Hammett Read online

  There’d be no more after tonight. Coasting, he pulled toward the shoulder of the road. No more. One dead was one too many. He glanced in the mirror as he reached for the brake.

  Egan Tokzek screamed. Filling his mirror was a huge black auto, thundering down upon him.

  He slammed the car back into gear, tried to shove his foot through the floorboards, and wrenched over the wheel in the vain hope of cutting the other off. Fenders crumpled. He swung away. The pursuer’s radiator was at his rear door, creeping up. Sudden lights flooded the mirror to claw at his drug-sensitized eyes. His hands jumped and shook on the wheel as if electricity were pouring through them.

  Dan Laverty’s hands were rocks. The cars were shoulder to shoulder. He wanted to do it the easy way if he could. One big hand left the wheel to make violent motions as he pulled up on the left of Tokzek’s car.

  ‘POLICE!’ he bellowed over the roar of powerful engines and the scream of wind. ‘PULL OVER!’

  But Egan Tokzek was already scrabbling for the scarred walnut butt of his huge old Colt. 44 rim-fire.

  His first shot passed in front of Laverty’s windshield. The policeman’s teeth gleamed in a wolfish grin. This was what he lived for, this was when he felt really alive.

  The gun roared again. This time Laverty’s window shattered. He felt the warm trickle of blood down his cheek from a hurled splinter of glass. More shots. Still no hits. And still Laverty’s gun remained on the seat beside his thigh.

  Then his lips pursed and his eyes narrowed. A hundred yards ahead the road ended at Yorba Street, without going through to Sloat. The grizzled policeman leaned all the way across his seat to rest the fleshy heel of his gun hand on the door frame where Tokzek’s bullets had taken out the glass. He pumped two rounds into the side of the bullnose.

  Tokzek heard the first shot. A terrible fist struck his shoulder with the second. He fought the wheel. Jesus. Left arm dead. And the road was gone. Jesus Jesus!

  The Morris-Cowley rammed headlong into the sand, reared like a stallion, slewed, sheered off two stubby pines while losing a fender and a door. The car canted, almost rolled, butted sideways into a sandhill, and rocked to a halt.

  Tokzek was hurled across the seat by the impact. He lay still, panting, hearing without comprehension the moaning wind and a liquid trickling noise. His gun was still in his hand; directly ahead gaped escape where the door was gone.

  He slithered forward, jackknifed down over the running board. A push with cautious boots, a twist, and he was out.

  On his usable elbow and his knees, he crawled a dozen yards to a lip of dune and sought shelter behind a tussock of coarse fringing sea grass. He bit through his lip to keep from crying out; the wet cold had begun worrying at his bullet-torn shoulder. His lips writhed back from his bloodied teeth. His hand took a fresh grip on the smeary pistol butt. He waited.

  Dan Laverty was out of his Reo and shielded behind an open door with the. 38 in his hand. Nothing moved in the stark glare his headlights laid on the other car. There was no sound except the high whine of escaping steam. The visible, right-hand door was closed. Laverty moved out past his own car.

  Now he could smell gasoline from a ruptured tank. One shot fired..

  The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want.

  The Psalm chanted through his mind, unsought but oddly comforting. He doubted if the man could have survived the crash. Why had he risked his life over a mere car theft?

  He placed each step deliberately, so no water-filled succulents would crunch underfoot. Through the window he could see that the far door was gone. Three or four more paces, and he could see something blanket-wrapped in back. Even as this registered, his eyes were finding the awkward turtle-trail scrabbled away from the car. Digging knees and elbows, which meant…

  He was spinning and dropping into his firing crouch, but Tokzek had already come up from behind the dune a dozen feet away with the big. 44 revolver speaking at Laverty’s chest. Its voice was merely a series of clicks. The hammer was falling on empty chambers.

  With a groan of terror, Tokzek fled into darkness. He made two paces before Dan Laverty shot him in the spine. He went down in a sudden heap, writhing and screaming, as Laverty turned back toward the car and the hastily glimpsed bundle. He shone his flashlight in through the unbroken rear window. Flung up against the glass as if in entreaty was a delicately boned hand. He recoiled savagely.

  ‘Blessed Virgin, protect us,’ he breathed.

