The Cemetery Man and Other Darkside Tales

Hooch

The three of us were in the cab of the chicken rancher’s truck, heading to Bringle’s Cove on the Sonoma County coast to pick up a whiskey shipment from Canada. The second truck, the bigger Graham, was five minutes or so behind us. It was five in the morning and there was hardly any traffic, but you never want to run trucks close together so it looks like a caravan, no matter what the hour. Angelo was driving and the kid, Bennie Sago, was in the middle between us. He had his Thompson gun tight between his knees, his skinny fingers sliding back and forth over the butt. My chopper was propped against the door, Angelo’s up behind the seat. The payoff money was in a sack underneath. Nobody touched that but me.

The kid was antsy as hell. Not scared, far as I could tell, just excited. This was his first run with Angelo and me. Twenty-three, twenty-four, face like a beagle, straggly mustache, hair slicked down flat with pomade. Too cocky, too mouthy for my liking, but I had to put up with him for the time being. He’d been working for Renzo four or five months now, hired on as a favor to a gee Renzo knew in the Central Valley, and the jobs he’d done so far were up to snuff. When Renzo told you to partner with somebody, you didn’t argue.

“Three hundred cases coming in, right, Joey?” this Bennie said for the second or third time.

“I already told you.”

“Some twelve-year-old Scotch, too,” Angelo said. “Twenty cases.”

“Twelve-year-old? Sure be swell to get a couple of bottles of that.”

“Don’t even think about swiping any,” I said, “you know what’s good for you.”

“Hey, Joey, I was only kidding,” the kid said. He gave a nervous little laugh. “I’d never do nothing like that.”

“Damn well better not.”

He was quiet for half a mile. Then he said, “You think we’ll have any trouble?”

“No.”

“I don’t mean with the Coast Guard or the Feds. Fix is in up at Point Arena, right? Draw them all up to Mendocino County while we make the pick-up down here. But what about hijackers?”

“What about them?” Angelo said.

“Never know when they’ll show. On land or on the ocean.”

“No trouble with hijackers in over a year.”

“Could still happen, though.”

“Not this run. Don’t wet your pants worrying about it.”

“I’m not worrying.” The kid’s fingers kept sliding over the Thompson, fondling it like you would a woman. “Just thinking what it’d be like to see some action.”

“You wouldn’t like it.”

“I don’t know, maybe I would.”

“You just think you would. Get into a shootout, you’d wet your pants for sure.”

“Not me. Uh-uh, not me.”

“You ever fire that Thompson at a man?” I said.

“No. Just target practice so far. But it wouldn’t bother me none. I’m ready, willing, and able.”

“Sure you are. All hot to trot.”

Bennie was quiet for a while, until we cut off Highway One just south of Bodega Bay. It was getting close to dawn by then. Dark night, no moon, sky full of running clouds, fogbank out on the horizon — a good night for Cap Doolin’s speedboat to leave Bodega Bay and slip into Bringle’s Cove without being spotted.

“Say, Joey,” the kid said then, “you ever read Little Caesar?” Out of the blue, just like that.

“Little what?”

“Little Caesar. You know, the book by W.R. Burnett.”

“No. Never heard of it.”

“It’s the real goods, all about this Chicago gang-boss named Rico Bandello. Only problem with it is, he gets bumped off in the end.”

“Then why the hell bother to read it?”

“Because it’s the real goods, like I said. The Maltese Falcon, that’s another one with the real goods. You ever read that one?”

“No.”

“But you heard of the guy wrote it, Dashiell Hammett?”

“No.”

“Never heard of Hammett? Ah, come on.”

“You calling me a liar?”

“No, no. I’m just surprised, that’s all. He’s a local bird. Lives in San Francisco, hangs out at John’s Grill on Ellis Street. I almost met him there once about a year ago, right after The Maltese Falcon got published as a book. It was a serial in Black Mask before that.”

“So what?”

