It was coming right, now. Felix Weber, the ex-con, was gone. The Primrose Hotel was gone. Hammett’s typewriter clacked. The ashtray was overflowing; flecks of tobacco drifted on the top of black coffee long since gone cold.
He stopped, rubbed bloodshot eyes, tugged his mustache, considered. Aaronia Haldorn. Her husband Joseph. And instead of the run-down hotel, their exclusive Pacific Heights place, the Temple of the Holy Grail. Joseph would work as a character where Weber hadn’t.
He got up and started to pace. Hell, yes. Joseph would believe. That was it. Wield the knife himself. Sure. As for Aaronia…
Aaronia.
Hammett quit pacing to light himself a cigarette. Aaronia. He’d given her the name but not the physical description of his older sister, Reba. Of all his relatives, the only one he still wrote to. He chuckled. Aaronia Rebecca Hammett, as stiff-necked as he was. He’d send her a copy of The Dain Curse when Knopf published it. If he ever got the damned thing revised.
But still he stood, gripped by the past. Philadelphia. He’d been.. what? Two? Three? White house with a little wooden porch and initials carved penknife deep in the railing. Tagging along after Reba to the park to fetch drinking water. Must have been Fairmont Park. And the time the old man took them both — maybe even the baby, Dick, too — to the city dump. There’d been a billy goat with a long white beard and mad eyes, eating tin cans. Or at least the labels off them.
Circle of men around the goat, laughing. Every time one of them would toss a cigarette butt, quick as lightning the goat would piss on it and put it out. Every time. He’d never seen his father laugh so hard.
He became aware that knuckles had been rapping against the front door for some time. He rubbed a hand over his sandpaper jaw and called, ‘I’m asleep.’
‘Sam. It’s me. Goodie. You’ve got another phone call.’
Hammett went to the window and jerked at the bottom of the shade. It shot up to slap twice around the roller. Sunshine burst in to squint his eyes. He threw up the bottom half of the double-hung window and sucked in shocking dawn air. Where the hell had the night gone?
Goodie was dressed for work in a checked gingham apron frock with a collarless square neck and a midcalf hem that would turn no sufferer’s head in the doctor’s waiting room. Following her to her apartment, he talked at her back.
‘I’m going to give that damn Atkinson a blast he won’t forget, after that trick he pulled last night…’
He knelt on the couch, picked up the phone, clipped the receiver between the side of his neck and a raised shoulder so he could make drinking motions with his left hand to suggest coffee. Goodie nodded and disappeared into the kitchen.
‘Yeah, I know, Vic. The cops picked you up and-’
‘Dash? Jimmy Wright here.’
A well-remembered voice from his Pinkerton past, another operative who’d stayed on when Hammett had left.
‘Jimmy, how’s the boy, long time no see. You still with the Pinks?’
‘Not for a year. I quit to go with Vic down south. Why I called, they found him behind the Southern Pacific station this morning. Worked over with a baseball bat or something, then dumped there.’
I’m in danger, Dash! Strange men… Hope they beat… goddamn head in…
‘Dumped?’ he asked almost stupidly. The tips of his fingers had turned pale against the phone. ‘Dead?’
‘You never saw one deader.’
He was without movement for a full twenty seconds; then a long ripple that might have been a shiver ran through his lean body.
‘I’m on my way.’
Goodie came from the kitchen with a steaming cup of coffee half-extended. Hammett felt hollow. Hope they, beat… goddamn head …
‘Sam, what’s wrong? What-’
He was already heading for the door.
Hammett paid off the cab and started across Third toward the bulky colonnaded Mission Revival SP station, built of stucco phonied up like adobe. When he saw the craning knot of loungers at the far end of the long wooden baggage shed, he veered down Townsend instead. At the gate in the iron picket fence, a uniform bull was holding back the crowd. He let Hammett through.
Jimmy Wright, five feet eight and overweight, was at the foot of the wooden ramp leading up into the shedlike baggage building. They shook hands.
‘Who found it?’ asked Hammett.
‘Switchman.’
The meat wagon hadn’t arrived yet. Another knot of men, all official and dominated by O’Gar’s bullet head, was clustered in the five-foot-wide area between the side of the baggage shed and the closest of the tracks. The space was for brakemen servicing the rolling stock. Four of the men staggered toward the timbered loading dock at the foot of the ramp with a sagging army blanket. When they dropped it near Hammett’s feet, one corner flopped back. He had such an acute moment of deja vu that he felt dizzy. Words washed over him.
