Hammett (Crime Masterworks) (13 page)

The fat woman started to laugh. Her whole body participated, like waves bouncing back and forth in a bathtub.

‘I look like I got a maid out here, mister?’

‘Lillian Tam Pong,’ said Hammett. ‘Oriental minor.’

‘I wouldn’t have no chink on the place.’

‘Miss Pong gave this as her place of employment to the police officer investigating the accident. Mrs Heloise Kuhn. The old Borne farmhouse on the Bolinas Road.’ Hammett was reading from the blank back of an envelope he had taken from his suitcoat inner pocket. He returned it. ‘The driver I hired in Sausalito brought me here. If there’s some mistake . . .’

The fat woman jabbed a still-wet finger against his chest. ‘You better clear out of here you don’t want no trouble. Ain’t no chinks on my place, ain’t been no chinks on my place, ain’t gonna be no chinks on my place.’

‘Then you won’t mind if I glance around.’

He went by her up the weathered front steps toward the screen door leading to the front room. The screen sagged in its frame. When he reached the porch, she said behind him, ‘Don’t try it, mister.’

He looked down at her, unmoving beside her rain barrel.

‘What’ll you do? Drown another kitten?’

He swung back toward the door. The woman said, ‘Andy,’ in her fat, pleasure-filled voice.

The screen door opened a foot and the muzzle of a double-barrel shotgun – an Eastern Arms hammerless takedown twelve-gauge – came through the opening. The muzzle bored into Hammett’s breastbone. He backed down the steps. He felt breathless.

The door was shouldered wider by a towheaded seventeen-year-old with the build of a bull and a snubnosed freckled face almost idiotic in its vacuity. Sweat stood on his forehead and his cheeks were flushed as if from sustained physical effort. His faded workshirt was buttoned crookedly. It hung outside his trousers. His grin was delighted and quite mad.

‘Shud I do him, ma?’

‘Let be.’

Andy quit advancing. Hammett was three steps below the porch with the twin muzzles angled down against his collarbone.

Hammett made himself take another backward step, then another, and then a third to the ground. He turned stiffly away. Flies were already buzzing around the little heap of dead fur by the corner of the house.

As he went by her, the fat woman said, ‘Just a minnit you.’

Hammett stopped.

The woman looked at him, the raisins unwinking in their sockets of suet. She took a breath and made a sustained grating noise in her throat. Her rosebud mouth worked. She spat what she had hawked up against Hammett’s necktie, just under the knot.

Hammett went wordlessly down the narrow rutted grass
track. Behind him, mother and son were making noises he took to be laughter.

As soon as the track dipped and curved to hide him from the house, he stopped and took off his tie. He threw it into the waist-high reed grass that flanked the track. He began to curse in a rising voice, as much madness in his tone as there had been in Andy’s laughter. The muscles stood out cleanly along the sides of his jaws as he ground his teeth. His face was fashioned from scraped bone. Somewhere in the trees arched over the narrow ruts a crestless scrub jay began its rusty-hinge of protest at his presence. Hammett could feel the black rage loosening its fingers from his mind.

Without being reckless, he’d never been afraid of dying. He didn’t like finding out that now he was.

He started down the track again toward the high-shouldered old Model-T coupe he’d hired in Sausalito. His progress sent a pair of mourning doves careening away, sunlight gleaming off the white feathers edging their pointed grey tails.

‘The hell with them,’ he muttered aloud.

Molly Farr wouldn’t be jungled up at a place like this. She wouldn’t give anyone like that fat woman that much of a hold over her. A fat woman who, goddammit, seemed familiar.

He came out on the Bolinas Road. His teenage driver was leaning against the fender of the Model-T. The coachwork of the car had been cut away with a blowtorch behind the cab so a pickup bed could be welded on. A devil with a thumb to his nose rode the cap on the flat-sided brass radiator.

Hammett jerked his head back at the house. ‘Where’s her husband?’

‘Ain’t nobody ever seen him that I know,’ said the boy. ‘Guess she was married just long enough to have Andy.’

‘No man around at all?’

‘Just her brother, sometimes. Big, mean-looking guy runs rum for some bootlegger over in the city.’

‘What’s the brother’s name?’

‘Don’t rightly know. Maybe my paw . . .’

‘Doesn’t matter.’

He got in the car. The leather seat was hot from the sun. Hot breeze came through the opened upper half of the windshield as they started off with a jerk. He was reduced to Phineas Epstein after all. Epstein was going to be a damned tough nut to crack.

