The op pulled on the handbrake of the ’25 Marmon 8 Sedan he’d rented from a Third Street hire-car outfit. By God, Hammett had been right. The fat woman and her idiot son had stuck around. At least their flivver was parked behind the farmhouse.
Dragonflies hovered on gossamer rainbow wings in the scorching sunlight, but the op wore his overcoat as he trudged stolidly up the creaking porch steps. In the right-hand pocket was a big black Colt. 45, just in case Andy the idiot boy mistook him for a gorilla from Chi-town and started waving around that twelve-gauge.
He used the heel of his hand on the screen-door frame. It was warped enough to rattle loudly. By pressing his nose against it he could see the fat woman waddling toward him from the kitchen. Fat? That was like saying that Babe Ruth played baseball.
‘This here’s private property, mister.’
‘And this here’s my ID as an operative for the Pinkerton Detective Agency, lady,’ said Wright in his nastiest tone.
He didn’t expect her to fall on her knees and babble out a confession of white slavery, but he’d hoped for more than a crossing of fat-huge arms on her immense bosom and the single monosyllable she dropped at him.
‘So?’
‘So we’re looking into the death of the little Chinese girl your brother raped and murdered…’ He went through the pitch that Hammett had worked out, but could see it wasn’t taking. He finished up barking, ‘So you’d better come over to the city with me now, sister. We can do our fighting in court.’
She turned her head to yell, ‘Andy! You, Andy! Git on down here.’ She turned back to Wright. ‘You ain’t got nuthin’, gumshoe. Nuthin ’. Me ’n’ my baby boy hadn’t been over’n the city in weeks, and cain’t you nor nobody else prove no diffrunt.’
Andy clattered down the stairs from the second floor. Hammett had done a job on him, all right. His lips were puffed and split, one eye was swollen shut, and there was a nasty bruise on one temple. The fat woman was now standing arms akimbo like Strangler Ed or the Scissors King squaring off for a wrestling card at the State armory.
‘You move outta here quick, mister, afore Andy moves ya.’
The op hesitated, then with a muttered curse turned away. It rankled, but Hammett had wanted him merely to throw a scare into them and depart. He went back down the steps. The only one who’d got scared was him. The look on that witless kid’s face…
He fired up the Marmon, adjusted the spark and smoothed out the mixture. Hell, maybe Heloise had been acting, raising his call, riding out his bluff.
Two hundred yards north of the farmhouse lane, the main road took a curve. Here he pulled the Marmon off into the weeds and got out. No place to leave it, close enough to keep the mouth of the lane under surveillance, where it wouldn’t have been seen. That meant he’d have to go up through the woods afoot to take his plant on the house.
Sweating and swearing and slipping, he swarmed up the steep earth bank and into the greasewood. And him in city suit and shoes! Nettles stung his face and hands; once he stepped squarely into a red-leafed cluster of poison oak. Damn Hammett, anyway. If they didn’t run…
Then a new thought made him try to make better time through the baffling underbrush. What if they ran too soon, before he was even in position? He planned to go afoot down the lane behind them if they fled, counting on the Marmon’s eight powerful cylinders to soon catch him up. But if they were gone when he got there…
Twenty minutes later he’d worked his way around through the hardwoods to the ridgetop behind the depression that cupped the farmhouse and outbuildings. He still couldn’t see the place, but he was pretty sure he’d have heard the flivver being cranked up. He paused, spent and blowing, under a live oak tree. About time to start downhill toward the edge of the cleared land.
A shotgun crumped. He froze, after a moment mopped his tough lumpy face with his handkerchief while listening intently. No repeats. But it had seemed to come from the farm.
Slick leather soles sliding on the dry grass, he went quickly downhill through the trees, hanging on trunks and branches to keep from landing on his backside. Summer-dry blackberry bushes clutched at his suitcoat.
Whump. Another shot.
He broke into a shambling, sliding, stumbling run, cursing and slapping at the mean black-bodied deerflies that seemed to have found him suddenly tasty.
He pulled up, chest heaving and eyes smarting with sweat, at the edge of a copse of birch trees a couple of hundred yards above and to one side of the weathered sagging barn. The Model T was still in the yard, but he could see the top of a black touring car just disappearing down the lane. Goddammit, anyway. But then he saw that a boy had emerged from the woods in front of him. Not Andy. A much smaller kid, eleven or twelve, maybe, just ambling down across the open fallow fields toward the barn.
The op still hesitated, the. 45 from his waistband now in hand. What had gone on down there while he’d been stumbling around in the woods? Andy shooting crows? Or had he and Heloise been in the car he’d seen departing? Or were they…
The boy burst from the barn before his scream of terror, delayed and thinned by distance, reached the op’s ears. His cap sailed off as he fled down the lane with his head back and his arms working.
