Hammett (Crime Masterworks) (20 page)

The stranger hesitated. He squared broad lean shoulders under his overcoat and leaned closer. ‘It’s from . . .’ He leaned closer yet. ‘
Him
.’

‘Him?’ Mulligan said stupidly, trying to appear wise.

‘
You
know.’ The eyes darted to the door at the far end of the room. ‘Is there a private office? Anyone coming by in the street can see me in here, and if they do . . .’

Boyd, thoroughly confused, left his blond-wood swivel and led the way.

Griffith Mulligan had shared the private office with no one since his brother’s death a few years before. There were filing cabinets along the left wall, with layers of thick asbestos sandwiched between their sheet steel sides. They were always locked, and Griff Mulligan carried the only key. The secret lives of half the powerful in San Francisco were locked away in these drawers; the secrets of the other half were locked away in Griff Mulligan’s shrewd Irish skull.

Boyd turned to face the stranger in the middle of the room. ‘Is this private enough for you?’ he demanded, without bothering to conceal the sneer in his voice. He wished the damned girl would get back; he was starving to death.

The stranger slid his eyes down the blank right-hand wall where the room’s only window had been bricked in and plastered over years before.

‘This’ll do,’ he said.

He put a sinewy open hand against Boyd’s face and shoved. Hard.

Boyd windmilled into Griff’s chair. The chair tipped over backward. He slammed knees-first into the wall and yowled. He struggled to his feet still too shocked for either fear or anger.

‘Are you crazy? I’m
Boyd Mulligan
.’

The stranger stood in the center of the room with his legs set wide, leaning toward Boyd as if against a strong wind.

‘And I’m Dashiell Hammett,’ he said.

‘Ham . . . Hammett?’

He felt his lower lip tremble. He pushed the lank black hair from his eyes. He wasn’t ready for this. He, well hell, he just . . .

‘Dorothy . . . will be back from lunch any—’

‘Twenty-two minutes,’ said Hammett. ‘Sit down, punk.’

Boyd found himself righting his uncle’s chair and lowering himself gingerly into it, keeping a tight grip on the wooden arms. His cheeks burned. Wait until he put out the call on this bastard! He’d have them start by breaking his shins, and then his forearms, and then smashing his kneecaps, and . . . But dammit, his uncle had said nobody touched Hammett. And what his uncle said . . .

‘I just came to put you on notice, punk,’ said Hammett. ‘I’m going to fry the man who killed Vic Atkinson.
And
the men who—’

‘Listen, I don’t—’

‘
And
the men who pointed him in Vic’s direction.’

Boyd fought his panic. Hammett was just trying to trick him
into spilling something. Well, Boyd Mulligan didn’t spill. He was tougher and smarter than that.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘You know, punk.’ Hammett stepped closer, eyes on fire. ‘Why do you suppose I took apart Pronzini’s last night?’

‘But the papers said Chinese gangst—’

‘Jesus!’ Hammett laughed gratingly. ‘You
are
just an errand boy, aren’t you? Well, tell your uncle that Pronzini spilled his guts. To me. About the Mickey Finn in Vic’s drink. About calling your uncle. About who your uncle called. Everything.
Everything
, punk.’

Boyd was licking his lips, again and again. His heart seemed to be thundering in his chest. ‘I . . . he wouldn’t . . . Atkinson didn’t . . .’

Hammett crossed the office in long strides. He jerked open the door. He spun abruptly on his heel to look back.

‘You ever seen a man who’s been hung, punk? He ends up with a neck three feet long.’

He was gone. Boyd, stunned, dragged himself from his uncle’s swivel chair. He reached the windows of the front office just in time to see Hammett striding down Kearny toward the Hall of Justice.

The Hall of Justice!
With shaking hands, he reached for the telephone.

‘You had fun last night,’ accused Jimmy Wright.

Hammett drank bad coffee from the rotund detective’s gas ring. Through the window he could see a strip of the Southern Pacific baggage shed roof. Just a week ago, he’d been standing there looking at Vic’s pulped features. A week, and nobody tagged for it. But . . .

‘Had some more fun this morning. You sure that wireman has the Mulligan Bros phones covered?’

‘I just came from the phone company. They’re covered.’

Hammett lowered his coffee cup and looked in as if waiting for something to surface. ‘Who stepped on this bug?’ he asked.
Laughter brimmed in his voice. He looked very youthful, his eyes sparkled. ‘I just left Mulligan Bros. Bought breakfast for their secretary the other morning and picked up their routine. When she was out to lunch and Uncle Griff wasn’t in yet, I went in and pushed Boydie-boy around a bit.’