The fat woman and her son had watched Hammett out of sight around the bend in the twin grassy ruts. The boy stood spraddle-footed on the porch, the shotgun muzzle-down in the crook of his arm.

‘He comin’ back, maw?’

She turned to look up at him, considering, squinting against the late afternoon sunlight. Finally she shook her head. ‘We scairt him.’ She added, ‘I need them kittens th’owed back up the ravine ’gainst they start stinking.’

‘Right after I finish, maw. I promise.’

Andy leaned the shotgun against the edge of the porch and went off. While he was gone, the fat woman heard, very faintly, the Model-T start up down at the foot of their track.

‘You can go finish up now, son.’

He went back into the house eagerly, letting the screen door flap shut behind him. He climbed narrow stairs to the second floor two at a time.

The window shades were lowered, making the room dim despite the bright sunshine outside. Andy carefully locked the door behind him before turning toward the bed. His face was already flushed with renewed excitement.

‘He ain’t gonna be back,’ he crowed. ‘Ain’t no way he’s gonna find out we got you here.’

Crystal, nude, was crouched back against the juncture of the walls at the head of the bed, tense as a coiled spring but her face totally without animation, her eyes, too old for her fifteen years, totally fathomless. If her features bore an expression, it was resignation.

‘Where was we?’ demanded Andy with a clumsy attempt at roguishness. ‘Oh, sure . . .’

He started to take off his trousers again.

B
rass Mouth Epstein didn’t run to front. His second-floor office at 35 Powell Street was small, crowded by a big golden oak rolltop and a couple of massive fumed oak chairs with brown Spanish-grained leather upholstery. The three unwindowed walls were outfitted with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves crammed with dark-bound lawbooks in enough disarray to suggest use, not show.

Epstein was on his feet behind the desk, taking in Hammett with shrewd sparrow eyes. He was a small dark man in a brown suit to match his eyes; a gold watch chain glinted across his spare belly. His big nose dominated the other features.

‘Take off your coat, Mr Hawkins. Heat builds up here, afternoons.’

Hammett nodded his thanks and draped his overcoat across the back of one of the leather chairs. He sat down in the other. Beside the desk, within reach of both men, was a walnut smoking stand with brass fittings. At its foot was an old-fashioned brass cuspidor. On the wooden coatrack in the corner was the lawyer’s melton Chesterfield and fashionable beaver fedora.

‘Now, what can I do for the Fourth Estate, Mr Hawkins?’

Hammett settled back in his chair and got out his Camels. ‘The name is Hammett. I’m a private sleuth.’

Epstein’s eyes got sleepy in the same way that Jimmy Wright’s got sleepy when he was thinking. He fiddled with a spindle upon which was impaled a fistful of memoranda. ‘Why the charade this morning? And why tell me now?’

Hammett glanced up at the attorney through fresh cigarette smoke.

‘I want Molly Farr. We don’t have to fight about it.’

Epstein chuckled. Somewhere back in the open mouth a gold-capped tooth glinted. ‘We
won’t
fight about it, Hammett. This office has no information concerning Miss Farr’s present whereabouts.’

‘I’ve been hired by the reform committee to take Vic Atkinson’s place. Forget all that stuff in the papers about a gangland slaying. Vic wanted to talk with Molly about police corruption. Instead, you let her talk with the newspapers and then dust while they built her up into the biggest story since the Gray-Snyder electrocution. That’s fine with me. You’re doing a great job for her. But if you’d let Vic talk to her before—’

‘Mr Atkinson never contacted this office.’

‘That’s one of the things I wanted to know.’ A smile twitched the thin lips beneath his mustache. ‘I knew we didn’t have to fight.’

‘I am an officer of the court, Hammett. Molly is a fugitive from justice. If I knew where she was, naturally I would produce her. From what I read in the papers, she’s in New York – or Chicago – or Paris. The Mexican border patrol is going to nab her in the next hour or so, and the London bobbies are only waiting . . .’

‘Oh, I know
where
Molly is,’ said Hammett. ‘From what you say, I know more than
you
do. And frankly, I have more power than you do to
use
what I know.’

Epstein bounced to his feet. He went to the window. Through the Venetian blinds, the dying afternoon made stripes of light and shadow across his body. He turned, still abruptly, to face Hammett. There was an ominous look in his eyes.