Jimmy Wright went out across the uneven weed-furzed furrows, picking his way. He was in no hurry; he was pretty sure what he’d find in the barn. If he were right, all he had to do was clear out before the kid came back with the law, and find a phone to call Hammett.
‘ What? Both of them?’ Hammett scratched washboard ribs under his white shirt. ‘Okay. I’m on my way now. I’ll call you at your hotel when I get back.’
He rehooked the receiver, stood frowning at it, then picked up the phone again and was connected with the Weller. Pop answered.
‘How’s the patient?’ asked Hammett. He listened. ‘Fine. Keep her locked in that room unless I’m…’ He broke off abruptly to listen, exclaimed, ‘ Telephone? ’ and listened some more. He finally said, ‘Yeah, okay, I should have thought of getting word to her folks myself that she’s okay…’ He interrupted himself. ‘Listen, make damned sure she doesn’t wander around the hotel anymore where someone can see her. All of a sudden it’s gotten tricky and I don’t know why. Yet.’
When he hung up, he became aware of Goodie at his elbow, holding the toilet articles she had gotten for the Chinese girl.
‘What is it, Sam? What’s happened?’
‘Those killers on the train from back east must have gotten in. Somebody gunned down the fat woman and her son a half hour ago.’
‘Hell, all I know for sure is that somebody didn’t like ’em.’
The sheriff was nearly as tall as Hammett, heavier in the way that a bull mastiff is heavier than a greyhound, with direct pale eyes and a mouth made angry by a sullen lower lip. His deputy was an overweight youngster wearing cord trousers and a wide leather belt with a brass buckle.
‘Can’t even be sure it’s them,’ said the deputy.
They lay side by side on their backs in the barn. The straw around their heads and shoulders was sodden with blood and brain matter. The bodies had no faces left.
‘Kid had a broken finger on the left hand, improperly set,’ said Hammett. ‘So does the corpse. And you’d raise hell finding that woman’s double outside a circus. Once you get comparison prints from-’
‘Who’d you say you was?’ The sheriff’s face was stony.
‘Private investigator looking for a wandering daughter from Nevada.’
‘Thought you was a mighty observant sort of feller. Missing girl, you say.’ He pointed with the straw he’d been chewing on. ‘Now tell me this? Wasn’t about to mistake her for this one, was you?’
Hammett chuckled appreciatively. ‘Mrs Kuhn’s brother did time for white slavery before the war. She wasn’t convicted, but she was involved, too. Somebody answering my client’s daughter’s description got off the ferry in mid-May at Sausalito, and had a hire-car drop her at or near the Kuhn house. Once I learned the background, I had to check these people out. But nothing came of it.’
The three men paused in the weeds outside the barn’s sagging double doors. The flivver that had been parked in the drive of the Bolinas house the night before was now parked near the kitchen door of the farmhouse.
The sheriff’s interest in Hammett had been dulled by the detective’s offhand lies, but he said, ‘Maybe your client decided the Kuhn woman had spirited his daughter away even so, and-’
‘My client is a fifty-seven-year-old bank president confined to a wheelchair since a hunting accident three years ago.’
An old black Chandler with side curtains on the rear windows and a badly dented fender turned in to chug its way toward them up the incline from the road.
‘Doc Straub,’ said the deputy.
A small gray-haired man bounced out of the car with that irrepressible enthusiasm most men who handle bodies professionally seem to develop.
‘Gentlemen,’ he said. He went by them into the barn.
‘Who found the bodies?’ asked Hammett, apparently idly.
‘Jimmy Gibson from the farm a mile down the road. Heard a shotgun here twice, figgered it was Andy shootin’ crows so he come down to see could he tag along. That Andy’d shoot anything that moved. Only just as Jimmy come out of the trees up the ravine, a big man he didn’t know come running out of the barn. He jumps in a big black car and goes tearin’ out of here. So Jimmy naturally looked in and saw-’
‘Didn’t get a plate on the car, I guess.’
‘Big and black. That’s it. If he had to guess, he’d say a Reo.’
Doc Straub came out of the barn wiping his hands on his handkerchief. ‘You figgered they was gonna raise up from the dead or something, Jeremy, you run me out here to see ’em in situ?’
‘Just going by the book, Chet,’ said the sheriff in a soothing voice. ‘What can you tell me about the deaths?’
‘Lead poisoning.’ He gave a short whoop of laughter. ‘Shotgun. Close range. Better th’ow a canvas over ’em unless you want blowflies layin’ eggs in your evidence.’
He went by them down the slope toward his Chandler. The deputy went back into the barn with an unhappy look on his face to cover up the bodies.
Hammett and the sheriff started down the slope toward Hammett’s hire-car.
‘Looks like mob work to me,’ said the sheriff. ‘Her brother was a rumrunner for some wop in the city, and with a shotgun being used and all…’
‘You knew the brother?’
