Hammett Read online

  When the sounds had faded, Pop went over and shut the door. From below, faintly, came the careless slam of the front door. He reached in under the scalloped green shade of the floor lamp to pull the chain and plunge the room into darkness.

  Pop threw the window up so he could lean on the sill and stick his head out. Hammett was cutting across the deserted intersection, weaving, bottle in hand.

  As he slid the window back down, Pop shivered as with a chill. God help whoever had killed Vic Atkinson.

  10

  It was shortly after nine o’clock on Thursday evening. Hammett, his pace firm, his clean-shaven face pale but his eyes clear of any trace of dissipation, crossed the floor of the echoing rotunda at City Hall. His steps rang on marble so highly polished it gave the illusion of being soft underfoot. As he passed each claw-footed, ridiculously ornate brass light standard, his elongated shadow wheeled across the floor. He skirted the central staircase and moved between pillars supporting the vast domed ceiling five stories above.

  In front of a half-ton brass mailbox facing the locked Van Ness Avenue entrance, he shook hands with the larger of two dark waiting shapes. Preacher Laverty hadn’t changed much with the years. Same heavy features, same pinkish hair just now beginning to frost with age. They were nearly of a height, although Hammett was seventy pounds lighter.

  ‘So you want to go after the murdering bastards, now that it’s too late for Vic.’ Laverty’s soft south-of-Market brogue made it sound very slightly like ‘murthering.’

  ‘Will you back me or not?’

  Laverty rasped a heavy hand down over that morning’s shave. ‘Vic thought a lot of you as a detective, and Jimmy here tells me you can’t be bought.’

  ‘We’ve already spent the last hour up there arguing for you,’ said the fat little op.

  Hammett went up the marble staircase. As he skirted the mezzanine above the rotunda, his eyes were caught, as always, by the slogan McKenna had caused to be incised above the ornate arch:

  SAN FRANCISCO

  O GLORIOUS CITY OF OUR HEARTS THAT

  HAST BEEN TRIED AND NOT FOUND WANTING

  GO THOU WITH LIKE SPIRIT TO MAKE

  THE FUTURE THINE.

  He paused for a moment before the darkly varnished door with THE MAYOR chisled into the granite coping above it, marshaling what Jimmy Wright had told him of the members of the reform committee. Then he pushed on through it.

  Evelyn Brewster was a slim handsome woman just shy of forty. Her chestnut hair was short and finger-waved in the latest style. She wore a white sleeveless frock with a tailored collar and a white jacket in heavy crepe de Chine, the ensemble set off by a bright silk scarf around her slender throat. She smelled pleasantly of eau de cologne.

  She cast a covertly furious glance at her husband, Dalton. He was lounged in his chair with one knee braced against the edge of the oak conference table. He’d come to the mayor’s office, she was sure, only because their son had been one of those apprehended in that woman’s place, not from any sense of moral urgency.

  Which meant it was up to her to make sure that they were represented by an investigator of impeccable personal habits. A moral man. An upright man.

  ‘Even though you come highly recommended by Mr Laverty and Mr Wright,’ she said to the lean man standing across the table, ‘I… that is, we, feel that a professional detective should represent this committee in this trying and delicate investiga-’

  ‘I spent eight years in the profession, ma’am.’ As an afterthought, Hammett added, ‘And Vic Atkinson didn’t intend to represent you.’

  Evelyn Brewster’s husband stirred for the first time. He was youthfully trim, his hair dark and unthinned by his forty years, the heavy muscles in his jaws giving his face an unexpected craggy appearance. He ran with absolute authority the small coastal shipping empire his grandfather had founded back in gold rush days, and it showed in his voice.

  ‘Then what did Atkinson intend to do?’

  Jimmy Wright had been mistaken. Get Dalton W. Brewster on your side, and you had his wife no matter how much noise she made ahead of time.

  ‘When you hire a detective, you hire a bloodhound. He uncovers facts and leaves evaluations to the people who hire him.’

  ‘I find that unacceptable.’

  Dr Gardner Shuman, opening his campaign of opposition. Jimmy had warned Hammett that Shuman was the Mulligans’ man, body and soul. He was a bald, stout, middle-aged man sitting next to the mayor.

