling little dinky up Powell to Sutter, transferred to a Number 1 Owl, and left that to walk downhill on Hyde.

  ‘Q is San Quentin, isn’t it?’ said Goodie abruptly. Hammett, busy with his keys as they crossed deserted Post Street, didn’t answer. She demanded, ‘Sam, what did you do before you were a writer?’

  ‘Lived in sin with a three-legged dwarf lady who liked to-’

  ‘Sam!’

  Like so many postquake buildings, 891 Post had a lobby suggesting a Greek temple rather than an apartment house, with a huge square pane of mirror beside the elevator to reflect the faces and figures of anyone mounting the steps from the foyer. Hammett depressed the elevator lever.

  ‘I was a Pink,’ he said abruptly. He pulled open the door, slid back the inner iron grillwork. ‘A sleuth. A detective for the Pinkerton Agency. That waiter was a steward aboard the Sonoma when a hundred twenty-five thousand in gold specie disappeared from her strong room en route from Sydney back in twenty-one. I turned up most of the gold in a drainpipe aboard ship, but he got caught changing two missing sovereigns into paper money and did a little trick at Quentin.’

  The elevator groaned its way toward the third floor. Goodie said thoughtfully, ‘I can never be sure I’m getting a straight answer out of you.’

  ‘You wouldn’t know a straight answer if it bit you on the nose.’

  ‘Bite me on the nose, Sam.’

  Her face was cold against his lips, shiny with the night mist. He could feel the heat of her small firm body through her coat.

  ‘I guess you’re healthy.’

  She giggled. ‘A cold nose only counts with dogs.’

  ‘A dog you ain’t, lady.’

  Goodie reached around the doorframe to flip on the light.

  ‘Come in for a while, Sam? Please?’

  The door opened directly into the living room, with the oversized closet that hid the wall bed just to the left.

  Goodie dropped her coat on a sagging easy chair and headed for the kitchen. ‘Some dago red?’

  ‘Good.’

  Hammett waited in front of the couch, which was backed up against a davenport table with a Boston fern on it. Goodie came out of the kitchen carrying two water glasses half-filled with cheap Italian wine. The dim light aureoled her blond hair. She handed the writer a glass and sat down on the couch.

  ‘What do private detectives really do?’

  ‘Get enough on somebody down at City Hall to keep their clients out of jail.’

  ‘You’re a cynical man, Sam.’

  ‘Not in this town, lady. In this town I’m a realist.’

  Goodie made a vague gesture. ‘I don’t know anything about politics.’

  ‘When I was a kid, my old man — who was a tobacco farmer then — switched from Democrat to Republican to get the cash to run for Congress. Instead, they just about ran him out of St Mary’s County, Maryland, on a rail. Just for changing party affiliation. But here.. ’

  He put one foot on the cushion beside her and leaned forward so an elbow rested on the raised knee. He gestured with his free hand, his voice taking on a surprising intensity.

  ‘Every illegal activity in the book is going on right now in San Francisco — gambling, bookmaking, prostitution, protection. And without mob control. Why?’ He leaned closer to laugh unpleasantly. ‘Because your local government got here first. While our Mayor of All the People stumbles around with his eyes shut, City Hall, the cops, and the district attorney’s office own this town. And are owned in turn. Anything — anything — is for sale here. And anybody.’

  Goodie’s small sure voice spoke to the bitterness in his words. ‘ You wouldn’t be, Sam.’

  He set down his empty glass. The light had died from his eyes and the slight, almost consumptive flush had faded from his cheeks.

  ‘Don’t make book on it. Thanks for the wine, brat.’

  ‘Sam…’ Her voice was soft. She laid an inviting hand on the couch beside her. Under his steady gaze, she started to blush, but went on, ‘Sam, you don’t have to… I mean, you can…’

  He tilted up her face with a lean sinewy hand, brushed her lips with his, and straightened up again.

  ‘I could have a wife and a couple of kids stashed somewhere.’

  ‘I’d… take my chances, Sam.’

  ‘Long odds, sister.’