  The sprawled girl had been pitched from her blanket shroud by the crash. Even in the flashlight’s wavering rays her nude body was the delicate amber of old ivory. The ebony hair was in wild disarray, the Oriental features contorted with pain and fear. On the flesh were the mottled bruises of a systematic beating.

  The policeman went around the car to the other rear window. He could feel the black Irish rage rising, threatening to engulf him again like that other time. When his light again flooded the interior, bile choked his throat.

  Blood was streaked across the girl’s lower belly and on the insides of her thighs. The flesh there was roughened and empurpled.

  She could not have been over twelve years old.

  Dan Laverty turned from the car with his face terrible and his eyes feverish. He trudged back to Tokzek with a sleepwalker’s step.

  ‘Want me to ease your pain, laddie?’ he asked in his soft Irish tenor.

  Grunting with effort, he drove the toe of his boot up into Tokzek’s testicles. Tokzek screamed, bucked with the impact like a man gripped by a naked high-tension line. Again. Again. As if to successive jolts of electric current. Finally, shattered ends of bone severed his spinal column and ended it.

  Laverty’s eyes gradually unglazed. When he realized what he had done, he crossed himself and vomited a few yards from the corpse.

  3

  With sudden impatience, Dashiell Hammett thrust aside the December, 1927, issue of Black Mask. He needed more complication, another scene showing the Op stirring things up in Poisonville, for the four published novelettes to work as a novel. And with the book version, titled Red Harvest, already scheduled for publication, he had to do any insert scenes damned quick.

  He began pacing the narrow cramped living room. How about a… no, that wouldn’t work. But…

  Yeah. Maybe a fight scene. Good. Set in a fairgrounds casino or something, out on the edge of town. Now, how to make the Op the catalyst in it…

  Hammett paused in his pacing to look at his strap watch. Still time to get out to Steiner Street and catch the Friday night fight card at Winterland. Just opened, he hadn’t even seen the inside of the place yet. So why not? He’d be bound to get an idea or two he could work into Red Harvest during his stint at the typewriter that night.

  As Hammett emerged into Post Street he almost cannoned into Goodie Osborne, just coming home from work. He caught her by the shoulders.

  ‘Can you live without food for a few more hours?’

  ‘Of course, but what-’

  ‘C’mon.’ He guided her across Post Street without noticing the very big man who was supporting the corner building while relighting his cigar stub. ‘I’m on my way out to Winterland for the fights. Want to come along?’

  Goodie’s eyes were sparkling. ‘Try to stop me.’

  The big man straightened, tossed aside the newly lit stub, and crossed Post toward their apartment building. His name was Victor Atkinson, and he was a man not easily forgotten: six feet three, two hundred and fifteen pounds, huge restless hands, and a bony icebreaker jaw.

  With his work cords and heavy wool lumberjack, he looked like a logger down from Seattle — which is what he wanted to look like.

  Atkinson went down the narrow dim hallway beside the elevator to tattoo the manager’s door with heavy knuckles. The bleary-eyed woman who opened it and squinted up at him wore her hair in a wispy bun and had about half a bun on herself; he could smell the bathtub gin from three feet away.

  ‘Ain’t got no rooms.’ Her face brightened. S
he added with a simper, ‘Big boy.’

  ‘Yeah.’ He crowded her back into the littered, close-smelling apartment without seeming to. ‘I want a line on one of your tenants.’

  ‘That’s privi…’ She hiccuped. ‘Privileged infor-’

  ‘Hammett. Third floor front, far end. Was up there. Nobody home.’

  ‘I told you-’

  ‘Habits. Who he sees. What’s he do for a living. Things like that.’

  ‘I don’t-’

  ‘Ain’t got all night, lady.’ His heavily boned face was brutal in its lack of expression. The boredom in his voice somehow had a menace beyond mere bluster. ‘I gotta catch the fight card out to Winterland.’

  Hammett and Goodie paused in front of the row Victorians across Steiner from the huge amphitheater.

  ‘Quite a place,’ he commented.

  ‘And so many people.’ The blond girl was clinging to his arm with excitement.

  Winterland was a massive white stucco structure, four stories high, with spotlights to illuminate the American flags on the poles jutting up past the coping of the red-tiled roof. They let themselves be carried across the street to the open doors under the unadorned sidewalk-width marquee.