‘How is he?’ asked the op in an interested voice.

‘He sings soprano. I’m hoping he used the phone after I left.’

The op shrugged, and fed him the straight line. ‘So he calls Uncle Griff . . .’ He liked to watch Hammett work.

‘When he did, Uncle Griff should have been sitting in Dave’s Barber Shop on McAllister and Fillmore, waiting for a Mr Hambledon to show up with some hot mining stock tips. Dave’s Barber Shop isn’t a place Uncle Griff ever goes.’

‘That wouldn’t be Mr Dashiell Hambledon, would it?’

‘The very same. Incognito for this important occasion.’

In crisp sentences, he outlined what had happened at Pronzini’s the night before, to appropriate comment and a lot of chuckles from the op. Finally he stood up and put on his hat.

‘How does the interrogation of the police brass look?’

‘An Inspector O’Keefe sounds brittle. And I think the lieutenant on the take from Molly is starting to get religion. I’ve got both of them coming back tonight. I’ll be taking them on myself. Want to sit in?’

‘Let me call you later.’ From the door, he asked, ‘What did the Pinks have to say about Tokzek?’

The op snapped his fingers. ‘Good you asked. Meinbress didn’t know me, so he wanted to check with some of the other boys before he looked in the files for—’

‘Meinbress?’

‘He took over as Resident Sup. when Geauque went out. I’m supposed to call him this afternoon, and he’ll give me whatever they have on him.’

When Hammett walked up the hill from a Geary Street car three hours later, Preacher Dan Laverty was leaning against the side of a dusty parked Reo, arms folded on his chest. He was
talking with the wispy Frenchwoman who ran the hand laundry in the streetlevel shop below Hammett’s apartment building.

She went back inside with a dissatisfied look on her face when Hammett arrived. The Preacher faced Hammett squarely. He was troubled, his hard cop’s eyes worried.

‘Ah . . . Iook, ah, Dash, what do I hear about you being mixed up in this thing last night at Dominic Pronzini’s joint?’

‘The tong binders?’ Hammett shrugged. ‘I had to put pressure on Pronzini, and they were the only people in town I could think of who wouldn’t be scared to go up against him.’

‘Yeah-h-h . . .’ Laverty was hesitant, oddly unsure of himself. He began, ‘Dash, I want to . . .’ He stopped and shook his head. He sighed. In a tired voice, he asked, ‘What made you want to pressure Pronzini anyway? Why do you think he had anything to do with Vic’s death?’

Hammett ticked off his points on his fingers.

‘Vic called me that night, around one o’clock, from the YMCA on The Embarcadero. He was given directions and the password to Pronzini’s joint at the cigar store in the Hotel Commodore. With that, I went after Pronzini. He admitted, to me, that he fed Vic a Mickey. He admitted that he called Griff Mulligan. He admitted that someone came around to take a look at Vic. But he claimed that the last he saw, Vic was alive.’

‘You believe that?’

‘It might be the truth. But I know damned well it was his boys who dumped Vic’s body behind the Southern Pacific station.’

The sunlight had finally broken the noonday fog to move Laverty’s shadow, black and hinged in the middle, around on the sidewalk and up the tan bricks of the apartment building as he shifted position. In a thickened voice, he said, ‘I’d like to get that devil’s hound Pronzini down in the basement of the Hall of Justice for an hour. We’d find out the truth.’

‘Mulligan Bros would have him out of there on bond before you could work up a good sweat. And if you took him to a station house instead of the Hall, that White Top cab parked
outside their shop on permanent call would deliver the bond before you could get him booked.’

Laverty nodded. The brief flash of fire within him had died. He asked, ‘Where’d you get the chinks?’

‘One of the big wineys in Chinatown owed me a favor.’

Laverty jerked his head in assent and went back to his black Reo. Seeing the car reminded Hammett. He leaned an elbow on the edge of Laverty’s open window. ‘Dan, you’ve seen the coroner’s report on Egan Tokzek by now. Was the guy coked up?’

‘To the eyeballs. C-and-M crystals. Still had the snuffbox in his watch pocket. Damned lucky for me he was, he emptied a .44 at me without hitting anything but glass.’

Hammett watched Laverty’s car go down Post Street, then stood unmoving for a full minute after it had disappeared. Egan Tokzek was a dope addict, longtime, habitual, as Pronzini had intimated. And he’d been on the hop the night of his death.

