Hammett (Crime Masterworks) (24 page)

When he hung up, he became aware of Goodie at his elbow, holding the toilet articles she had gotten for the Chinese girl.

‘What is it, Sam? What’s happened?’

‘Those killers on the train from back east must have gotten in. Somebody gunned down the fat woman and her son a half hour ago.’

‘Hell, all I know for sure is that somebody didn’t like ’em.’

The sheriff was nearly as tall as Hammett, heavier in the way
that a bull mastiff is heavier than a greyhound, with direct pale eyes and a mouth made angry by a sullen lower lip. His deputy was an overweight youngster wearing cord trousers and a wide leather belt with a brass buckle.

‘Can’t even be sure it’s them,’ said the deputy.

They lay side by side on their backs in the barn. The straw around their heads and shoulders was sodden with blood and brain matter. The bodies had no faces left.

‘Kid had a broken finger on the left hand, improperly set,’ said Hammett. ‘So does the corpse. And you’d raise hell finding that woman’s double outside a circus. Once you get comparison prints from—’

‘Who’d you say you was?’ The sheriff’s face was stony.

‘Private investigator looking for a wandering daughter from Nevada.’

‘Thought you was a mighty observant sort of feller. Missing girl, you say.’ He pointed with the straw he’d been chewing on. ‘Now tell me this? Wasn’t about to mistake her for this one, was you?’

Hammett chuckled appreciatively. ‘Mrs Kuhn’s brother did time for white slavery before the war. She wasn’t convicted, but she was involved, too. Somebody answering my client’s daughter’s description got off the ferry in mid-May at Sausalito, and had a hire-car drop her at or near the Kuhn house. Once I learned the background, I had to check these people out. But nothing came of it.’

The three men paused in the weeds outside the barn’s sagging double doors. The flivver that had been parked in the drive of the Bolinas house the night before was now parked near the kitchen door of the farmhouse.

The sheriff’s interest in Hammett had been dulled by the detective’s offhand lies, but he said, ‘Maybe your client decided the Kuhn woman had spirited his daughter away even so, and—’

‘My client is a fifty-seven-year-old bank president confined to a wheelchair since a hunting accident three years ago.’

An old black Chandler with side curtains on the rear windows and a badly dented fender turned in to chug its way toward them up the incline from the road.

‘Doc Straub,’ said the deputy.

A small gray-haired man bounced out of the car with that irrepressible enthusiasm most men who handle bodies professionally seem to develop.

‘Gentlemen,’ he said. He went by them into the barn.

‘Who found the bodies?’ asked Hammett, apparently idly.

‘Jimmy Gibson from the farm a mile down the road. Heard a shotgun here twice, figgered it was Andy shootin’ crows so he come down to see could he tag along. That Andy’d shoot anything that moved. Only just as Jimmy come out of the trees up the ravine, a big man he didn’t know come running out of the barn. He jumps in a big black car and goes tearin’ out of here. So Jimmy naturally looked in and saw—’

‘Didn’t get a plate on the car, I guess.’

‘Big and black. That’s it. If he had to guess, he’d say a Reo.’

Doc Straub came out of the barn wiping his hands on his handkerchief. ‘You figgered they was gonna raise up from the dead or something, Jeremy, you run me out here to see ’em in
situ
?’

‘Just going by the book, Chet,’ said the sheriff in a soothing voice. ‘What can you tell me about the deaths?’

‘Lead poisoning.’ He gave a short whoop of laughter. ‘Shotgun. Close range. Better th’ow a canvas over ’em unless you want blowflies layin’ eggs in your evidence.’

He went by them down the slope toward his Chandler. The deputy went back into the barn with an unhappy look on his face to cover up the bodies.

Hammett and the sheriff started down the slope toward Hammett’s hire-car.

‘Looks like mob work to me,’ said the sheriff. ‘Her brother was a rumrunner for some wop in the city, and with a shotgun being used and all . . .’

‘You knew the brother?’

‘Hell, knew the whole family. This here’s been the Tokzek farm for fifty years. When they was kids, Heloise was a looker . . .’

‘Somebody told me Egan was on the hop pretty regular.’