  ‘Who do you like in the main event, Mr Hammett?’

  The fresh-faced urchin in knickers, drab moleskin coat, and golfing cap was peddling newspapers and boxing magazines. Hammett bought a Knockout.

  ‘The Canadian in the fifth or sixth.’

  ‘I dunno,’ said the boy dubiously. ‘I seen Campbell in a couple a’ workouts and he looked awful strong to me.’

  ‘So’s a bull, but it can’t match a mastiff,’ said Hammett. ‘The Frenchie’ll cut him to pieces.’

  The ticket windows, flanked by ornamental green shutters, were set under little roofed cottagelike facades at either end of the foyer. Hammett got two in the third row ringside, which cleaned him out except for cigarette money.

  ‘Who was that boy, Sam?’

  ‘Just a kid hangs around on fight nights. He’s got an uncle makes book out of the candy store at Fillmore and McAllister.’

  ‘Sam, a candy store?’

  ‘Next best place to a smokeshop,’ he said piously.

  They surrendered their tickets and passed through a thick-walled archway beside the narrow balcony stairway. Open side doors, guarded by uniformed ticket-takers, let in the noise of the Post Street evening traffic that inched through the sporting crowd. Over the heads of seated fight fans they could see the square canvas ring that had been set up on the main arena floor.

  ‘Sure beats Dreamland,’ said Hammett.

  But not, he thought, as a place for him to stage Poisonville’s fights. Until a couple of years before, this had been the site of the Dreamland roller-skating rink where Hammett had seen a lot of Friday-night fights and Tuesday-night wrestling matches. The old echoing wooden building, with its narrow second-floor balconies extending out toward the ring, fitted Poisonville’s grubby atmosphere better than this fancy new place. Unless he picked up something usable from the bouts themselves, he’d wasted his evening.

  They took their seats on the vast main floor of the arena, which could be flooded to make ice but was now covered with row upon row of wooden folding chairs linked in pairs for easy setting up and removal.

  Goodie craned up at the ceiling. It was very high, arched and vaulted, pierced by glassed-over skylights and with a square frame of spotlights centered above the ring. Around three sides were balconies, their steep rows of permanent seating finally lost in the blue haze of tobacco smoke.

  ‘Evening, ma’am.’

  The man who owned the breathy voice beside her was very fat and wore a heavy tan coat with an astrakhan collar. His shoe-button eyes had an unusual intensity which frightened Goodie. She turned quickly to Hammett.

  ‘Sam…’

  But the fat man was leaning past her, not toward her.

  ‘Dash, I hear you tell the kid outside you take Boulanger in the fifth?’

  ‘Not picking a round, two-to-three he does it by the sixth.’

  ‘Thirty says you’re wrong.’

  Hammett nodded. The fat man began talking with great animation to a dapper slick-haired individual with a slightly lopsided face and a carnation in his lapel.

  Goodie whispered, ‘Sam, who is he?’

  ‘Another of those gamblers you’re so anxious to meet.’ The spotlights went on above the ring. ‘Freddy the Glut. I saw him lose a grand to Benny the Gent in Bones Remmer’s Menlo Club on Eddy Street one night, and walk away laughing. Fellow with him is Carnation Willie. Local lads, not in a class with Eddy Sahati or the Rothsteins.’

  The announcer interrupted with the information that Al Flores was going to engage in ‘four rounds of boxing’ with Dancing Frankie Whitehead in the curtain-raiser.

  ‘Keep your eye on the Portagee,’ said Hammett.

  But Dancing Frankie opened fast: Halfway into the round he put the Portuguese boy on the canvas for a six count with a roundhouse right that wasn’t fooling. Goodie was on her feet, shouting. She sat down shame-faced when Hammett tugged at her coat sleeve.

  ‘I’m sorry, Sam, I just got so excited-’

  ‘Heck, yell all you want, kid. I just think you ought to know you’re backing the wrong boy. Whitehead won’t last.’

  ‘I’ll bet you supper he wins,’ said Goodie recklessly.

  In the second round, Flores put the badly winded Dancing Frankie down with a flurry of punches that kept him down.

  ‘That takes care of supper,’ said Hammett.

  ‘Quit smirking!’ exclaimed Goodie furiously.