‘… stink?’
‘Shit his pants when he died…’
Baltimore. His first job, at thirteen, right out of Polytechnic Grammar School. The old man had gotten sick and Hammett had tried to pick up the pieces as messenger boy for the B amp;O line in their Charles and Baltimore Street office. He was late for work as usual, cutting across the tracks, when he’d stumbled on a brakeman who’d been killed by a switching engine.
A head just like Vic’s: still whole but oddly misshapen, almost soggy, no more interior structure than a beanbag. Same stink of excrement. A shabby way to die. He flipped the coarse brown wool back up with an apparently casual toe.
‘His money was on his hip,’ said Jimmy Wright. ‘No wallet.’ Working undercover, Hammett thought, there wouldn’t be. ‘Clerk from the hotel saw the excitement, came over, and recognized the clothes.’
‘Sure it wasn’t a switching engine?’
‘Brakeman was through twenty minutes before. No body. No trains moving on this track last night anyway. You see everything you want here?’
Hammett nodded. They went up Townsend to the side entrance of the depot arcade and walked under arched ceilings past the train gates. In the Depot Cafe at the far end of the station, they found a table and ordered coffee. Jimmy Wright also ordered ham and eggs. Watching the stocky two-hundred-pound op shovel in hashbrowns, Hammett felt a little ill. He drank scalding black coffee. He fumbled out a cigarette.
‘You going to take over the investigation of the police department now that Vic is gone?’
The op’s sleepy brown eyes gleamed, then were sleepy again. He was dressed in a brown suit; his collar was soiled and rumpled from an all-night train ride from LA. ‘I was hoping you would.’
‘Me? I haven’t been a sleuth for over six years.’
‘And I’m a hired hand.’ He sopped up the last of the egg yolk with his final bite of toast. ‘I’m lousy behind a desk, whereas you — ’
‘A writing desk, not a detective’s rolltop.’
‘Mebbe.’ The op lit a Fatima and feathered smoke at the ceiling. He chuckled. ‘Remember that check-raising gang you and Vic and I ran down in the old Blackstone Hotel on O’Farrell Street?’
Hammett remembered. Big blond guy with a broken nose that Vic had hung out of a third-story window by an ankle to cool down. He said, ‘Remember when I got drunk at that hotel on Taylor? The one where all the ex-cons went on Saturday night because they could get together at the weekly dance and plan jobs without being arrested as parole violators? Vic was…’ He broke off abruptly. ‘Jimmy, he called me last night. He was on a round of the speaks, wanted me to meet him. If I had…’
‘Right you are,’ said the thickset operative meaninglessly.
Hammett leaned forward, elbows on the table.
‘Any blood where they found him?’
‘No blood. He was dumped.’
‘Coroner’s man make a guess on the time yet?’
‘You know them.’
‘Then here’s something you can give O’Gar when you talk to him. Vic was alive just before one o’clock. If he wants to know what Vic was working on, refer him to Preacher Laverty. I’d think the fewer cops know about your operation right now, the better.’
‘Check.’
He left the stocky detective getting into a cab for the Hall of Justice, after again refusing Wright’s pleas that he join the investigation. He caught a 15 car up Third Street. Dammit, Vic’s death really had nothing to do with him. Vic Atkinson had been unwary and had gotten dead. Probably had nothing to do with the investigation anyway. As far as anyone on the reform committee knew, Vic had returned to LA to get his crew together.
But at Mission Street, Hammett got off the trolley and walked the two blocks to the Chronicle building. He picked up back issues of the newspaper. When he left the Sutter car at Hyde twenty minutes later, he stopped at the Eagle Market to get a bottle of rye from the back room.
He had two things neither the police nor Jimmy Wright had. DAvenport 7789, from which Vic had called him last night. And the fact they had talked with Molly Farr on Sunday.
It was easy enough to check out the phone. He detoured to Dorris’ garage and dialed the number. It rang seven times before it was picked up.
‘Clyde there?’
‘Clyde? Look, mister, this is a pay phone.’
‘ Pay phone?’ exclaimed Hammett in a surprised voice. ‘You sure?’
‘’Course I’m sure. In the lobby of the Army-Navy YMCA…’
Hammett hung up. What the hell was there down at the foot of Mission Street to attract Vic at one in the morning? He called the Townsend, where Jimmy Wright had taken over Vic’s room, and left a message for the stocky operative. Then he went up to his apartment.