‘For ten years and more, gettin’ worse.’ The sheriff gave a meaty chuckle. ‘Y’know, fathered that boy back there. On his own sister.’ He cast an expectant glance over at Hammett, seemed let down that there was no visible reaction. He said defensively, ‘More of it than you’d guess, rural families. Like to killed their folks. Heloise took the name of Kuhn to explain the kid, and moved over to the city to have it. Started puttin’ on all her weight after it was born.’ He paused a moment. ‘Born here, raised here, now she’s dead here. Ain’t a hell of a lot of sense to any of it, is there?’

‘They were executed for not delivering me,’ said Crystal in a tight, terrified voice.

‘I could buy that except for one thing.’ Hammett leaned back against the garish flowers painted on his chair. His eyes burned and he was yawning with fatigue, but otherwise he felt all right. ‘If they expected hired killers from back east to be looking for you, why’d they hang around to be found?’

‘You do not believe what I have told you?’

He made angry gestures with hands, eyebrows, mouth. ‘Quit clowning around, Crystal. Too many people are dying. Who’s after you, and why?’

‘But I cannot tell anyone, ever, because—’

‘I’ve had enough of this.’

He was on his feet, hurling his cigarette across the room against the radiator. It fell to the floor in a shower of sparks. As he picked up his hat and coat from the dresser, he ground it into the rug with his heel. Crystal was off the bed to catch his hand in both of hers and try to kiss his fingertips. He jerked his hand away. She started to cry.

‘It’s a nice act.’ Hammett sneered.

He watched her wipe her face on her sleeve. ‘I must tell it in my own way.’

‘Just so you tell it.’

When she had fled Capone’s Harlem Inn in Stickney, she had hidden in Chicago’s Chinatown for several weeks, until her cash had run out. Then she had gotten a job as a domestic in a rooming house on North State Street. She held it for over two years.

‘Mrs Rotariu was very nice. She called me Crystal and let me call her Anna even though I merely worked for her. The house was owned by a famous author named Keller or something—’

‘Harry Stephen Keeler?’

‘You know of him?’ she exclaimed.

‘I’ve read some of his stuff.’ Hammett’s voice was flat, and a tense, wary look had entered his eyes.

Crystal went on with her story. Early in October, 1926, a very pleasant young man calling himself Oscar Lundin had taken the back second-floor room that had been Keeler’s studio. Then one of the front rooms overlooking State Street had become vacant, and he had taken it even though it was much smaller and cheaper, with worn-out furniture.

‘Just two wooden chairs and a dresser and an old brass-frame bed and a gas ring,’ said Crystal with her eyes far away. ‘The day he switched rooms he paid a week’s rent on the new one, and then walked out and didn’t come back. The next day two men who’d visited him once before moved in.’

Two days later Crystal had just started down the back stairway to the alley after she had finished work, about four o’clock, when there was a tremendous racket from the front of the building.

‘It sounded like many auto backfires very close together, with a heavier, sort of booming sound, too. Then it stopped and the door of Mr Lundin’s room flew open and the two men ran out.’

The man in front was about twenty-five and carried a tommy gun. The second man was heavily built, and dark, and had a
shotgun. She was slammed up against the wall by the man with the tommy gun. The second man ran by her, then a dozen steps below her stopped and said, ‘Hey!’

‘That was when I saw his face clearly for the first time.’ Her hands were twisting in her lap like warring animals. ‘Twice I had seen him out at the Harlem Inn. He . . .’ Her cheeks began to burn. ‘Both times he . . . used me. He did not pay like the others.’

‘And he recognized you on the stairs.’

‘Yes. He pointed the shotgun at me and pulled the triggers, first one and then the other. I heard two clicks. He cursed and turned around and ran after the first man. They climbed out the ground-floor window into the alley.’

She had run to her cheap Chinatown rooming house, got her money from under the mattress, and caught the first train leaving Chicago. It was going to Minneapolis so that was where she went. She stayed there until one icy night a car tried to run her down. She went to Detroit. The restaurant where she worked as a waitress was bombed when she should have been there, but had been off sick. She finally returned to San Francisco where the mob had few connections, and went to work for Molly as a maid.

‘And you never knew what happened in the rooming house. Was it right across State Street from Holy Name Cathedral?’

Crystal shrugged. ‘There was a church there. I do not know what it was called.’

‘Sure not. But you recognized the man on the stairs. Was it the man who owned the Harlem Inn? The one they call Big Al?’

She said, barely above a whisper, ‘Yes.’

