Hammett (Crime Masterworks) (2 page)

‘Q is San Quentin, isn’t it?’ said Goodie abruptly. Hammett, busy with his keys as they crossed deserted Post Street, didn’t answer. She demanded, ‘Sam, what
did
you do before you were a writer?’

‘Lived in sin with a three-legged dwarf lady who liked to—’

‘Sam!’

Like so many postquake buildings, 891 Post had a lobby suggesting a Greek temple rather than an apartment house, with a huge square pane of mirror beside the elevator to reflect the faces and figures of anyone mounting the steps from the foyer. Hammett depressed the elevator lever.

‘I was a Pink,’ he said abruptly. He pulled open the door, slid back the inner iron grillwork. ‘A sleuth. A detective for the Pinkerton Agency. That waiter was a steward aboard the
Sonoma
when a hundred twenty-five thousand in gold specie disappeared from her strong room
en route
from Sydney back in twenty-one. I turned up most of the gold in a drainpipe aboard ship, but he got caught changing two missing sovereigns into paper money and did a little trick at Quentin.’

The elevator groaned its way toward the third floor. Goodie
said thoughtfully, ‘I can never be sure I’m getting a straight answer out of you.’

‘You wouldn’t know a straight answer if it bit you on the nose.’

‘Bite me on the nose, Sam.’

Her face was cold against his lips, shiny with the night mist. He could feel the heat of her small firm body through her coat.

‘I guess you’re healthy.’

She giggled. ‘A cold nose only counts with dogs.’

‘A dog you ain’t, lady.’

Goodie reached around the doorframe to flip on the light.

‘Come in for a while, Sam? Please?’

The door opened directly into the living room, with the oversized closet that hid the wall bed just to the left.

Goodie dropped her coat on a sagging easy chair and headed for the kitchen. ‘Some dago red?’

‘Good.’

Hammett waited in front of the couch, which was backed up against a davenport table with a Boston fern on it. Goodie came out of the kitchen carrying two water glasses half-filled with cheap Italian wine. The dim light aureoled her blond hair. She handed the writer a glass and sat down on the couch.

‘What do private detectives
really
do?’

‘Get enough on somebody down at City Hall to keep their clients out of jail.’

‘You’re a cynical man, Sam.’

‘Not in this town, lady. In this town I’m a realist.’

Goodie made a vague gesture. ‘I don’t know anything about politics.’

‘When I was a kid, my old man – who was a tobacco farmer then – switched from Democrat to Republican to get the cash to run for Congress. Instead, they just about ran him out of St Mary’s County, Maryland, on a rail. Just for changing party affiliation. But
here
. . .’

He put one foot on the cushion beside her and leaned forward so an elbow rested on the raised knee. He gestured with his free hand, his voice taking on a surprising intensity.

‘Every illegal activity in the book is going on right now in San Francisco – gambling, bookmaking, prostitution, protection. And without mob control. Why?’ He leaned closer to laugh unpleasantly. ‘Because your local government got here first. While our Mayor of All the People stumbles around with his eyes shut, City Hall, the cops, and the district attorney’s office own this town. And are owned in turn. Anything –
anything
– is for sale here. And anybody.’

Goodie’s small sure voice spoke to the bitterness in his words. ‘
You
wouldn’t be, Sam.’

He set down his empty glass. The light had died from his eyes and the slight, almost consumptive flush had faded from his cheeks.

‘Don’t make book on it. Thanks for the wine, brat.’

‘Sam . . .’ Her voice was soft. She laid an inviting hand on the couch beside her. Under his steady gaze, she started to blush, but went on, ‘Sam, you don’t have to . . . I mean, you can . . .’

He tilted up her face with a lean sinewy hand, brushed her lips with his, and straightened up again.

‘I could have a wife and a couple of kids stashed somewhere.’

‘I’d . . . take my chances, Sam.’

‘Long odds, sister.’

He stopped outside her door for a moment before using his key on the one directly adjacent. He slapped an open palm lightly against the varnished wood. He wondered just how big a fool he was.

