Hammett

12

Hammett went down Prescott Court, a narrow cul-de-sac off Vallejo Street, looking at house numbers. He paused in front of 20/22, an older building with white scroll-work on the roof overhang and around the windows of the lower flat. From somewhere, very faintly, came the tang of fermenting grapes. It was only in the past ten years, since the Italians had begun pushing the Irish out, that the billy goats had disappeared from the lower slopes of Telegraph Hill and the bootleg winepresses had begun to outnumber the whiskey cookers.

Which reminded him that he needed a bottle if he was going to play in Fingers LeGrand’s poker game. It was tricky to try to get information about payoffs over the poker table in seemingly casual conversation; but Fingers knew him as a writer, not a detective, and he doubted that news of his hiring by the reform committee would be out on the street yet. He’d left McKenna’s office less than an hour before.

And the sooner he found Vic’s killer, the sooner he could return to the revision of The Dain Curse.

Hammett knocked, then rattled the heavy brass knob of the alley door. He had to stoop to press his nose against the heavy-gauge wire mesh that covered the window. It was gritty with street dirt.

A blocky silhouette moved toward Hammett, a latch was turned, and the window opened inward. A garlicked voice shoved words at him through the mesh. ‘I don’t know you.’

‘Fingers does.’

‘Fingers who?’

‘For Chrissake, knock-knock.’

The door scraped open. The man’s gray sweatshirt stank of stale sweat and was stretched taut over a broad hard mound of gut. He led the way to the speakeasy, a square concrete cell, the walls dampstained and unadorned with either picture or calendar, the ceiling the rough pine joists of the subfloor above. A single light globe hung from an electric flex stapled to one of the rafters.

‘Nice little place you’ve got here,’ said Hammett politely.

‘Yeah, Palm Court at the Palace.’ He went around behind a two-by-twelve of unplaned wood laid across two upended wooden beer kegs. ‘What’s yours?’

‘Rye?’

‘Seven-year-old Canadian.’

Hammett leaned an elbow on the plank and looked around. There were a few straight-back chairs and two kitchen tables with chipped white enamel tops. One was empty, the other held a bottle and three glasses and six elbows.

The Italians who belonged to the elbows wore their overcoats buttoned and their fedoras precisely centered on their dark heads. None of them was speaking. The light laid down their shadows as thick as tar across the floor and up the walls.

‘Flip a lip over that,’ beamed the barkeep. He had a crooked nose and the eyes of a spaniel.

Hammett laid back the shot. His eyes popped wide open. ‘What’s a pint of this run?’

‘For you? Three fifty.’

‘And for everybody else?’

‘Three fifty. Listen, that stuff goes out of here at fifty-six bucks a case. My cousin, see, runs this fishing boat for Dom Pronzini, and part of his cut he takes in-’

‘Giusepp.’ One of the men with his elbows on the table swung the word at the barkeep like a sock full of sand. To Hammett, he said, ‘Now you have your bottle, now you get on your way dam’ quick.’

Hammett laid a five on the stick. The bartender replaced it with a pint. Hammett dropped the bottle into his overcoat pocket, picked up his buck change, and asked how to get to the game.

‘I’ll show you the way.’

Giuseppe led him through a small concrete area past a couple of battered garbage pails to steep exterior stairs. A dozen feet below, the yellowing grass of the hillside fell away to Sansome and Vallejo. Refuse, empty tins, and broken bottles lined the foot of the wall.

‘Top flat. Don’t bother the girls in the lower, y’know?’

Something in his voice made Hammett ask, ‘Blisters?’

‘Now, nothing like that. Dead swell dames. Ya want some of that I can maybe arrange it, but no just knockin’ on the door lemme in, see?’

‘Sure.’

One of the dead swell dames was outside her open back door. Her body, silhouetted through her filmy negligee, was full and lush and Mediterranean.

‘Blisters,’ she said scornfully to Hammett as she ground out a cigarette beneath the heel of her pastel French mule. ‘We’re no coffee-and hustlers, big boy.’

