Hammett (Crime Masterworks) (10 page)

‘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.’

H
ammett, 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.’

‘You trust the Preacher’s judgment that much?’

‘He and Bren and I went through grammar and high school together out in the Mission. We’ve known each other for better than forty years.’ He shook his head. ‘The directions people go! Griff Mulligan was another one in the class . . .’

McKenna bustled in. One pearl-gray trouser cuff was artfully draped into the top of an oak-tanned cowboy boot. Despite his high heels, he was half a head shorter than the other two men. Through the briefly opened door, Hammett could see the committee members still standing in odd groups around the table.

McKenna beamed, pumping Hammett’s hand up and down in both of his. ‘Congratulations! The reform committee has hired you to investigate graft in the San Francisco police
department, and to report to the grand jury all material for criminal indictments against policemen guilty of taking bribes.’ He crossed to the sliding panel in the Gillow sideboard, which was supported by two magnificently carved wooden eagles. ‘Brandy?’

‘I’m on the wagon.’ Still wary, Hammett added, ‘I’ll need strong backing in certain areas, Mr Mayor . . .’

‘Just name them.’

‘I’ll be questioning policemen, everyone from sergeant up, to start – and a lot of them aren’t going to want to talk to me.’

Lynch said, ‘Dan Laverty will see that anyone your people want, your people get.’

‘They’ll be Vic’s people, actually, headed by another ex-Pinkerton named Jimmy Wright. Jimmy’s in town now, the rest are due up from Los Angeles next week. They’ll start interrogations on Monday, in an office we select ourselves so informants can come and go unobserved for their own protection.’

‘Anything else?’ asked Lynch.

‘I’ll need some sort of authorization to talk to the phone company to monitor certain lines, with stenographers taking down all incoming and outgoing calls.’

‘Fair enough.’ Lynch extended his hand to Hammett; the mayor was working on his second brandy. ‘I’ll get written authorization for you before your men arrive. You’ll see that I meant what I said about the total backing of this office.’ He chuckled. ‘And you can be as secretive as you wish about your methods and findings, even with us.’

‘That’s right,’ said Hammett pleasantly.

When the lean detective had departed, McKenna lowered his snifter almost sadly. ‘That’s a man with a grievance, Owen, and you’ve turned him loose in my city with a meat ax.’

Surprising anger suffused the secretary’s heavy features. ‘Goddammit, man, this is your only chance to get out of the mess you’ve gotten yourself into!’

‘Mess?’

Lynch sighed. He plopped his briefcase on a walnut and gilt console table and fished in his watch pocket for the key.

‘I didn’t plan to spring this on you until tomorrow morning on the Sacramento train, Bren, but . . .’ He delved for papers. ‘You know they’ve taken to calling you
Randy
Bren around City Hall these days?’

‘Haw! That’s good, that!’ McKenna tossed off half his third brandy with a practiced flip of the wrist. ‘Randy Bren. I like that.’

‘I doubt that Colleen would find it very amusing.’

‘She ain’t likely to hear it.’

Lynch said nothing. McKenna turned a hard questioning stare on him. Mention of his wife seemed to have troubled him.

‘Well, is she?’

Lynch had removed a thin file folder from the briefcase. ‘Report from a private detective dated Monday, May 21, 1928. Subject of Investigation:
BRENDAN BRIAN MCKENNA
. Client:
COLLEEN DOROTHEA MCKENNA
. Quote: “Subject was observed leaving—”’

‘Col . . . you mean that Colly put a
private snoop
on me?’

‘What did you expect, Bren? She’s no fool and you’ve been getting more flagrant with it. Quote: “Nine thirty
A.M.
, subject was called for at City Hall by a blonde . . .” Hmm . . . ah, yes. “Left Whitcomb Hotel, Market Street, at eleven o’clock
A.M
. . . .’ Ah! Here: “Twelve ten
P.M
. ascended to upstairs room above Jack’s Restaurant with a brunette” . . . There’s a good word, Bren, “ascended”; it gives a scriptural flavor that I’m sure Colly would find comforting. The investigator points out that there are beds in those upstairs rooms, and . . .’

‘You’ve made your point,’ said McKenna weakly.

Lynch put the folder back in the briefcase. ‘And you can ask what mess you’ve gotten yourself into?’

McKenna said wearily, ‘Thank God Colly didn’t see—’

‘Who the devil do you think gave it to me?’

‘You . . . can’t be serious, Owen!’

‘With a note that if this didn’t stop, you’d be running for governor as a divorced man.’

McKenna went to the ornate rocaille pier glass to nervously center his cravat. The light slanted down cruelly across the puffiness of indulgence around his jowls, the fine veining in his eyes, the first tiny hints of burst capillaries in his nose.

He mumbled, ‘Colly would go through with it? The divorce?’

‘If you force her hand. If you don’t, she’ll keep it in the family once again. But something that
isn’t
going to disappear is that Judah Street rezoning stink. It’s all over the papers and liable to—’

‘I vetoed the damned thing Friday.’

‘Two weeks too late. It’s an open secret that your three handpicked boys on the Board of Supervisors took a thousand apiece to vote for the change from Second residential to commercial.’

‘I’ll have their candy asses if they did,’ said McKenna with as much anger as he could muster.

‘Then there’s the rape-murder of that little Chinese girl . . .’

‘Dan Laverty shot the murdering bastard dead; the blue-noses ought to be cheering.’

‘Would they cheer to know that Dan kicked the man’s balls up into his belly first?’

‘Yes,’ said McKenna defiantly, ‘after what he used ’em for.’

‘Maybe so. But the dead man was a rumrunner for a local ’legger. The teetotals are already saying it wouldn’t have happened if you didn’t allow the speaks to flourish in San Francisco. And finally is this thing of the Brewster pup and his cronies going off to Molly Farr’s place.’

McKenna attempted to shrug it off. ‘So Brady’ll have to make a little noise because he plays handball with Dalt Brewster. It’ll cool down, Owen. It always does.’

‘Not this time. Not with Evelyn Brewster on the reform committee. She wants Molly out of business and in jail.’

‘I’ll not see Molly put away for fifteen years.’ He raised a
hand to forestall objections. ‘I know, Owen, you don’t use whores and don’t see why anyone else should, but it’s more than just that. Last election, Molly had every Mary Magdalene in this city out voting tombstones for us from morning till night. I’ll not throw her down.’ He brightened abruptly. ‘Besides, nobody knows where she is.’

‘Epstein does, no matter how much he denies it to the newspapers. If I were Hammett, I’d be trying to make a deal with Brass Mouth for her secret testimony.’

‘And you wanted him hired!’ He burst out suddenly, ‘Why are we suddenly so worried about the reform element, anyway, Owen? In the old days—’

‘The old days are gone. To be governor two years from now, you have to get the clean money in San Francisco behind you now.’

‘It was the not-so-clean money put me in this office.’

‘Don’t you understand
yet
, Bren? That money has nowhere else to go.’

They descended the broad marble stairway to the floor of the rotunda, and paused at the head of the granite outer stairs while the chauffeur brought up McKenna’s grand yellow and black 1927 Lincoln coaching brougham with its gleaming side-lamps. Then Lynch went up Polk alone to his four-year-old Auburn. His thick shoulders slumped slightly. He was tired. It was all getting so damned complicated.

‘Bren, Bren, you damned fool,’ he said aloud in fond exasperation as he watched the brougham’s retreating taillights.

What wouldn’t he give to still have a wife to buoy him up, comfort him, inspire him as Colleen McKenna would do for Bren, given the chance? But his wife, Clarissa, had died, childless, in the influenza epidemic of 1918, and he had been alone ever since.