Hammett (Crime Masterworks) (15 page)

‘Before you left Five Points, you ever hear of a big Irishman named Babe?’

‘Should I have?’

‘Might have been after you left,’ Hammett muttered thoughtfully. ‘The Babe was an expert with a tire iron and made the mistake of trying to use one on a fat little killer out of Baltimore named Garlic.’

Lonergan slapped the tire iron against his open left hand. ‘This ain’t Baltimore, bo.’

‘Garlic blew away both the Babe’s kneecaps with a matched pair of .45’s. They had to take his legs off just below the hips because he got gangrene from the garlic on the bullets. These days he rides around on a little board with casters on it, selling pencils around Forty-second and Times Square . . .’

Lonergan chuckled and tightened his grip on the tire iron. ‘I think you want to get petted with this thing, bim—’

He shot forward across the room to crash headfirst into the far wall. He whirled off it with tire iron upraised and lips drawn back from tobacco-stained teeth.

‘I like to burn ’em when they’re comin’ at me,’ grated Jimmy Wright. The lumpy .45 automatics in his fists stared at Dead Rabbit with unwinking eyes.

The tire iron clattered to the floor. Dead Rabbit’s hands shot up, shaking. His face was pinched and tired around the eyes as if he had developed a sudden head cold.

Hammett hadn’t moved during the flurry of action. He said: ‘Garlic, why don’t you walk this bird over to the edge of the basement well so he can tell us what he knows? If he don’t tell us in thirty seconds, he jumps off. Twenty-nine . . . twenty-eight . . .’

‘Jesus, man, that’s twenty feet down!’ cried Dead Rabbit. Wetness was mooning out from beneath his arms. ‘I’ll get all busted up.’

Hammett watched the big terrified Irishman. ‘When you
can’t crawl up the ramp anymore, he puts one .45 in each of your ears and pulls the triggers at the same time.’

Hammett and the op walked away from Lonergan’s Garage.

‘Once he gets his nerve back, he’s going to call ’em up and tell ’em we were here,’ said Jimmy Wright thoughtfully.

‘I want him to. I want them to start knowing I’m around. My God, is that crude, Jimmy! A phone call from Shuman after he left the reform committee meeting Thursday night. And that second phone number he gave us – that’s Boyd Mulligan’s home phone!’

‘Crude is right. A direct line to the Mulligans. But I guess they never expected anyone to be around asking questions.’ Then the operative started laughing. ‘Without anybody laying a glove on him! They should call him Scared Rabbit.’

H
ammett went up the sloping walk between carefully trimmed privet to the rambling two-story pseudo-Elizabethan in the exclusive Parkside District. When he rang the bell, the inset door was opened by a young pretty colored maid much like his own Minnie Hershey in
The Dain Curse
.

‘Mr Hammett? Come right in, sir.’

The living room was two-storied under a cathedral arch, the furniture heavy, leather, of a scale to match the room.

‘Right in here, sir.’

Two of the solarium walls were floor-to-ceiling glass that framed a staggering sweep of Pacific beyond the rolling miles of dunes.

Evelyn Brewster, seated on the cretonne cushions of the cane sofa, did not rise when Hammett entered. Her eyes were frosty.

‘I should have thought I’d made my feelings about you clear on Thursday night.’

Hammett bowed wordlessly, then said, ‘But I’m sure you would wish me to carry out the committee’s objectives properly.’

An unexpected smile touched her lips and she leaned forward with sudden animation. ‘I know I must seem inflexible to a man of your . . . background, Mr Hammett. But the work of the committee is all-important to me. The punishment of the guilty must take precedence over merely personal considerations, so if you have come here to plead special circumstances for some friend whose activities—’

‘Quite the contrary, Mrs Brewster.’ He fell easily into her stilted cadences. ‘A prominent San Franciscan to whom I need an introduction might inadvertently have information vital to my investigation.’

She looked intrigued. ‘The name?’

‘George F. Biltmore.’

‘My God!’ She was genuinely shocked. ‘You can’t suggest that Captain Biltmore could possibly—’

‘Not for a moment, ma’am. But . . .’ He lowered his voice confidentially. ‘A man in Captain Biltmore’s position can open doors . . .’

She nodded wisely. ‘I’ll call him at his office.’

As Evelyn Brewster picked up her phone in Parkside, Boyd Mulligan was spinning his swivel chair to answer the phone in his Kearny Street bailbond office.

‘Mulligan Bros,’ he snapped self-importantly as he unforked the receiver.

