Hammett

30

Wind-driven fog lanced through Hammett’s topcoat as he swung off the trolley on Presidio Avenue. He stood staring through ornate wrought-iron gates: The fog hid the rolling green acres of Laurel Hill cemetery. A shiver as much mental as physical ran through him. He crossed the street. A thick shape materialized.

‘Why do these bastards always have such a flair for the dramatic?’ demanded the fat little detective. He was sucking on a Fatima.

‘Dumping her in the cemetery?’

The tone of Hammett’s voice jerked the op’s head around, but the stocky detective said only, ‘Yeah,’ and then, ‘This way.’

They followed the gravel drive used by the hearses, then cut off on an earth path. Jimmy Wright used a hand torch against the fog. Hammett stumbled and cursed behind him, hands thrust deep into his coat pockets.

‘Trolley conductors,’ said Wright over his shoulder. ‘They were ahead of schedule, so they stopped to have a smoke. Otherwise they’d never have heard her, and she probably wouldn’t have been found until the weekend.’

‘You mean she was killed here, not just dumped here?’

‘Yeah. Kept screaming for almost five minutes, according to the witnesses. They were just about here when they heard the shot.’

Moisture dripped from Hammett’s hat-brim and his mustache bristled with it.

‘Just the one shot?’

Their feet crushed tough aromatic wild flowers massed across the path. Jimmy Wright slipped and cursed.

‘He used both barrels at once. Shotgun. I figure him for a big man to take the recoil.’

The path angled between two black wet cypresses grown scraggly as winter dogs from lack of care. This part of the graveyard was full of weed-grown, unmonumented plots.

‘What time was all this?’

‘Little over an hour ago.’ The op flashed his light on his wrist briefly to confirm it.

‘And Laverty was-’

‘I’m damned if I know for sure, Dash. One of my men put him to bed last night, but there’s an alley runs the length of the block he lives on, he could have back-doored my man through the night. I left word that when my operative calls in, he should go pound on Laverty’s door and see if he’s home. But that ain’t going to prove anything either.’

They had come up on the moving lights carried by a couple of patrolmen searching for clues. Two Homicide dicks were standing off to one side with their hands in their pockets and their hats tipped back on their heads. Hammett didn’t know either one of them.

Both he and Wright were sopping to the knees. Palpable fog-forms seeped between the old graves and ornate crumbling tombstones like dawn-harried wraiths. Directly beside a chest-high marble gravestone bearing the dates 1831–1893 was a white marble obelisk knocked down by the 1906 quake. Flanking it were two shattered cylinders of dark marble.

The dead Chinese girl was sprawled face down across the obelisk. One arm was folded under the body so the childishly small hand formed a cup. Blood from the shattered head had arteried the curved marble to run into the cup. The other arm was outflung. Hammett recognized the tweed knickers and argyle socks and leatherette sport jacket. The legs were apart enough so he could see the crotch of the knickers was stained.

Hammett squatted over the body. He touched his fingers to the crotch of the knickers and sniffed them. Urine. Bladder voided in death. Raped? No way to tell yet. He realized with an abrupt touch of nausea that the girl’s limbs unnaturally fit themselves to the contours of the unyielding stone beneath her. He put a hand on the body.

‘Hey!’ One of the Homicide dicks took his hands out of his pockets. ‘The medical boys ain’t seen her yet.’

‘Seeing her isn’t going to make her any less dead,’ said Jimmy Wright.

Hammett removed his hand and wrapped his forearms around his knees and remained squatting with his chin on a kneecap, his face brooding. Without looking up, he said, ‘Worked over with a baseball bat. No wonder she was screaming.’

He shifted the body enough to get a look at the face hidden by the shimmering ebony hair.

He sighed and stood up and wiped his hand idly on his topcoat, then rested it on the upright gravestone. The marble was icy to his fingers. The Homicide cops had gotten still and intense when he had looked at where the girl’s face had been. It was gone right to the hairline, leaving only splintered bone and red meat.