  ‘You aren’t hiring my views, you’re hiring my expertise.’ Hammett added, with an indifference that lent it strength, ‘You hired Vic Atkinson, and I was a better detective than Vic ever thought of being.’

  ‘Why aren’t you a detective now?’

  ‘I retired. Voluntarily.’

  Shuman was hurting him; he could see it in the other faces around the table. Especially with Evelyn Brewster.

  ‘We were led to understand that Mr Atkinson was returning to Los Angeles to organize his staff,’ she said. ‘Now he turns up dead in San Francisco.’ She already had decided that this lean, cool-faced fellow just would not do. Not in the face of Dr Shuman’s opposition. Dr Shuman was a trustee of the San Francisco Opera Company and a Knight of Columbus. ‘So I do not feel we can even be sure that Mr Atkinson’s death had anything to do with his planned work for this committee.’

  ‘If you really believe that, then you’d better all fold up your tents and quietly steal away.’

  ‘Hmph,’ said Mayor Brendan Brian McKenna from the head of the table.

  Eyes turned toward him. He was rotund and balding, with a silvery mustache that lent his face a spurious weight and purpose. A black pearl stickpin gleamed in his gray cravat. A fresh carnation, like those the City Hall wags suggested he wore in his pajama top at night, bloomed in the lapel of his dark cutaway.

  ‘What I mean to say, perhaps Mr Hammett has an excellent thought there.’ His own thoughts were with the cut-glass decanter behind a sliding panel in his office. ‘Perhaps we ought to disband for this evening. Mr Atkinson’s death has been a terrible shock-’

  ‘I want an answer tonight.’

  Hammett had set his feet, as if the room had begun to rock and he was bracing against it. But he knew he could not carry the fight to Bren McKenna personally. This was the man who, after the 1906 earthquake and fire, had literally directed disaster relief from the back of a prancing white steed; the only mayor in Prohibition America who dared have as his campaign song a ditty titled ‘Smile with Brandy Bren.’

  So Hammett said civilly, ‘Mr Mayor, Vic Atkinson has been dead for nearly forty-eight hours. Somebody killed him and that somebody’s out there right now’ — the rough power of his voice held them all momentarily motionless — ‘trying to make damned sure he’s going to get away with it. I want to make damned sure he doesn’t. And meanwhile this committee wants to sit around arguing whether I’ll be able to use the correct fork for the fish course at their victory dinner.’

  The silence that followed was broken, not by Shuman as he had expected, but by Dalton Brewster.

  ‘I can understand the temptation to reduce this investigation to a personal vendetta against the men who murdered your friend. But by your own admission what is needed is dispassion, not-’

  ‘I hadn’t seen Vic Atkinson in over six years, hadn’t written to him or communicated with him in any way. But yes, he was my friend. He was also a husband, a father, a good detective, and an upright man. He died because he wanted to do something about a department full of cops who’d become a little too corrupt, and a Board of Supervisors a little too openly for sale, and a district attorney-’

  ‘As a member of the San Francisco police commission, I resent your remarks about our fine department,’ interrupted Shuman.

  ‘Vic believed in this investigation — and because he had this committee behind him, because he thought his banks were secure, he got careless. And he died.’

  Shuman was almost sputtering. ‘You dare to suggest that V
ictor Atkinson was betrayed by someone in this room?’

  ‘That’s your suggestion, Doctor, not mine.’

  ‘I suggest that Victor Atkinson was struck down by someone from his own highly unsavory past. A man who drank and-’

  Hammett let his voice go tight and furious, and his eyes became coals. He leaned across the polished hardwood table so he could thrust his face close to Shuman’s.

  ‘ You have the gall to call Vic Atkinson unsavory?’

  He straightened up. He looked around at the dozen or so uncomfortable faces. McKenna, the Brewsters, Hayden from the City Planning Committee, Walcott, president of the Civil Service Commission, Superior Court Judge Fitzpatrick, Boyle of the Anglo-California Trust, DiReggio of the Bank of Italy, Fremont Older of the News-Call, a couple of others he didn’t know by sight, Shuman himself.

  ‘Shuman, Gardner, medical doctor.’ Hammett made it a flat recitation. ‘Degree from the University of California med school in 1899. Entered general practice, but soon…’

  Shuman half-rose, face furious. ‘I’m not going to-’

  ‘Shut up!’ snapped Hammett.