It was the muffled voice that over the years he had come to recognize if not know. ‘Get him.’

‘Oh . . . uh, yeah, sure.’

Mulligan laid the receiver on the desk and went down the narrow room to the doorway of the inner, private office. He was short and strutting, his shoulders were narrow and his posture just slightly swaybacked, so he always walked as if he were about to start tap dancing.

‘Uncle Griff, it’s . . . uh . . . him.’

He returned to his desk and hung up the phone noisily. All
three of them knew he wasn’t bright enough to know things he wasn’t bright enough to know.

Griff Mulligan was a white-haired banty rooster with a lilting Irish tenor as light as a Shannon mist. He wore a faded comfortable flannel shirt and old-fashioned armbands that matched his garters and galluses.

‘A pleasant good morning to ye.’

‘It isn’t,’ grated the no-longer disguised voice.

‘And what might the trouble be with it?’

‘I just heard about that stupid attempt to scare off Hammett.’

‘I’d not heard of it meself,’ said Mulligan with a sideways gleam of his faded blue eyes toward the doorway beyond which his nephew sat. ‘But I suppose that Boyd thought—’

‘That would be a first. Hammett learned it was Joey Lonergan who fingered him for the strong-arms, and last night he and his right bower, Jimmy Wright, paid a visit to Lonergan’s Garage. Lonergan opened the bag for them.’

Mulligan’s voice remained as mild and melodious as before.

‘Well, now, faith, it’s not that Joey knows the devil of a lot. A couple of phone numbers without any names to—’

‘It’s given Hammett a connection. He’s tough and he’s smart . . .’

‘So was Atkinson.’

‘Whoever killed Atkinson did us no favor,’ snapped the other man quickly. ‘Remember that.’ His voice became elaborately casual. ‘I want Hammett left alone, but I don’t want him getting hold of Molly. Where do you have her stashed away?’

‘Faith, I don’t know meself. I’ve let Boydie handle that.’ He lowered the receiver. ‘Boyd! Where is it that you have Molly holed up then?’

‘Ask her little kike attorney. He wouldn’t tell me.’

To the phone, Mulligan said in an ominously calm voice, ‘Boyd seems to have lost sight of her for the moment, but Molly won’t sing—’

‘TelI him to find her. Now.’

‘Right ye are,’ said Mulligan in his lilt.

‘And be careful on that phone after Monday.’

‘Right ye are,’ he lilted again.

He hung up and went down the office, cat-quiet, to stop behind his nephew’s chair. With a great deal of relish he swung his right arm to explode his fist against the side of Boyd’s head. The younger Mulligan was knocked sprawling out of his chair, the scalp under the oily hair split by his uncle’s ring. He sat on the floor with a hand to his head.

‘Ye stupid git!’ snarled Griff Mulligan. ‘Who told ye to go after Hammett?’

‘But . . . but I thought . . . Shuman said . . .’

‘Now get y’rself out o’ here and find where Molly is, before Hammett finds her for us.’

The private office was heavy with the smells of leather and saddle soap. It was just across California Street from the new Robert Dollar building. George F. Biltmore stood up behind a huge rolltop with innumerable pigeonholes lined in green felt. His white walrus mustache was ragged and yellowed at the edges from being chewed on; snarled thickets of white brow bristled above his deep-set eyes.

‘Going to clean up this town, are you?’

‘So they say.’

‘So Evelyn Brewster says.’

Hammett matched the power of Biltmore’s massive hand with his own wiry strength. Biltmore sat down in his deep leather chair with a surprised look on his face. He had captained his own five-masters around the Horn and in later years had made his fortune from shipping and marine insurance.

‘She’s a fine woman,’ he said. ‘Fine woman. You’re a close friend of hers?’ When Hammett didn’t respond, he added challengingly, ‘Hey?’

Hammett, remembering everything he’d heard of this tough old man, said, ‘She hates my guts.’

‘Then why’d she ask if I’d see you? Hey?’

‘She thinks I’m going to smite the wicked.’

‘But you ain’t.’ He made it a statement.

‘I’m going to find a murderer and smite him.’

‘Murderer, hey? Humph.’ He drew the tangled white thickets down over piercing blue eyes that had never seen the need for eyeglasses, and burst out, ‘Clean up San Francisco! I remember when that husband of hers was fifteen,
his
father Derry – God rest his soul! – and I took the boy to Diamond Jessie Hayman’s parlor house on Ellis Street to start the lad out right. Then he marries that whey-faced ninny! Reform committee, had the gall to ask
me
to be on it! Why . . .’ He jerked his head around toward Hammett. ‘What do you want from me? Hey?’