She swayed against him, turning so her breasts were cushioned against his chest and her strong whore’s thighs gripped his leg.

‘That’s the best you’ll ever get next to.’

‘Sorry, sister, my weakness is liquor.’ He clamped powerful fingers around the hand trying to slip the wallet off his hip. Her unabashed laughter followed him up the stairs.

Fingers’ back door opened on a bright kitchen. A short mustached walleyed man came in from the hall as Hammett was taking out his pint.

‘Pantry,’ said the man. He disappeared again.

Hammett could hear voices and chips. Stale smoke hung in the air. In the narrow white pantry he found a glass and opened the old-fashioned zinc-lined cooler. He chipped enough ice from one of the twin hundred-pound cakes for his drink, rammed the pick back into the wooden top of the waist-high cooler, and was dousing the ice with rye when the walleyed man popped back in.

‘Dining room,’ he said.

The dining room was paneled in blond wood; its plate rail held only empty bottles and mail-order junk. The massive oak table bore scores of burns and dozens of pale rings to mark its years of service for poker rather than dining. In the corner behind Fingers’ chair stood his loaded ten-gauge goose gun, outfitted with an extra heavy frame and breech.

LeGrand’s dolorous face swam up at Hammett through the haze of smoke like a carp surfacing in muddy water.

‘Table stakes with a pot limit. I’m the bank.’ He indicated whites, reds, blues. ‘Quarters, halves, dollars.’

Hammett bought twenty bucks’ worth of chips. Fingers started the first-name-only introductions.

‘Dash, you met See-See out in the kitchen…’

They nodded to each other. Hammett happened to know that the dapper little man with the reputation for looking in two directions at once was the best ‘soft-touch’ pickpocket in the game. In thirty years as a cannon he’d never taken a fall.

Directly to See-See’s left was a tough, handsome, loud-mouthed Irishman named Joey. Auto mechanic by his hands. He said it was his night off.

Finally there was a pudgy, middle-aged German named Dolf, whose last name Hammett knew to be Geltwasser. He peered myopically through spectacles thick as bottle glass and ran a pawnshop and was one of the city’s deadliest amateur poker players. He had killed two men that Hammett knew about.

Hammett also knew he was probably wasting his time there that night. There just weren’t enough players for the conversation to develop along the lines he needed. But now he was here, he may as well try; and what the hell, maybe he could pick up rent money in the process.

Fingers broke out a new deck, shuffled, and burned the top card. Despite deliberately erratic play, Hammett took two hours to lose the first of two double saw-bucks he had gotten from Jimmy Wright as an advance against expenses on the Atkinson Investigations fund. He ran a few bluffs as advertising, and two of them took good pots.

By the time he bought his second stack, he’d killed half his pint, and the group had loosened up a bit. All of them were punishing their bottles, especially Dolf Geltwasser. He drank prodigious amounts of whiskey; the eyes magnified by his thick glasses became only more kindly, and his play only more deadly.

Time to start. Hammett said, ‘Dolf, whatever happened to the Silver Fox?’

‘He went east, Oklahoma City, I heard, Joplin, Mo., maybe.’ The old German shook his head. ‘That Silver Fox, he would bet his lungs.’

‘When he was running that gambling hell on Pacific and Montgomery, wasn’t his landlord a cop?’

‘Sure,’ said Fingers. ‘Patrolman Paddy Quinlan. Rents that and the place next door to a couple of ’leggers now. Charges ’em fifty a month rent each, and receipts ’em for thirty.’

‘How does he get away pocketing the extra twenty?’ asked Joey in a belligerent voice.

‘Because they’re engaged in breaking the law,’ said Fingers.

‘I should have been a cop,’ said Hammett.

‘Heard the latest?’ asked See-See. ‘Tickets to the policemen’s ball. Some of the cops sell the same tickets over and over, and don’t turn in any of it. They arrest somebody, he gets off if he buys enough tickets.’

The talk drifted to a famous poker game that had run for two years at the Kingston Club, a fancy downtown place with liveried waiters and velvet settees and superb French cuisine. Nick the Greek and Titanic Thompson, playing partners, took over nine hundred thousand each out of the game.