‘Too big a one to change now,’ he muttered aloud.

A
s Hammett’s typewriter clacked hesitantly in a vain attempt to do something about Felix Weber and the Primrose Hotel, a muscular Morris-Cowley bullnose was going by the dark empty oval of Kezar Stadium. Egan Tokzek leaned closer to the split windshield through which ocean air poked cold fingers. Sand hissed against the bonnet, almost overwhelming the bulbous headlamps as the stolen car ran west toward the ocean along the southern edge of Golden Gate Park.

‘Jesus Jesus,’ the big man chanted, as if making incantations over the terrible bundle on the back seat of the big saloon car. There was sickness in the white rim around his lips and in the frightened flash of his eyes.

Better not until he’d dumped it. But he had to. Better not. Well, Jesus, he
had
to.

He wrestled the big car over to the shoulder. He’d stolen it only half an hour before and still wasn’t used to the right-hand drive.

He fumbled in a pocket as the swirling fog paled the wide-spaced gas lamps. He used his coat sleeve to wipe sweat from his forehead, then thumbed open his snuffbox and snorted a generous pinch of the white C-and-M crystal. His face contorted as the potent mixture of cocaine and morphine bit into the tortured flesh of his inner nose.

Tokzek glanced over his shoulder at the bundle on the rear seat. The rough wool of the horse blanket was soaked through. With an angry curse, he stamped on the clutch and rammed the rigid central lever into low. The jerk slammed him back against the seat.

To his right, Ninth Avenue curved into the park. Tokzek imagined a gleam of nickel and polished steel deep in the shadows under the eucalyptus trees.

No. Nothing.

He burst into triumphant laughter. The fog was thinner, a retreating wall. To his right the black empty reaches of the park, to his left scattered dwellings with empty sand between, the dunes tufted with coarse sea grass and spurges and beds of low succulents.

His eyes whipped wide open. Lights had entered the small round rearview mirror.

The police! Who else would be crouched, waiting to pounce, along this lonely stretch of midnight road?

He tried to urge more speed from his car. Once he had lost his pursuer . . . now!

His breath whistled through stained, gappy teeth as Egan Tokzek wrenched over the wheel to send the heavy machine skidding into Thirty-seventh Avenue.

Holy Mother of Christ, there it was, the big foreign car with the steering wheel on the wrong side, just as the phone call had warned.

Chief of Inspectors Daniel J. ‘Preacher’ Laverty eased his black Reo Wolverine from under the shadows and out into Lincoln Way. It was his own car, not a police vehicle; the call had reached him at home with the family.

Far ahead, through a gap in the roiling fog, was a wink of red taillight. The wind hissed sand against his windshield. All the way to the ocean? Or would the car thief sense pursuit and try to lose him in the avenues running south from . . .

Another gap. Taillight . . . ah! South it was.

‘Two can play at that game, laddie,’ muttered the plain-clothesman through his teeth. He was a grizzled Irishman with a sad, judging face under a thatch of once-carroty hair now ash-gray. His accent was Mission District, more like Canarsie or Baum’s Rush a continent away than a stage Mick’s brogue. Only his eyes suggested the copper.

Laverty dragged his steering wheel over and switched off the headlights just as the turn was completed. The mist had tattered enough so he could use the lights of the car ahead as a guide.
While trying to coax more speed from the Reo, he removed a long-barreled Police Positive from his mackinaw pocket and laid it on the seat against his thigh.

Fear rode with Egan Tokzek like some obscene Siamese twin. The lights had disappeared from his mirror, but he still had the bundle to dispose of.

Why’d the little bitch have to die, anyway? None of the others had, down through the years. He snuffled painfully. They’d survived, been shipped back east, and that had been the end of them, every one.

Until tonight.

Far enough south to dump her? Had to be at least two miles from the park. The houses that had crowded the first two blocks were gone. He eased off the accelerator. Lug it out into the dunes and dump it. Days, maybe weeks before nosy brats would find whatever the animals had left.