‘Instant leprosy,’ he said with studied indifference. The dicks lost their expectant look when he didn’t throw up or even turn pale. He said: ‘Her name was Crystal Tam or Lillian Fong, depending on when you knew her. She has parents named Fong in Chinatown who’ll need notifying.’

When Hammett and Jimmy Wright reached the place where the path split the two cypresses, both men stopped and looked back. The girl was a rag doll, hurled carelessly against the fallen marble monuments. A gray dripping dawn had harried the fog up enough to show, beyond the cemetery fence, the gentle slope of Lone Mountain and the simple white cross that topped it. The cross was nearly invisible against the leaden morning sky.

‘A lousy way to die,’ said the op.

‘Tell me one that isn’t.’

He needed a drink. He needed a lot of drinks. Vic Atkinson. Crystal Tam. And Hammett at home playing author, instead of being out in the streets where he belonged as a detective. He’d thought he had it pretty well figured out until her death. But now…

Jesus! Unless the… But that was unutterably evil If…

He needed a lot of drinks.

‘You lousy bastard,’ said Hammett distinctly.

‘Sam, please-’

He tipped up the bottle, then let his arm drop limply. The bottom of the half-empty quart thudded on the carpet.

Goodie tried again. ‘Sam, you mustn’t blame yourself for-’

He looked up at her, heavy-ridded. He tried to laugh. His lips wouldn’t work right. They were blue, as if with cold.

‘Mustn’t blame ’self. Then who?’

‘If she herself called up the man who did it-’

‘Shouldda known she’d call ’im.’ His eyelids dropped; he popped them open to stare owlishly at her. ‘Caught you at it, okay?’

‘Sam, you’re not making any sense. I’ll get you some coffee.’

‘No coffee. Hootch. Know where ’at comes from? The Hoochinoo Indians in Alaska who distill liquor just like ’shine. Was in a hospital once with a guy f’om Alaska. Whitey…’

When she returned two minutes later with the steaming black coffee, Hammett was snoring. She shook him awake and got him to his feet, where he performed a rubber-legged adagio dance with her until he fell face-forward across the bed and pulled her down on top of him in a swirl of silken thighs. He started to snore.

She stood looking down at him, pity and anger and infatuation playing across her face.

‘Oh, Sam!’ she wailed softly. ‘Why?’

He turned his head enough to open an eye at her. ‘Why? She read ’bout dead Chinese girl in Tokzek’s car, that’s why. Read that, knew she had ’im. Tell lie to Molly, go safe hideout, make contact. Had ’im. Only he got her, instead.’

‘Sam, shouldn’t you get some sleep?’

‘Shleep. Remember, dead Chinese girl in car is key. Key to whole thing. Raped. Get it?’

He started to snore again.

Voices beside the bed were talking around him as if he didn’t exist. Around him and over him and through him, as parents did when you were little. As if you couldn’t hear or understand or reason because you were little.

Or drunk.

Or sick.

Starchy white uniforms. Smell of ether and disinfectant, this won’t hurt much, just an ouch Jesus Christ what’re you doing, good-looking redhead from Butte, Montana, marry that girl sometime. Josie. Ah, shit. Josie. Screwed it up, all up.

Talking around him and over him and through him with the doctor.

Next day, doctor’s office. Desert heat shimmering through the open window, baking out the impurities.

— I got only one year to live, Doc?

— ahem. Never sure with consumption, Sergeant Hammett, but the indications — then I’m leaving the hospital.

— but without proper care… as the disease advances through the lungs…

— I don’t mind dying, Doc. I just mind dying here.

He opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling above the bed. The streetlight outside the window cast curtain-patterns across the plaster. The Chinese girl was dead. Vic Atkinson was dead. Unspeakable evil?

‘Where’s that bottle?’

‘Sam, please…’

‘Gimme the bottle, goddammit, I know what I’m doing.’