‘Hell, knew the whole family. This here’s been the Tokzek farm for fifty years. When they was kids, Heloise was a looker…’
‘Somebody told me Egan was on the hop pretty regular.’
‘For ten years and more, gettin’ worse.’ The sheriff gave a meaty chuckle. ‘Y’know, fathered that boy back there. On his own sister.’ He cast an expectant glance over at Hammett, seemed let down that there was no visible reaction. He said defensively, ‘More of it than you’d guess, rural families. Like to killed their folks. Heloise took the name of Kuhn to explain the kid, and moved over to the city to have it. Started puttin’ on all her weight after it was born.’ He paused a moment. ‘Born here, raised here, now she’s dead here. Ain’t a hell of a lot of sense to any of it, is there?’
‘They were executed for not delivering me,’ said Crystal in a tight, terrified voice.
‘I could buy that except for one thing.’ Hammett leaned back against the garish flowers painted on his chair. His eyes burned and he was yawning with fatigue, but otherwise he felt all right. ‘If they expected hired killers from back east to be looking for you, why’d they hang around to be found?’
‘You do not believe what I have told you?’
He made angry gestures with hands, eyebrows, mouth. ‘Quit clowning around, Crystal. Too many people are dying. Who’s after you, and why?’
‘But I cannot tell anyone, ever, because-’
‘I’ve had enough of this.’
He was on his feet, hurling his cigarette across the room against the radiator. It fell to the floor in a shower of sparks. As he picked up his hat and coat from the dresser, he ground it into the rug with his heel. Crystal was off the bed to catch his hand in both of hers and try to kiss his fingertips. He jerked his hand away. She started to cry.
‘It’s a nice act.’ Hammett sneered.
He watched her wipe her face on her sleeve. ‘I must tell it in my own way.’
‘Just so you tell it.’
When she had fled Capone’s Harlem Inn in Stickney, she had hidden in Chicago’s Chinatown for several weeks, until her cash had run out. Then she had gotten a job as a domestic in a rooming house on North State Street. She held it for over two years.
‘Mrs Rotariu was very nice. She called me Crystal and let me call her Anna even though I merely worked for her. The house was owned by a famous author named Keller or something-’
‘Harry Stephen Keeler?’
‘You know of him?’ she exclaimed.
‘I’ve read some of his stuff.’ Hammett’s voice was flat, and a tense, wary look had entered his eyes.
Crystal went on with her story. Early in October, 1926, a very pleasant young man calling himself Oscar Lundin had taken the back second-floor room that had been Keeler’s studio. Then one of the front rooms overlooking State Street had become vacant, and he had taken it even though it was much smaller and cheaper, with worn-out furniture.
‘Just two wooden chairs and a dresser and an old brass-frame bed and a gas ring,’ said Crystal with her eyes far away. ‘The day he switched rooms he paid a week’s rent on the new one, and then walked out and didn’t come back. The next day two men who’d visited him once before moved in.’
Two days later Crystal had just started down the back stairway to the alley after she had finished work, about four o’clock, when there was a tremendous racket from the front of the building.
‘It sounded like many auto backfires very close together, with a heavier, sort of booming sound, too. Then it stopped and the door of Mr Lundin’s room flew open and the two men ran out.’
The man in front was about twenty-five and carried a tommy gun. The second man was heavily built, and dark, and had a shotgun. She was slammed up against the wall by the man with the tommy gun. The second man ran by her, then a dozen steps below her stopped and said, ‘Hey!’
‘That was when I saw his face clearly for the first time.’ Her hands were twisting in her lap like warring animals. ‘Twice I had seen him out at the Harlem Inn. He…’ Her cheeks began to burn. ‘Both times he… used me. He did not pay like the others.’
‘And he recognized you on the stairs.’
‘Yes. He pointed the shotgun at me and pulled the triggers, first one and then the other. I heard two clicks. He cursed and turned around and ran after the first man. They climbed out the ground-floor window into the alley.’
She had run to her cheap Chinatown rooming house, got her money from under the mattress, and caught the first train leaving Chicago. It was going to Minneapolis so that was where she went. She stayed there until one icy night a car tried to run her down. She went to Detroit. The restaurant where she worked as a waitress was bombed when she should have been there, but had been off sick. She finally returned to San Francisco where the mob had few connections, and went to work for Molly as a maid.
‘And you never knew what happened in the rooming house. Was it right across State Street from Holy Name Cathedral?’
Crystal shrugged. ‘There was a church there. I do not know what it was called.’
‘Sure not. But you recognized the man on the stairs. Was it the man who owned the Harlem Inn? The one they call Big Al?’
She said, barely above a whisper, ‘Yes.’
‘The Scarface himself,’ said Hammett. ‘No wonder they keep trying to kill you! You saw him thirty seconds after Hymie Weiss was rubbed out in front of his headquarters at 738 North State Street. You can finger Al Capone for murder!’