‘And I heard Titanic went into it broke,’ said Hammett, shoving in chips. Out of the table talk he’d gotten only one name, Paddy Quinlan, to pass on to Jimmy Wright. ‘Let’s see who’s doing what on whom here.’

‘Whom, yet,’ said See-See. ‘You’re there when it comes to spreading the salve, Dash.’

‘I had a deprived youth.’

Fingers had two pair. ‘Mites and lice,’ he said sadly. ‘Hammett, I can’t do a thing with you.’

Joey lurched to his feet. ‘Deal me out, I gotta tap a kidney.’

The evening might have been a bust from the investigation point of view, thought Hammett, but he was coming out of it a heavy winner: He was up something well over a hundred bucks. Joey came back and sat down.

‘I hope that was a local phone call,’ said Fingers.

The burly Irishman looked sheepish. ‘South City, I didn’t think you’d mind. Girl down there, I figured maybe when this broke up…’

‘She got a friend?’ asked Hammett.

‘She’s busy herself, dammit.’

‘Let’s play cards,’ suggested Geltwasser softly. His eyes twinkled at Hammett across the table. ‘I think I have you figured out now, Mr Dash.’

He did indeed. An hour later the lean detective was broke. Drunk or sober, nothing wrong with the old German’s nerve. It had been an education in bluffing. He remembered a story about three drunken patriots during the war who’d decided to show their hatred for the Hun by messing up Geltwasser and his hockshop. One had died, one had fled, and now, ten years later, the third still walked with a limp.

Hammett shook his head at the new stack Fingers had begun to shove across to him. ‘I’m tapped out.’ He jingled the change in his pocket. ‘And I’m already into my bookie. Pleasure, gents.’

The outside air was like wine. He buttoned up his overcoat as he went down the terrazzo steps. A fine damp fog was in to soak up the misty gaslight at the alley’s mouth.

Hammett stopped dead. Three silhouetted figures were coming through the fog toward him. They were spread across the alley so he would have to pass between them to get out to Vallejo.

Hammett fished out smokes and matches and leaned back against the rough stucco of a housefront as they came abreast of him. The closest one checked his stride.

‘Got a match, buddy?’

The one in the middle had stopped directly in front of Hammett, the third a yard beyond. They had him neatly boxed in.

‘A match? Sure.’

It scraped, flared at the end of Hammett’s cigarette. The other man leaned just enough forward, as if to share the flame, so that Hammett would have to take his back from the wall and thus bare the nape of his neck to a rabbit punch.

But Hammett drove off the wall with the toe of his right shoe snapping into the man’s left kneecap. Pivoting on his left foot, he rammed his cigarette into the second man’s eye while the first was still yelling.

That left the third, coming in hard to cut off his break for the mouth of the alley. Instead, Hammett met his charge. He smashed the top of his head against the attacker’s face and through his mashed fedora felt teeth give inward. He sprinted for the concealing shadow at the far end of the cul-de-sac.

‘We’ve got the bastard!’ yelled one of them.

But Hammett had once questioned a witness in Prescott Court and he knew that the blank red brick rear of Broadway’s Washington Irving Grammar School was not completely flush with the final house on either side of the alley. The gaps were closed off with rough plank fences ten feet high. He veered right in the darkness, jumped to catch the top of the fence with his fingers, and swung his lean body to one side so he could hook the back of his shoe over the top also.

Grunting, he heaved again, pulled, rolled belly-down across the top of the planks and let go to fall away into blackness. The twenty-foot drop ended with bone-jarring abruptness on the gravel playground. He limped on stinging feet around the corner of the building and away.

Once on Broadway, he laughed aloud in the deserted three A.M. street. It was the first time anybody had tried to roll him when he’d lost at poker. He drew his overcoat tighter against the chill seeping up off the bay, and wondered if his hat would have any toothmarks in it.

Fast work. The committee had hired him only a half dozen hours before. Too fast. It gave him somebody obvious to work on. They were making mistakes already.