There’d be no more after tonight. Coasting, he pulled toward the shoulder of the road. No more. One dead was one too many. He glanced in the mirror as he reached for the brake.

Egan Tokzek screamed. Filling his mirror was a huge black auto, thundering down upon him.

He slammed the car back into gear, tried to shove his foot through the floorboards, and wrenched over the wheel in the vain hope of cutting the other off. Fenders crumpled. He swung away. The pursuer’s radiator was at his rear door, creeping up. Sudden lights flooded the mirror to claw at his drug-sensitized eyes. His hands jumped and shook on the wheel as if electricity were pouring through them.

Dan Laverty’s hands were rocks. The cars were shoulder to shoulder. He wanted to do it the easy way if he could. One big hand left the wheel to make violent motions as he pulled up on the left of Tokzek’s car.

‘POLICE!’ he bellowed over the roar of powerful engines and the scream of wind. ‘PULL OVER!’

But Egan Tokzek was already scrabbling for the scarred walnut butt of his huge old Colt .44 rim-fire.

His first shot passed in front of Laverty’s windshield. The policeman’s teeth gleamed in a wolfish grin. This was what he lived for, this was when he felt really alive.

The gun roared again. This time Laverty’s window shattered. He felt the warm trickle of blood down his cheek from a hurled splinter of glass. More shots. Still no hits. And still Laverty’s gun remained on the seat beside his thigh.

Then his lips pursed and his eyes narrowed. A hundred yards ahead the road ended at Yorba Street, without going through to Sloat. The grizzled policeman leaned all the way across his seat to rest the fleshy heel of his gun hand on the door frame where Tokzek’s bullets had taken out the glass. He pumped two rounds into the side of the bullnose.

Tokzek heard the first shot. A terrible fist struck his shoulder with the second. He fought the wheel. Jesus. Left arm dead. And the road was gone. Jesus Jesus!

The Morris-Cowley rammed headlong into the sand, reared like a stallion, slewed, sheered off two stubby pines while losing a fender and a door. The car canted, almost rolled, butted sideways into a sandhill, and rocked to a halt.

Tokzek was hurled across the seat by the impact. He lay still, panting, hearing without comprehension the moaning wind and a liquid trickling noise. His gun was still in his hand; directly ahead gaped escape where the door was gone.

He slithered forward, jackknifed down over the running board. A push with cautious boots, a twist, and he was out.

On his usable elbow and his knees, he crawled a dozen yards to a lip of dune and sought shelter behind a tussock of coarse fringing sea grass. He bit through his lip to keep from crying out; the wet cold had begun worrying at his bullet-torn shoulder. His lips writhed back from his bloodied teeth. His hand took a fresh grip on the smeary pistol butt. He waited.

Dan Laverty was out of his Reo and shielded behind an open door with the .38 in his hand. Nothing moved in the stark glare his headlights laid on the other car. There was no sound except the high whine of escaping steam. The visible, right-hand door was closed. Laverty moved out past his own car.

Now he could smell gasoline from a ruptured tank. One shot fired . . .

The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want
.

The Psalm chanted through his mind, unsought but oddly comforting. He doubted if the man could have survived the crash. Why had he risked his life over a mere car theft?

He placed each step deliberately, so no water-filled succulents would crunch underfoot. Through the window he could see that the far door was gone. Three or four more paces, and he could see something blanket-wrapped in back. Even as this registered, his eyes were finding the awkward turtle-trail scrabbled away from the car. Digging knees and elbows, which meant. . .

He was spinning and dropping into his firing crouch, but Tokzek had already come up from behind the dune a dozen feet away with the big .44 revolver speaking at Laverty’s chest. Its voice was merely a series of clicks. The hammer was falling on empty chambers.

With a groan of terror, Tokzek fled into darkness. He made two paces before Dan Laverty shot him in the spine. He went down in a sudden heap, writhing and screaming, as Laverty turned back toward the car and the hastily glimpsed bundle. He shone his flashlight in through the unbroken rear window. Flung up against the glass as if in entreaty was a delicately boned hand. He recoiled savagely.