‘The Scarface himself,’ said Hammett. ‘No wonder they keep trying to kill you! You saw him thirty seconds after Hymie Weiss was rubbed out in front of his headquarters at 738 North State Street. You can finger Al Capone for murder!’

H
ammett lit his fifth cigarette of the day and flopped open the newspaper that Moms had slammed down on the counter in front of him. His hand stopped moving with his first cup of coffee halfway to his mouth.

Gunfire rocked the foot of Mission Street last night. Dominic Pronzini, 32, owner of the Côte d’Or Club (popularly known as Dom’s Dump), died in the 3
A.M
. blasts by an unknown assassin.

He was skipping down the story when his eyes were caught by a boldface box announcement.

‘They’re trying to bring their gang warfare to San Francisco,’ thundered McKenna in his marvelous orator’s voice. ‘Well, gentlemen, I’m here to tell you it isn’t going to succeed!’

The red-carpeted reception room was jammed with reporters crowding the mayor’s huge cherry-wood desk. Hammett hung back on the fringes. He’d tried to get Jimmy Wright at the Townsend Hotel and had failed; it was a good bet he’d be here to listen to the mayor.

‘Are you stating as a fact, Mr Mayor,’ demanded a reporter
from the
Examiner
, ‘that Dominic Pronzini’s death was a gangland slaying?’

‘Both the district attorney and I feel this is the case.’ McKenna began dramatically marking off his points with his fingers. ‘Dominic Pronzini was murdered with a shotgun. The shotgun is a classical gangland weapon. Less than twenty-four hours ago, a woman and her son were murdered up in Marin County with a shotgun. Less than two weeks ago, a rumrunner in Dominic Pronzini’s employ, named Egan Tokzek, was slain in a gun battle with police. That woman murdered in Marin was’ – he paused to tighten the suspense – ‘Egan Tokzek’s
sister
, gentlemen.’

The newsmen began frantically scribbling in their notebooks. Hammett felt his sleeve tugged. He and the fat little op, Jimmy Wright, worked their way from the crowd toward the door. Behind them, McKenna was overriding the reporters’ questions.

Hammett closed the door on the oratory. He and Wright had the hallway to themselves.

‘Your little plot didn’t come off too well,’ said the op.

‘It worked in my story.’

‘Yeah.’ He looked thoughtfully at Hammett. ‘Only this ain’t a story.’

But Hammett had realized there was an ill-concealed excitement in the stocky detective which owed nothing to the botched events on the other side of the Golden Gate.

‘You’ve got something else for me?’

‘Boyd Mulligan made some calls after you left his office.’

‘Gimme,’ said Hammett.

Owen Lynch was dressed in a conservative three-button silk-stripe worsted with a white neckband shirt and a fresh dressy Norfolk collar. The links of his gold watch chain glittered across his vest.

‘I gather you don’t think much of Bren’s theory concerning the killings.’

‘It stinks. Better get him in here, so I only have to say it once,’ said Hammett.

He smoked quietly in his chair after Lynch departed, his face keeping his secrets.

McKenna came through the door first, his jaw rather belligerent and his breath rich with brandy. Only his eyes betrayed the anxiety apparent in the worried face of Lynch behind him.

‘Hammett,’ said the mayor coolly.

The detective stood up.

The mayor said, ‘I understand you disagree with me about the mobs trying to move into our city.’

‘I don’t. The facts do. When I talked with Molly Farr last Sunday, I was convinced that—’

‘Molly Farr! But she . . . the DA is looking all over for . . .’

‘He’s looking. I found.’ Hammett stopped at an ashtray to stub out his cigarette butt. He rousted his pockets for the pack, and stuck a new one, unlit, in his mouth. ‘I’m not saying just where because I know my investigators aren’t going to get any cooperation at all from the police department, only as much cooperation from the DA as the reform committee can pressure him into giving, and exactly as much backing from
this
office as it cares to give. Therefore—’

‘I told you we were with you all the way on this investigation.’

Hammett jerked a thumb at the mayor. ‘Did you tell him?’

He went on before either man could speak.

‘Those highbinders who busted up Pronzini’s place were my boys – which shoots hell out of part of your gangster scenario, Mr Mayor.’ Hammett’s grin was tight, almost unpleasant. ‘They scared Pronzini enough so he spilled some things. Enough so I now believe Vic died in Pronzini’s back room, and that the man who killed him went there through the Mulligans. So I threw a scare into Boyd—’