  The second prelim was a slam-bang affair between KO Eddie Roberts and a colored lad named Battling Barnes, who took the decision. In the third preliminary bout, Roundhouse Revani TKO’d his Filipino opponent after flooring him in the second, closing his eye in the third, and using his gut as a workout bag in the fourth. Freddy the Glut spoke around Goodie again.

  ‘I’ve got twenty at four-to-seven that says the semi-final is a draw.’

  Goodie was sure he was offering Hammett a bet of some kind, and was excited. ‘Go ahead, Sam,’ she urged. ‘Take him up on it.’

  ‘You’re faded,’ said Hammett to the gambler.

  He spent the six-round roommate act that followed explaining to Goodie the difference between a jab, an uppercut, and a cross; why working on an opponent’s gut to take away his legs and wind was better than head-hunting; and how a fighter could win by opening an opponent’s eyebrow with his glove-laces if the ref was lax.

  ‘Of course nothing like that’s going on here,’ he said. ‘This is just a dancing lesson.’

  The referee called it a draw. Hammett returned to the obese gambler.

  ‘Freddy, want to double your dough on the Pride of Glen Park?’

  Freddy raised an eloquent shoulder under the rich coat. He had it draped around his shoulders like a cape.

  Hammett grinned at Goodie. ‘See what you got me into?’

  ‘I don’t understand. I don’t understand any of this.’

  ‘We had a twenty-buck bet, two-to-three odds. Twenty to me if I won, thirty to him if I lost. Now that’s doubled. If I lose I owe him forty — and I don’t have forty. Plus, I already owe him thirty-five from the last fight.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Sam.’ Her voice was contrite. ‘I thought-’

  He chuckled. ‘Don’t worry, kiddo. I don’t have the thirty-five, either.’

  By the end of the first round, it was apparent that Campbell was outclassed. By the end of the second, Goodie had become aware of stamping feet and a growing chorus of boos, shouts, and catcalls.

  ‘Hey, Frenchie, why don’t you kiss ’im?’

  ‘Me an’ my old lady tangle more than that!’

  Hammett, watching Boulanger left-jab Campbell across the ring with light stinging blows without real beef behind them, had a calculating expression on his face.

  ‘He’s keeping Campbell awake, trying to choose his round. He must
have some money down himself. It’ll work for Red Harvest, right enough.’

  Goodie looked at him curiously, but he ignored her. Boulanger, dark, lean, intense, a good fighter, trying desperately to keep Campbell from tripping over his own shoelaces and KOing himself on a ring-post. And Campbell, blond, slow, stupid in the ring, throwing roundhouses at whatever got between him and the light. Good.

  Only in the novel, the Boulanger character wouldn’t be trying to pick his round — he’d be trying to throw the fight. And… sure, the Op wouldn’t let him. Why? Some criminal charge from back east that the Op had found out about, and…

  Boulanger was boring in. The catcalls had died under the thud of leather on flesh. Sweat flew as the Canadian pummeled away.

  ‘He’ll put him away in the next round,’ said Hammett.

  The fifth started with Boulanger going around the bewildered local fighter, jabbing him at will like a cooper nailing up a barrel. Whenever Campbell would clinch, Boulanger would go inside, working on his belly with solid blows and on his jaw with sizzling uppercuts. The ref stopped it after the round’s fourth knockdown.

  The lights came up. The ref raised the Canadian’s right hand above his head in the victory signal. And just here, Hammett thought, would come the flash of silver as a black-handled knife would be thrown from one of the balconies to kill the fighter in his moment of victory.

  Freddy the Glut handed Hammett a twenty and a five. ‘I think our local boy should find some other line of work.’

  ‘Unless he wants to end up in Napa cutting out paper dolls.’

  The lean writer and the petite blonde inched their way toward the Post Street exit. Tonight’s stint at the typewriter would just about wrap up Red Harvest.

  ‘What was that about cutting out paper dolls in Napa, Sam?’

  ‘A few more beatings like that, and Campbell will be ready for a room in the state hospital for the insane at Napa. Let’s go down to Fillmore Street and take on a stack of wheats and bacon.’

  ‘Oh, yes! I’m famished!’

  ‘On you. Remember?’

  Goodie pouted her way out of the amphitheater.