  Shuman’s face turned pale, but he sank back in his seat. McKenna’s half-raised remonstrative hand gradually lowered. Brewster sat up straighter, with a ghost of a smile on his face. Used to wielding authority himself, he could recognize it in others.

  ‘Member of the Police Commission since 1915, very popular with the department. Carries an Honorary Policeman’s badge. We all know that a good deal of the corrruption in this city stems from the Mulligan Bros Bailbonds Company, even if there is no courtroom proof of this fact. Correct?’

  He looked from face to face, deliberately. Rapt silence. Shuman was chalk-white.

  ‘Right. Now, Griffith Mulligan holds — personally holds — the mortgage on Dr Shuman’s office at the foot of Post Street. He personally holds the mortgages on Dr Shuman’s house on the corner of Scott and Pine. He personally holds the mortgage on the building at Sutter and Divisadero that houses the general office of Shuman’s Prescription Pharmacies and store number one in the Shuman drugstore chain.’

  Shuman seemed to have shrunk in his clothes. ‘You have no right..’

  ‘And Mulligan Bros Bailbonds holds the mortgages on the other twenty-five Shuman pharmacies scattered around town. What was your word, Doctor? Unsavory?’

  Shuman was on his feet, face ashen. He gripped his walking stick like a club. His voice shook. ‘I do not intend to stay here and listen to any more of this. There are legal remedies…’

  He collected his hat and cape. As he stalked out, Hammett was going on exactly as if he had not departed.

  ‘Through his position on the police commission, Dr Shuman receives all — all, every one — of the department assignments to examine arrested prostitutes for venereal diseases. He also gets as much medical business involving accident, rape, and assault victims as the police department can shove his way without the rest of the doctors squawking too loudly…’

  ‘Facts,’ interrupted Dalton Brewster abruptly. He seemed to have taken a sudden shine to Hammett. He raked the table with his coolly appraising look, then turned back to the lean detective. ‘But you want a friend’s murderer caught. We want a structure of corruption and vice exposed. The two things aren’t the same.’

  ‘You can’t accomplish one without the other, Mr Brewster. I’m not opposed to your moral crusade. I merely say that the city of San Francisco is the way it is because that’s the way its citizens want it. This system has worked so well that the eastern mobs have never been able to get a toehold here. But whoever rubbed Vic Atkinson changed the rules. I want him. I’m going to have him. In getting him, I’ll shake enough other bad apples out of the tree to satisfy you people.’

  ‘That’s as much of a commitment as you can give this committee?’ demanded Evelyn Brewster’s tight, quiet voice.

  ‘It’s as much of a commitment as any honest detective could give you, ma’am. Chopping down the tree is the job of the grand jury and the DA. Yours is making sure they do theirs.’

  ‘It isn’t enough!’ she cried. Her voice quivered. ‘It has no moral dimension! We are not here merely to stop corruption. We are here to root it out; it is that, and only that, which is important, no matter who is hurt or what hardships are worked upon their families. Civic duty takes precedence over personal convenience. The guilty must suffer. Every policeman who has ever taken a bribe, every bookmaker who has ever taken a bet-’

  ‘My dear,’ said her husband.

  ‘Every speakeasy proprietor who has ever sold an illicit drink-’

  ‘Evelyn.’

  ‘Every woman who has ever sold her body to lustful men-’

  ‘ Evelyn! ’ His voice was a whipcrack.

  ‘Oh!’ she exclaimed. Her voice was breathless, half-smothered, as if her husband had tossed a bucket of cold water over her.

  ‘I’ve sent plenty of wrong Ghees to the can, and I’ve never lost any sleep over any of them,’ said Hammett. ‘I wouldn’t lose any sleep over sending crooked cops up either. But you wouldn’t have any police graft if you didn’t have prostitution, or gambling, or bootlegging ‘Exactly! Stop those…’

  ‘The trouble is, ma’am, you can’t stop those. Statutes that conflict with human nature are ultimately unenforceable and just create disrespect for all law, as we’ve seen with Prohibition. But if you legalized gambling and prostitution, and then licensed and controlled them with the regulating power assigned to someone other than the police, you’d cut off the sources of police graft and corruption, and-’

  ‘Do you think this committee could ever agree, even in principle, to such immoral, outrageous suggestions?’ she demanded.