“He wrote some other books, too,” the kid said. “Red Harvest. The Dain Curse. Short stories, too. I read ’em all. He’s some writer, that Hammett. Even better than Burnett.”

“Yeah?” Angelo said. “What’s he write about?”

“Knockovers, mob wars, cheating dames, you name it. And private dicks — Sam Spade, the Continental Op. Real tough gees. He used to be a private dick himself, so he knows all about how they operate.”

“Sure he does,” I said. “Then how come he quit being one?”

“So he could write. That’s what he always wanted to do. You really ought to read one of his books, Joey.”

“I got no time to read books.”

“His stories in Black Mask, then. You know Black Mask, right?”

“No.”

“What’s Black Mask?” Angelo said.

“It’s a pulp magazine. You never heard of it?”

“No.”

“You guys ought to read it,” the kid said. “Hammett’s stories ain’t the only swell ones. Raoul Whitfield, Frederick Nebel, Carroll John Daly — they deliver the goods too.”

“Yeah? What do those birds write about?”

“Same like Hammett.”

“You do a lot of reading, huh, Bennie?” Angelo said.

“Oh, sure. A lot.”

“Bad for your eyes.”

“Hah. You sound like my old lady.”

We were less than a mile now from the side road that led to Bringle’s Cove. There was still no traffic. Bringle’s was the best delivery spot along this section of the coast. Off the beaten track, natural jetty, no hidden offshore rocks or kelp beds to foul up a boat’s engine, no place for Feds or hijackers to set up in ambush. We’d been using the cove off and on since ’27 and never had any trouble.

“I do a lot of writing, too,” the kid said. “One of these days I’m gonna write some stories for Black Mask. Right now I’m writing a book.”

“A book, huh?” Angelo said.

“Yeah. I been working on it ever since I come up permanent from the valley.”

“What kind of book?”

“A fiction book, a novel like Little Caesar and The Maltese Falcon, only better. Real tough, tougher than Burnett and Hammett.”

“What’s it about, this book of yours?”

“The liquor business. Write what you know, that’s what they tell you.”

Angelo didn’t say anything. I said, “That mean you’re writing about us, the operation?”

“Well, yeah, sort of.”

“Renzo, me, Angelo, you?”

“We’re all in it, sure, but not under our real names, not so’s we’d be recognized. I mean, I’m giving the real inside dope on how the racket works out here, but it’s all disguised, fictionalized. Nothing the cops or Feds could use, you don’t have to worry none about that.”

“What happens to us in this book of yours?”

“Nothing. That’s the beauty of it, see? None of us gets caught or shot up like Rico Bandello.” The kid squirmed some more and then laughed. “We outfox the cops and the Feds, same as we’re doing in real life, and get away clean in the end. Pretty nifty, huh?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Nifty.”

“I call it Hooch. Couldn’t ask for a better title. Hooch.”

We jounced over the side road into Bringle’s Cove. It was a few minutes before dawn, still mostly dark, just enough daylight so you could tell the beach, the cliffside caves, the jetty were all empty except for squawking seagulls. Angelo drove into the biggest of the caves where we always left the trucks. The three of us got out with the choppers and me with the money sack and stood around waiting. The kid was still antsy. Once he said, “Man, I can’t wait to get out there and make the pickup. Action or no action.” I told him to shut his mouth and for once he shut it.

The big Graham, its canvas sides rolled halfway up so you could see the produce boxes stacked inside, rattled in about five minutes later. Three-man crew on it too. Six soldiers and six machine guns were all we’d need even if we ran into hijackers. That had only happened once on any of my runs, and what that bunch got out of it was two dead and a shot-up boat. It wasn’t anything to sweat about.

Cap Doolin showed up right on time, with just enough dawn in the sky so he could drift in without running lights. His boat was a forty-foot cruiser with twin diesels, squat-hulled and clean-decked, flush from stem to stern except for a small glassed-in pilot’s hood. She could outrun any Coast Guard cutter and had proved it more than once. Doolin eased her in close to the end of the jetty, just long enough for the six of us to climb on board. Then we headed out, running wide open once we got far enough offshore.

