The room was small but meticulously clean, with a steel-framed bungalow bed and a steam radiator. Above the bed was a framed print of ‘Spring Song,’ with the little girl sitting on the bench watching a bluebird sing at the edge of a copse of birch trees. Across from it was a dresser set at an angle between the two windows. The single straight-backed chair was childishly decorated with painted vines and garish flowers.
Crystal entered the room like a cat, daintily sticking her head into the closet and around the frame of the bathroom door. Also like a cat, she made the room her own, bouncing on the bed as a child might do to test its springiness. They had come up a very narrow uncarpeted stairway from the rear of the hotel’s top floor, to this single small separate room built right on the tar-and-gravel roof of the hotel.
‘I could sleep for a week,’ she said.
‘Ain’t much to do but sleep, here,’ said Pop from the doorway.
‘Pinkerton’s used to put surprise witnesses up here until it was time to testify,’ Hammett explained. Pop said he would bring milk and doughnuts up from the Eagle Market, and Hammett added, ‘Coffee, too.’
Crystal gestured after the old man. ‘Shouldn’t you… I mean, he’s pretty decrepit…’
‘This lets him feel he’s handling the situation.’ Hammett drew the garish chair closer to the bed and sat down. ‘And gives us time for a little talk.’
‘I… don’t understand.’ Her eyes slid away from his.
‘Fat mama and the idiot boy didn’t put the snatch on you at high noon on Market Street.’
The girl was looking down at her hands. Her voice was very small. ‘No, of course not. But…’
‘Remember Vic Atkinson?’
‘The man with the ten-year-old dog?’ She jerked her head and gave an involuntary nervous giggle.
‘Vic’s dead. Murdered.’
‘Oh! I’m sorry.’ Her eyes went back to her hands, which clasped and unclasped themselves in her lap. ‘I… I didn’t know.’
‘Everybody keeps talking about a threat from the mob back east. You, the cops, Molly. Vic’s murder could have been a mob killing, it had the earmarks. Or it could have just been made to look that way. I’m pretty sure where he died — in the back room of Dom Pronzini’s speakeasy.’ The name had no apparent effect on her. ‘If I knew why, I’d probably know who.’ He added thoughtfully, ‘The mob might be trying to get a toehold in the city through Pronzini…’
The girl said nothing.
‘What did you see in the newspaper that made you start running?’
The girl’s dark almond eyes flashed up briefly at him, then back down to the hands busy in her lap again. She said nothing
‘I need some answers, sister. Was it because of a newspaper article identifying a dead man as Egan Tokzek? The brother of the fat bitch up in Marin?’
The fingers of one hand picked at the other. Her eyes watched. She spoke to her hands, her voice soft and hesitant. ‘If you are to understand, you must know something that happened four years ago, when I was only eleven…’
‘You answered an ad for a domestic and were grabbed by the fat woman and her brother and shipped to a brothel back east,’ said Hammett in a brutally impatient voice. ‘I know all of that. What about-’
‘But how can you…’ Her eyes were wide and shocked. ‘Nobody..’
‘Tokzek did time for white slavery ten-twelve years ago. He and his sister specialized in Chinese girls then. Why would they have changed by the time you came along?’
The girl’s head remained bowed. Hammett leaned forward to raise her face. Tears were welling from her eyes, but she made no attempt to look away.
‘I am so ashamed.’
Hammett took his hand away. ‘It happened.’ He’d learned years before that a matter-of-fact approach worked better than sympathy when witnesses were on the edge of collapse. ‘Talking about it won’t make it happen again.’
‘I… know. All right.’ She knuckled her eyes in a little-girl gesture. ‘First I went to an office in Chinatown, the address listed in the ad. The fat woman was there. She interviewed me and sent me to an address on McAllister Street. It was my first trolley ride, I was terrified. Tokzek was there. He kept me in the attic for three days, putting things into the food so I was always… always foggy…’
Keeping his voice neutral, Hammett asked, ‘Who broke you in? Tokzek?’
She nodded.
‘He beat you? Maul you around?’
‘No. Just… just…’ She overcame the rising note of hysteria in her voice and spoke coldly and clearly. ‘Just taught me how to be a whore.’
‘And then they sent you back east.’