‘Is that supposed to be a threat?’

‘I’ve been authorized to tap a number of phones around town. I’ll be questioning police lieutenants and captains on Monday. I’ll be subpoenaing records.’ He paused to flick ashes. ‘I’d like to count on
your
cooperation.’

Epstein’s dark eyes were unwinking, rat-beady. He said: ‘You’re doing the talking.’

‘I’d like Molly to do some talking. To me, in private. Vic wanted to bring her in, make her testify under oath. That was the wrong approach, I felt. Better to—’

‘You can damn well believe it’s the wrong approach,’ Epstein snapped. The blinds clacked dryly as he moved against them.

‘What she tells me will be used,’ Hammett admitted, ‘but won’t be attributed. Her name will never appear . . .’

‘I’m sorry, Hammett, but you’re wasting your time.’

‘I’m being paid for it.’ Hammett looked at his watch and stood up. ‘I wouldn’t want to make you late for supper. As it stands, I’m afraid I’ll be talking to Molly without your permission.’

‘You’re bluffing.’

He nodded. ‘Sure, I
didn’t
talk with her direct, just with the lady who . . .’

He bit off his words, stubbed out his cigarette, and retrieved his overcoat. Epstein watched, his eyes beady and unwinking. Hammett went out and pulled the door shut behind him.

After a full sixty seconds, Epstein crossed to the door, opened it and looked around the frame. His secretary’s typewriter instantly stopped clacking.

‘Jenny, did Mr Hawkins leave?’

‘He went straight through without stopping, Mr Epstein. If you would like me to try to catch him, sir . . .’

‘No, that’s fine, Jenny.’

He went back inside and sat down at the desk. He frowned at his green blotter, then picked up the phone and dialed the long-distance operator. He leaned forward intently.

‘Yes, ma’am, I would like to make a person-to-person call to Mrs . . .’ He broke off abruptly. The tension left his small, tidy body. ‘Uh . . . cancel that, operator. I nearly made a mistake.’

He put the receiver back in the hooks with a grimace, and stood up for a turn around the room. He went to the window.
He looked out. He muttered, ‘Damn him,’ under his breath. Hammett might have told him about putting listeners on phones just to panic him into doing what he nearly had done – calling before they got around to him. Then Hammett would subpoena his records from the phone company.

Epstein got his hat and coat from the rack and went out. ‘I’ll be back in a few minutes, Jenny, if you don’t mind waiting.’

‘I’ve got two more revisions to type on the Wilcox brief anyway, Mr Epstein.’

Epstein went down the narrow stairway to emerge into Powell Street with the Pig’n Whistle on his right and the Edison Theatre on his left. His eyes darted and probed. No Hammett. The Turpin Hotel a few doors down, the cigar store next to that? The Pig’n Whistle itself, maybe?

No, all too risky, too exposed.

He turned abruptly up Powell toward Ellis with quick, nervous strides that his small stature made almost strutting. He went by Gene Compton’s and the United Cigar store on the corner without pausing, although both had pay phones, and right across Ellis. He’d made up his mind.

On the far corner he darted across Powell and started back down the even-numbered side. No Hammett. The tall, hawk-faced detective would be too conspicuous even in a crowd to be missed.

At Market he ducked abruptly into the Owl Drug’s brightly lighted, cavernous interior. Beside the front entrance was a pair of pay phones with green metal trays holding the current directories. Epstein spilled silver across one of the trays, dialed the long-distance operator and asked for a three-digit Marin County number. He completed the call, fed in the required coins, and talked for a scant thirty seconds.

He hung up with a complacent look on his face. ‘What I thought,’ he muttered aloud. ‘Faking it.’

Three minutes after he had disappeared across Powell toward his office, Hammett lowered the newspaper that had been shielding him from view at the lunch counter. He hissed out a
cigarette in his coffee cup, left a dime for the waitress, and sauntered over to the pay phones.

He thumbed a nickel into the slot of the phone Epstein had used. His face felt flushed. Goddamn, to play the percentages that way and have your number come up! It had just felt
right
that of all the pay phones available on the block, Epstein would choose the crowded, bustling Owl as the place he’d be least conspicuous while calling.

‘This is your long-distance operator. May I help you?’

Hammett drawled, ‘Inspector O’Gar. Homicide, Central Station. Five minutes ago a long-distance call was placed from this number. SUtter eight-seven-three-seven.’