Propped up in bed with the newspapers, the bottle of rye, cigarettes and ashtray, he started rapidly and expertly through the papers. The baseball bat was a mob trademark — which made it easy to copy. Sunday’s story on Molly he reread, followed her through. Monday, arraignment due that afternoon. Tuesday, neither she nor Crystal Tam showed up for the arraignment. He also reread the stories on Tokzek’s death and his eventual identification as a rumrunner.
He saw his glass was empty again, filled it, and padded over to his typing table and the night’s work still laid out. The hell with Atkinson. The hell with Molly Farr and the newspaper dog vomit. He had a book to revise.
But what had seemed so vital a few hours before became shallow and trite against Vic’s battered, shapeless head.
He went back to bed. He poured his tumbler half full.
The death didn’t make sense. What could Vic have learned in a casual evening of barhopping that was worth his life? As a working hypothesis, nothing. So leave that to the cops and to Jimmy Wright.
Dammit, leave the whole thing to the cops and Jimmy Wright. And where was that damn bottle?
Molly. Atkinson meant to pressure Molly until she broke, but she took a run-out powder. If he’d found her…
Wait a minute, Hammett. Your glass is empty. Hell, bottle empty too. Just as good. Work to do. Writing. Deathless prose.
Deathless death dead, Vic Atkinson, God dam mit Vic is dead.
Molly Farr. Find Molly. Molly’s folly.
Instead, Hammett found his shoes and a shirt and the door. When he returned ten minutes later, the empty pint had ballooned to a full quart.
His glass was under the bed and his head hurt when he bent over to get it. Should have had something to eat. Too busy to eat. Busy detecting, Hammett the ferret ferreting through the newspapers, gumshoeing bloodhounding sherlocking.
Today’s paper. Hadn’t checked that yet. And there it was.
MOLLY’S OWN STORY OF BEING ON SPOT
by Harry Warner
In the predawn hours before her grand jury arraignment on vice charges last Monday, a haggard Molly Farr wrestled with her code of life. Four courses, she told this reporter, were open to her.
‘I can commit suicide,’ she told him. ‘I can squeal. I can fight the case by pleading my innocence in front of a jury. Or I can run away.’
As she spoke, her voice was deadly serious.
‘I want you to get one thing straight. I have lived my adult life by the code of the underworld. They tell me I may have to go to jail for fifteen years. I won’t do that. But I’m not a rat. Sure, I know a lot about police graft. And I know I’m being crucified. I know politics is mixed up in this case somewhere. They’re going to feed Molly Farr to the wolves and say they’ve got the goods on her and that she’s a bad woman and they’re going to put her away for a long time. But I’m not going to blow the whistle now.’
She shuddered.
‘I have a code that says, “Keep your mouth shut.”’
Continued on Page 3, Col. I
Hammett read it through to the end. A typical Brass Mouth Epstein maneuver. Take Mulligan Bros money to defend Molly, then warn them — and the DA and the cops as well — that Molly knew too much for them to expect her to pull fifteen years at Tehachapi. Smear it all over the newspapers through exclusive interviews with feature writers. Make Molly a cause celebre. And then pull the plug, spirit her away, and let everyone sweat a little bit.
And into the midst of all this sweating and careful orchestration, perhaps, had stepped Vic Atkinson. What if he had found a lead to Molly that someone heard about? If someone didn’t want him to get to her, there was a motive for murder.
Which, however, only worked if you assumed that Molly knew something worth murder. You’d have to talk to Molly to know for sure.
Hell, he needed a licensed grift, so he could lean on the people who had to be leaned on. That meant convincing the committee he should take Vic’s place — just as Jimmy Wright had been urging him. Once he had that…
Who was he kidding? He was a writer now, not a sleuth. He lowered the level in his glass. The cops would turn up some bum or wino who’d ridden the rods up from Stockton or down from Portland, had rolled Vic as a drunk, and had hit too hard. Had carried the body across the street to dump it by the tracks.
Did he really believe that?
‘Do you really believe that, Hammett?’ he asked aloud.
Goddammit, Vic’s death had nothing to do with him, was nothing to him. Right? He sat on the edge of the bed, rubbed his hands down over his face. He had a book to revise. So many things…
But all in an orderly progression. First things first.
Where in hell had that bottle gotten to?