‘In a compartment on the train with a man whose job it was to transport me.’ Her voice, her gestures, even her eyes had taken on a bitter, smoky edge. ‘Part of his pay was using me on the trip. I was put in the Harlem Inn in Stickney.’
Hammett stood up, lit a cigarette, and sucked acrid smoke into his lungs. Crystal went on in her hard whore’s voice, looking straight ahead as if seeing through the wall of the room.
‘We used to parade for the johns. I had to wear high-heeled shoes and gingham baby rompers with a big bow in the back. It was two dollars for five minutes. The landlady was called Auntie Adelaide. She used to sit in the hall at the foot of the stairs. When you went upstairs with a john, she’d give you a towel and a metal tag with a number on it. The john would give her two dollars.’
Hammett had quit prowling the room to look out a window. Past the edge of the roof he could see the blocky tip of the Russ Building skyscraper.
‘Sometimes I can still hear Auntie Adelaide’s voice.’ In a strident Midwest twang, she said, ‘“Goddammit, Number Eight, somebody’s waiting. All right, Number Five, there’s a girl out here got to pay the rent.” If the john ran over his five minutes, the upstairs madam would pound on the door and ask for another two dollars. That was Tante Helene. We called her tante because she was a Creole from Louisiana. After another minute she’d come in and thump him on the back. She was nice. She used to wink at me past the john’s shoulder.’ She was silent for a moment, when she spoke again, it was in her usual voice, although now it sounded tired. ‘I remember Tante Helene’s wink sometimes, too.’
‘How’d you get out?’ The cigarette between his fingers, he noted with surprise, was crushed and twisted. He’d burned the side of his index finger without realizing it.
‘I just walked away one Sunday morning. The house commission was fifty percent, they charged ten percent of our net for the towels. Mostly the girls netted seventeen or eighteen dollars a night, but they owed me forty-two because Saturday was the biggest night of the week and I was a big grosser. I thought that if they owed me money they wouldn’t be so quick to come looking for me.’
‘Then why is the mob after you?’
She shook her head back and forth exaggeratedly, again like a child younger than she was. ‘I can’t tell you that. Not anyone. Not ever.’
You’re going to have to come up with the story, kid, he thought grimly. You just don’t know it yet. He said solicitously, ‘How did Heloise Kuhn…’
‘How did Heloise Kuhn get hold of her?’ Goodie was in a new blue crepe de Chine negligee decorated with darker blue flowers made of lace and ribbon. She poured more coffee into Hammett’s cup. ‘Are you sure you don’t want an egg?’
‘People keep sticking food in my face,’ he complained. He waved out the wooden match he’d used on his cigarette. ‘She thought the house would be empty, so she went there. And got tagged out.’
‘I… don’t understand.’
Hammett paused to feather smoke through his nostrils. He drank coffee.
‘Working for Molly Farr she picked up gossip about a fat woman living in Marin who’d just retired from the skin-trade and had left town, and she figured it had to be the same woman who’d grabbed her years before.’
‘Why did she give that address to her parents as her employers’ address?’
‘It was the only address in Marin she knew, and she’d already told her folks she was working over there. She couldn’t really tell them she was maid in a cathouse…’ He broke off to exclaim, ‘Hey! It’s seven thirty! You’d better get ready for work if-’
‘Oh, I… ah… quit my job.’ Her blue eyes were troubled. ‘I’ve gotten a better one, at a lot more money.’
‘Hey, that’s great. Secretarial?’
‘ Personal secretary.’ She was momentarily enthusiastic. ‘I start the first of the week, when the girl I’m… replacing, leaves.’
‘I’ll tell you what, sweetheart,’ said Hammett, ‘I’ll take you out tonight and we’ll celebrate. The works! Dinner and-’
‘Gee, Sam, I’d love to, but…’ She found a tentative smile. ‘I’ve… got a date already…’
Hammett was surprised at his own reaction. A stab of jealousy. Wasn’t this what he’d always wanted? Goodie at arm’s length, just for laughs? He made himself lean back in his chair with a wry smile.
‘That’s good, sweetheart. Have yourself some fun.’