Jimmy Wright’s voice sneered, ‘Give him his goddamn bottle. Sucking on it is what he’s good for.’

Hammett struggled to a sitting position. He looked at the square-bodied little detective. The op looked back. Goodie shoved the bottle into Hammett’s hand.

The op said, ‘How long’s he been like this?’

‘Since this afternoon. He was the same way after Vic Atkinson was killed.’

Beat the drum slowly and play the pipes lowly. Play the dead march as they carry him along. He set the bottle to his lips.

‘Yeah, he’s a sweetheart,’ said the op.

Hammett removed the bottle. ‘Fuck you, Jimmy Wright,’ he said distinctly.

‘That solves something?’

He’d show them. Both of them. As he used to show Josie when she was always at him. He drank in long swallows.

His belly tried to reject it, vomit it back up, but he stopped only when he started to strangle, even as the girl cried out in anguish, ‘Oh my God, Sam, you’ll kill yourself!’

‘Don’t worry ’bout me, sister.’ He giggled. ‘You got old goat with lotsa money, I got wife an’ two kids to worry ’bout me. Josie. Josie’s a woman…’

He stopped because Goodie was staring at him with wide terrified eyes. She turned to Jimmy Wright.

‘Is… is that true? A wife? A… a wife and children?’

Wright was silent.

Her face turned white. ‘But… Sam. Last night I… didn’t. Because I… you… I thought…’

She ran blindly from the room, hitting the doorway instead of the wall only by instinct; her eyes were squeezed tight shut.

The fat little detective shook his head. ‘I hope you know what you’re doing, Dash.’

‘Gotta do it sometime.’

‘Your timing’s shitty. And your manners. What’s this about the dead Chinese girl in Tokzek’s car being the key to all this?’

‘Beaten an ’ raped.’ Hammett felt deliciously sleepy. Good night’s sleep would fix him up.

‘I don’t follow you.’

‘Try ’is one, then. Crys’al never worked in North State Street roomin’ house. English too good. Kep’ couple years. Bright. Listened an’ learned. Chicago, maybe, sure. But…’

He fell straight backward from his sitting position on the edge of the bed. His head hit the wall a resounding thump. The bottle hit the floor with a like thump as his hand let it go. Bottle empty. He lay still, eyes shut, as if he’d passed out again.

Drunk on the outside. Outside only. Wish my head was empty, like the bottle. Hope you know what you’re doing, Dash.

He knew. Dying. Dying of rotgut and a head that wasn’t empty and a gone marriage and a lot of fictions he’d never write.

Head full of jumbled ideas, thoughts, intuitions, fears.

Full of facts, too. Facts about the ambush of Hymie Weiss in 1926, for instance. Capone had been seen countless places during the two days Crystal had him holed up in that rooming house. So… her story had been a lie. Why? What had she been covering?

No way to find out now.

Crystal. Thought you could handle him. Thought he…

He. Didn’t know who he was. Not for sure. Few clues. Silk scarf instead of wool. Dan Laverty doing what Dan Laverty probably had done, pushed on by… God, the man’s control!

Tomorrow. Soon enough, tomorrow, to decide whether he believed that the evil which was unthinkable was, did exist.

Tomorrow. Nobody left to die tonight anyway. Was there?

When he woke again, it was icy and black; one of those predawn hours when sick people die in their beds. Dark. Cold. God the cold! But some guardian angel was working the cool delightful neck of a bottle between his teeth.

He sucked thirstily at it. No whiskey came out. His furry tongue tasted metal.

Someone had shoved the muzzle of a revolver so far into his mouth that it touched the back of his throat, making him want to retch.

Then the voice came from the darkness above him. It was not unexpected. And somehow, though it had nothing to do with the owner of the voice, he knew — knew — that he was right and that all the whiskey in the world couldn’t drown that knowledge.

Then the voice grated, ‘Okay, wise guy, let’s move. You’re all out of time.’