  He stopped outside her door for a moment before using his key on the one directly adjacent. He slapped an open palm lightly against the varnished wood. He wondered just how big a fool he was.

  ‘Too big a one to change now,’ he muttered aloud.

  2

  As Hammett’s typewriter clacked hesitantly in a vain attempt to do something about Felix Weber and the Primrose Hotel, a muscular Morris-Cowley bullnose was going by the dark empty oval of Kezar Stadium. Egan Tokzek leaned closer to the split windshield through which ocean air poked cold fingers. Sand hissed against the bonnet, almost overwhelming the bulbous headlamps as the stolen car ran west toward the ocean along the southern edge of Golden Gate Park.

  ‘Jesus Jesus,’ the big man chanted, as if making incantations over the terrible bundle on the back seat of the big saloon car. There was sickness in the white rim around his lips and in the frightened flash of his eyes.

  Better not until he’d dumped it. But he had to. Better not. Well, Jesus, he had to.

  He wrestled the big car over to the shoulder. He’d stolen it only half an hour before and still wasn’t used to the right-hand drive.

  He fumbled in a pocket as the swirling fog paled the wide-spaced gas lamps. He used his coat sleeve to wipe sweat from his forehead, then thumbed open his snuffbox and snorted a generous pinch of the white C-and-M crystal. His face contorted as the potent mixture of cocaine and morphine bit into the tortured flesh of his inner nose.

  Tokzek glanced over his shoulder at the bundle on the rear seat. The rough wool of the horse blanket was soaked through. With an angry curse, he stamped on the clutch and rammed the rigid central lever into low. The jerk slammed him back against the seat.

  To his right, Ninth Avenue curved into the park. Tokzek imagined a gleam of nickel and polished steel deep in the shadows under the eucalyptus trees.

  No. Nothing.

  He burst into triumphant laughter. The fog was thinner, a retreating wall. To his right the black empty reaches of the park, to his left scattered dwellings with empty sand between, the dunes tufted with coarse sea grass and spurges and beds of low succulents.

  His eyes whipped wide open. Lights had entered the small round rearview mirror.

  The police! Who else would be crouched, waiting to pounce, along this lonely stretch of midnight road?

  He tried to urge more speed from his car. Once he had
lost his pursuer… now!

  His breath whistled through stained, gappy teeth as Egan Tokzek wrenched over the wheel to send the heavy machine skidding into Thirty-seventh Avenue.

  Holy Mother of Christ, there it was, the big foreign car with the steering wheel on the wrong side, just as the phone call had warned.

  Chief of Inspectors Daniel J. ‘Preacher’ Laverty eased his black Reo Wolverine from under the shadows and out into Lincoln Way. It was his own car, not a police vehicle; the call had reached him at home with the family.

  Far ahead, through a gap in the roiling fog, was a wink of red taillight. The wind hissed sand against his windshield. All the way to the ocean? Or would the car thief sense pursuit and try to lose him in the avenues running south from…

  Another gap. Taillight… ah! South it was.

  ‘Two can play at that game, laddie,’ muttered the plain-clothesman through his teeth. He was a grizzled Irishman with a sad, judging face under a thatch of once-carroty hair now ash-gray. His accent was Mission District, more like Canarsie or Baum’s Rush a continent away than a stage Mick’s brogue. Only his eyes suggested the copper.

  Laverty dragged his steering wheel over and switched off the headlights just as the turn was completed. The mist had tattered enough so he could use the lights of the car ahead as a guide. While trying to coax more speed from the Reo, he removed a long-barreled Police Positive from his mackinaw pocket and laid it on the seat against his thigh.

  Fear rode with Egan Tokzek like some obscene Siamese twin. The lights had disappeared from his mirror, but he still had the bundle to dispose of.

  Why’d the little bitch have to die, anyway? None of the others had, down through the years. He snuffled painfully. They’d survived, been shipped back east, and that had been the end of them, every one.

  Until tonight.

  Far enough south to dump her? Had to be at least two miles from the park. The houses that had crowded the first two blocks were gone. He eased off the accelerator. Lug it out into the dunes and dump it. Days, maybe weeks before nosy brats would find whatever the animals had left.