Which didn’t make any sense at all, unless . . . Yeah, unless you turned it around. Considered the fact that he was a rumrunner for Pronzini, and that Pronzini brought most of his Canadian booze into Bolinas. Obscure excitement moved through him, feeding on half-understood . . .

He crossed quickly to Dorris Auto Repair and called the Townsend Hotel for Jimmy Wright. Dammit, by this time Jimmy should have heard something from Pinkerton’s on Tokzek.

‘Did you call?’ he asked without preamble.

‘Yeah. And from the tone of your voice I ain’t going to surprise you much to tell you that Heloise Kuhn, your fat dame up in Marin, is Egan Tokzek’s sister.’

‘Good, good,’ said Hammett rapidly. ‘Sure. What I thought. I kept trying to remember her from two hundred pounds back. She was a looker, was collared on a Mann Act rap, right?’

‘In 1916, right. Pinkerton’s made the collar in a white slavery case, and Tokzek drew five years – although it’s the sister who sounds like bad medicine. He got out in twenty-one.’

‘What were they supposed to be doing?’

‘Supplying Oriental girls to Colosimo’s house in Chi-town.’

‘Wasn’t Johnny Torrio running the house then for Big Jim?’

‘Torrio. Right.’

‘And when he retired, the Scarface took over,’ muttered Hammett to himself. He raised his voice. ‘Better count me out tonight, Jimmy, on those interrogations. I’m going to be busy.’

‘You have all the fun,’ grumbled the op.

Hammett laughed and hung up and dropped another nickel and asked for DOuglas 6400. He was lucky enough to catch George Biltmore in.

‘Well. Hammett.’ He sounded slightly uneasy.

‘What can I do for you?’

‘How’s my credit after Sunday’s performance?’

Biltmore’s heavy, relieved laugh boomed out. ‘With me, A-one. But May wouldn’t be too delighted to see you again. Since she obviously can’t blame the grieving widow, she’s blaming you.’

‘Yeah, well, I brought the booze. How’s that chauffeur of yours in a brawl?’

‘Harry?’ The laughter boomed again. ‘He fought in the First Matabele War in ninety-three against the flower of Lobengula’s warriors. Lost his eye in the Battle of Imbembese.’

None of which meant too much to Hammett; he hadn’t been born until a year later. ‘Think he’d be willing to drive me somewhere tonight?’

‘Promise him action, he’ll be there.’

‘Nine thirty ferry in Sausalito,’ said Hammett. ‘He can pick me up at the slip. It wouldn’t hurt to bring a gun if he’s got one handy, although I don’t expect shooting.’

‘You don’t need another man, do you?’ There was a wistful note in Biltmore’s voice.

‘Your wife’s sore enough at me the way it is.’

I
t was the damnedest car Hammett had ever seen, a huge dark-green beast with a chest-high hood. Its owl-eyed headlamps were augmented by a searchlight mounted on a nickel stanchion on the right running board. A second set of folding windshields protected riders in the back seat.

‘What the hell is it?’ he asked Harry. The solid, compact chauffeur wore dark clothes and a soft knit cap instead of his uniform.

‘This is the new Cadillac four-passenger Sport Phaeton, sir,’ he said in his formal South African accent.

‘Make that Dash,’ said Hammett.

‘Very well, Dash. Sir.’

‘Have it your way.’

He had a hunch the South African was grinning.

The motor roared, then dropped to a throaty grumble. The car’s interior had glossy burled walnut paneling and seats of pale hand-crushed leather.

Harry said, ‘If I could know where we’re going, sir . . .’

‘To rescue a damsel in distress on the Bolinas Road.’

‘Sir.’

The car slid smoothly away from the curb. A few miles out of Sausalito, they swung left into the Bolinas Road at Dolan’s Corner, where their lights briefly showed them a rundown country store. They had the crushed-gravel road totally to themselves at that time of night.

‘Whom might the damsel in distress be, sir?’

‘A fifteen-year-old Chinese ex-whore named Crystal.’

Harry was silent, digesting this.

‘We’re saving her from a fate worse than death, is it, sir?’

The big car began the climb out of the valley on a road that wound and twisted back upon itself through grove after grove of close-packed eucalyptus trees and then, quite suddenly, redwoods.
They kept climbing this shoulder of the mountain that lay between them and the sea. Hammett checked his strap watch.

‘We ought to be there by eleven. Time I explained the setup, Harry.’

He did so as the Cadillac cleared the redwoods and rolled across windswept grassy hilltops clumped with genista and greasewood bushes. Far behind, across the black void of the bay, Hammet could see the twinkling lights of the city through the clear air. There was no fog.