‘You have a houseguest in Mill Valley—’

‘I have a lot of houseguests at various times.’ He got to his feet and went to the window. There was no fat on his seventy-year-old frame, no sag of age. ‘I’ve been a seafaring man, I remember my friends.’

‘This houseguest is a woman, a client of Phineas Epstein’s.’

‘A gentlewoman from back east,’ he boomed. ‘Tragic personal loss—’

‘Molly Farr,’ said Hammett. ‘The missing madam.’

Biltmore returned to his desk to select a cigar from his humidor. He raised shaggy eyebrows at Hammett and, when he was rebuffed, clipped the cigar and lit it with a wooden match. He watched Hammett sideways through clouds of aromatic smoke.

‘I’ve got dogs on the estate, son. Hounds, a whole pack of ’em. The sheriff in those parts, I own a good piece of him, too. Not because I’ve tried to, but because it’s the natural order of things, power being what it is . . .’

‘Sure,’ said Hammett readily. His voice was thin; he hitched his shoulders unconsciously. If he read the old man’s temperament wrong, he wouldn’t get to Molly. He said: ‘When I was a Pink, I worked for a lot of men like you, Mr Biltmore. Men having labor trouble at the mine or the factory who needed somebody to bust heads and put the workers back in line. You’re
big and old and tough and mean, and you think you’re never going to die. So you take what you want and do what you want, and worry about the consequences afterward.’

Biltmore seemed unangered by this appraisal. ‘You’ve drawn your full ration of gall, son, I’ll give you that. But tell me: Why was I supposed to be hiding out this Molly Farr?’

‘Because you get a hell of a kick out of it. Or because Epstein has something on you that even your money and influence can’t—’

‘Nodody’s got anything on me, son,’ he snapped. ‘I came up rough and I came up hard, but I came up clean. I don’t have to look behind me on dark streets . . .’

‘“I’ve picked up my fun where I found it,”’ quoted Hammett. ‘Only Evelyn Brewster wouldn’t call it fun. She takes her sin seriously.’

‘Mmph. How’d you find out I was hiding Molly?’

‘Epstein got so clever he got careless.’

The big ex-seaman stared at him from eyes that were blue chips of ice. ‘What d’ya want her for? Hey?’

‘Talk, that’s all. The man who got killed talked with her the day before she lammed. I think one reason she lammed was because she didn’t want to talk with him again. I don’t intend to put her on any witness stand and I don’t intend to turn her over to the DA, but I have to know if she has anything that would help me find my friend’s killer.’

Biltmore brooded a moment more, then slapped the desk in sudden vast delight.

‘Yes! All right, goddammit! Tomorrow afternoon. If you know a presentable lady friend, bring her for a social afternoon. Then you just slip away – Molly spends her time in one of the guest cottages, you can go talk to her there and no one else the wiser.’

They shook hands. At the door, Hammett paused. ‘Why
are
you hiding her out? And why are you letting me see her?’

‘I like Molly. Within her own limits, she’s an honest woman.
As for you . . .’ Biltmore’s expression became that of a gleeful schoolboy. ‘I’ve been waiting for years for somebody to come along who could stick a thumb into Brass Mouth Epstein’s eye.’

C
hinatown wore a new aspect at night, especially with the sea fog drifting through its narrow alleys and steep side streets. The hurrying pedestrians were mere undetailed forms in the swirling mists. Only the sound of heels on concrete betrayed their passage.

Hammett turned up Jackson past a group of tourists huddled under a streetlamp, ingesting their guide’s lies about the labyrinths six and seven stories below Chinatown streets. Hammett knew you could work your way down the hill from cellar to cellar, but you were never more than one flight below the pavement.

In Ross Alley – known as Old Spanish Alley before the Chinese pushed the Mexicans out – he went down a shallow set of stairs from street level into deep gloom. At the foot of the steps was a small concrete alcove holding a pair of battered stinking garbage pails. Hammett slapped his hand with a measured beat on the naking red door behind them. Nothing happened. Hammett kept on. Finally a voice inside called something in Chinese. Hammett persisted. The voice repeated its high-pitched exhortation. Hammett continued.

‘Go ’way,’ the voice finally called in English.

Hammett didn’t. There were sounds of a whole series of bolts being drawn. The door opened a bare two inches on a stout length of chain.

‘Go ’way.’

‘Chin Kim Guy,’ said Hammett.

The door was slammed shut and bolted.