Jealousy, for God’s sake. Kid’s stuff. Not since Baltimore had he
… Baltimore. Three-story red brick house with white marble steps. They’d gather on the front stoop at dusk, boys and girls together. Long dresses and long hair for the girls then; girls with short hair were considered loose — perhaps even free-love advocates. Who was that girl who…
Sure. Lil Sheffer lived next door, and her girlfriend was Irma Collison. Irma’s kid sister was in school with Hammett, but he had a terrible crush on Irma. Worshiped from afar…
He realized that Goodie was interpreting his long silence as censure. ‘… you’re never around anymore, Sam.’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Sure not.’
He didn’t see the tear glint in the corner of her eye. He returned to Crystal’s story.
‘When Molly’s got raided, Crystal was arrested along with the girls. She realized that if she showed up at the arraignment, news photographers were liable to be there and might get her picture. So she had to hide somewhere. Then she saw in the newspaper about Egan Tokzek being shot — and with a dead Chinese girl in his car. She was sure that would make Heloise cut and run because if Tokzek had been carrying any papers that showed her address, some smart reporter would make the white-slavery connection. So she went over to Marin on the ferry right after leaving Brass Mouth Epstein’s office. She-’
‘Why didn’t she just go stay with Molly Farr?’
Hammett jerked his shoulders in an almost irritable shrug. ‘You’re not thinking, sweetheart. Look how easy I found Molly. Somebody else could. And if somebody else did, then Crystal’s picture would be all over the papers for sure. As it was, of course, she walked right in on Heloise, who shoved her into an upstairs bedroom and put Andy the idiot boy on duty outside the door with a shotgun while she contacted her mob friends back east and offered to sell them Crystal all over again. For keeps, this time. Of course Andy didn’t stay outside all the time…’
‘How terrible for her!’
In apparent callousness, Hammett said, ‘Well, it wouldn’t have been an exactly unknown experience. After I showed up, she was hustled over to Bolinas, and was there until Harry and I pulled her out last night. A couple of times a day Heloise would come in to tell her that the negotiations were under way, and then were closed, and that the killers were getting on the train, that they’d gotten to Denver, they’d gotten to Salt Lake City, that-’
‘Then you showed up,’ breathed Goodie.
‘The White Knight to the rescue.’ Hammett yawned and stood up. ‘I’m dead, kid. Almost forgot what I came for. Could you run down to the Post-Jones Pharmacy and pick up whatever you think she might need? Toothbrush, toothpaste, anything…’
After she had gone, Hammett began pacing the room. He’d taken the little Chinese girl out of the hands of the fat woman and her dim-witted son — she had nothing further to fear from them; but what had he really learned? Despite what he’d told Crystal about them still running, he doubted if they’d even begun. Why should they? They sure as hell knew he and Harry hadn’t been cops.
He paused to light a cigarette.
Could they somehow be made to take it on the lam? Where would they run, and to whom, if they got the wind up?
He stopped pacing again to chuckle aloud. Hell, he could use that ploy he’d invented for one of his Continental Op stories back in ’24, just after Phil Cody had taken over as editor of Black Mask. In ‘The Golden Horseshoe’ the Op had caught up with a murderous Englishman named Bohannon and his equally murderous teenage doxy in Tijuana. He had nothing evidentiary on them, so he scared them into admitting their guilt by taking it on the lam.
How had it gone? Yeah. He’d very earnestly urged them to give themselves up to stand trial for the murder of Bohannon’s wife.
So why not have the real op, Jimmy Wright, do the same thing with Heloise and Andy? He rang up the Townsend. In thirty seconds he was explaining to the fat little detective what he wanted.
‘Who am I supposed to be?’ demanded Wright.
‘A Pinkerton operative looking into the death of the girl found in Tokzek’s car. You know Heloise is Tokzek’s sister and you know, although you’re not sure you can prove it, that she supplied the girl to Tokzek. You want her to come back to San Francisco to face arraignment on kidnapping and white slavery charges.’ A new thought struck him. ‘Make it even stronger by reminding her that the hired killers she was bringing out from back east aren’t going to be too happy with her when she doesn’t have Crystal to give them. Tell her she’ll be safer in jail than anywhere else.’
‘And you think that’ll make her and the kid do a bunk?’
‘I guarantee it.’
‘Sounds awfully complicated to me.’
‘It’ll work,’ Hammett insisted. ‘It worked before, on a case that you… that I was involved in. Just throw a scare into her, and after that it’s just a straight tailing job.’
The op sighed. ‘What’ll you be doing all this time?’
‘Sleeping,’ said Hammett. And hung up the phone.