  ‘No,’ said Hammett, ‘they haven’t invented a committee yet that has that much sense. So you still need an investigator. I’ll be out in the hall.’

  11

  Hammett, on his third cigarette in the corridor outside the mayor’s complex of offices, turned quickly when a door opened behind him. The man framed in the opening was about fifty, bulky and powerful, clean-shaven but with thick curly hair, a strong, slightly down-curved nose, and fleshy lips above a stubborn, meaty chin.

  ‘Mr Hammett. Could you come in, please?’

  Hammett went through the door, and realized that he was in McKenna’s private office.

  ‘I was eavesdropping from in here,’ said the man. He gestured at his clothes: patterned plus fours, diamond argyle socks, a V-neck cricket sweater. ‘I never got home to change after leaving the golf course this afternoon.’

  Hammett had him then. Owen Lynch, McKenna’s executive secretary. Also aide-de-camp, adviser, political guide, speech writer, and — if political opponents could be believed — chief conniver. A man with a private income and no personal political ambition, on whose judgment McKenna relied explicitly.

  ‘Brandy?’

  Hammett shook his head. ‘I’m just coming off a two-day drunk.’

  ‘I thought you said that you and Atkinson had drifted apart.’

  ‘That doesn’t change anything.’

  ‘Of course not. Sorry.’ Lynch slid back a panel to pour himself a generous drink from a Stourbridge decanter. He held it to the light. ‘“He who aspires to be a hero must drink brandy.”’

  ‘Sure. But I don’t suppose you asked me in to hear you quote Boswell.’

  ‘A private detective who reads Boswell. I like that. I pounded that line into Bren’s thick head during the twenty-two campaign when the teetotals took to calling him Brandy Bren. It was very effective at rallies. The public likes its heroes slightly flawed.’

  ‘I don’t follow politics much.’

  ‘Meaning you didn’t — or wouldn’t — vote for Bren? There was a time when I didn’t myself.’

  Hammett knew the story. In 1913, as a feature writer on crusading editor Fremont Older’s Bulletin, Lynch had been one of the few who opposed McKenna’s candidacy for mayor. But despite Lynch’s clever and biting attacks, McKenna had
won even in the home district of his incumbent opponent, P. H. ‘Pinhead’ McCarthy.

  ‘He’s gotten better since then?’

  ‘Or I’ve gotten less discriminating,’ said Lynch with an easy smile.

  Four years later, embittered by personal tragedy, he had resigned from the newspaper to direct McKenna’s drive for reelection. It was successful, for McKenna’s personal magnetism had found its perfect complement in Lynch’s hard-headed pragmatism.

  ‘Bren is backing you all the way in there with the committee.’

  Hammett slid down on his spine in a big leather armchair, and said nothing.

  After a moment, Lynch chuckled. ‘You think he’ll try to hamstring the investigation?’

  ‘It’s his town.’

  ‘Which he’ll be leaving in two years for the statehouse in Sacramento.’ He gestured with his empty brandy glass. ‘ Unless there’s a scandal in his administration that he does nothing about.’

  ‘Molly Farr,’ said Hammett. There was a thoughtful, vaguely approving look in his eyes.

  ‘Molly Farr or some other. Oh, I know he has been elected three times because the citizens want a wide-open town. But his popularity extends beyond that. He’s America’s first lord mayor in the British sense.’ His eyes were alight with enthusiasm. ‘When he took office, San Francisco was still a nineteenth-century provincial town; Bren turned it into a twentieth-century metropolis. It was a community with a tradition of political corruption under Abe Reuf, and with a history of mob violence and vigilante violence and labor violence. Bren has brought together employer, employed, and unemployed, and gotten them to-’

  ‘The only thing that won’t go away is that political corruption,’ cut in Hammett in an almost lazy voice.

  ‘And that’s exactly why I arranged for Bren to chair this reform committee as soon as I heard about it. That’s why I talked Dan Laverty into advising the committee — so they’d get an incorruptible investigator. And when that investigator was killed, I had Dan get us another one equally trustworthy.’