There was a wind and the water was choppy. Spray rattled like birdshot against the pilot house windows. Nobody said anything, not even the kid. He had his sea legs and he seemed to be handling himself all right, with his lip still buttoned.

It was full light when we neared the big Canadian rumrunner, anchored in the fogbank outside the twelve-mile limit. You couldn’t see her clear until we got close, and even then she looked like a ghost ship in the fog. The kid stood gawking at her through the windscreen. “Hey,” he said then, “hey, she’s one big mother, ain’t she.”

She was that. Hundred and ten feet, narrow-gutted, low-hulled, painted battleship gray from her waterline to the trucks of her stubby masts. Like a long, lean whale.

“How much liquor can she carry?”

“Sixty tons loaded full,” Doolin said.

“Sixty! Man!”

Doolin slid us alongside, up against the heavy rope fenders hanging from the ship’s bulwark. The six of us were all on deck by then, spreading out to watch and wait. Crewmen with machine guns were stationed on the rumrunner’s deck too. But it was all just everybody being careful. We’d done plenty of business with this bunch before.

I went over to the rail and tossed the money sack up to the Canadian captain. He knew all the cash would be there so he never bothered to count it anymore, just went ahead and ordered his crew to strip the hatch covers off the cargo hold. Doolin and his men did the same on the speedboat. I kept one eye on the kid while this was going on. Still up to snuff, but still keyed up too, his eyes jumping this way and that. The way he held his chopper, his finger skipping back and forth across the trigger, you could tell he was hoping somebody would start something.

The rumrunner’s electric power winch started to whir. The first fifty cases, already loaded into the rope net sling, came up fast out of her hold. The winchman swung them over on the flexible steel cable, lowered them quick through the cruiser’s open hatch. Everybody had the transfer down pat. It didn’t take more than an hour to load and unload all six slings.

“Smooth as silk,” the kid said when Doolin had us underway again. “But I still kind of wish we’d run into hijackers. Make a swell chapter for my book.”

“You and your goddamn book,” Angelo said.

We made short work of the Bringle’s Cove transfer too. Two hundred cases went onto the Graham, hidden by the produce crates. We took the other hundred in the chicken truck, including the twenty of twelve-year-old Scotch that somebody up here in the county had ordered special. The Graham headed northeast to Santa Rosa to make its delivery, we drove south to Constantine’s chicken ranch outside Petaluma. Constantine would handle local distribution from there.

In Angelo’s flivver, on the way to the Sausalito ferry, the kid started chattering again about the book he was writing. Hooch this, Hooch that. And some more about how all of us were in it under made-up names.

It was early evening by the time I got to the Bay Area Distributors warehouse, on the Embarcadero down by Islais Creek. Renzo’s operation was big, the biggest in San Francisco and the North Bay. More than four hundred on his payroll, contracts with haulers and distributors and homegrown suppliers of cheap jackass brandy and dago red. He ran it all from here, but he had another storage warehouse in South S.F. and a third up in Santa Rosa. All of them were packed with barrels of wine, crates of the jackass brandy, bonded Canadian Club and the best Scotch and Irish whiskey. Just about any liquor anybody could want, even some fancy cordials from France and Italy.

None of the warehouses had ever been raided. The fix was in with the city coppers and the county sheriffs here and up north. A few of the Feds, too. Not everybody’s got his price but plenty enough do. We’d had a little trouble with a couple of rival gangs trying to muscle in, but we handled them the way we handled the hijackers. Everything was running smooth now, smooth as silk like the kid said. But you still had to be careful. Real careful. You couldn’t afford to take chances.

Stairs at the far wall led up to Renzo’s office. I could smell the wine in there as I climbed up. Most of it was good, pre-Prohibition Burgundy from Sonoma and Napa counties, but there was plenty of the cheap stuff too. You couldn’t smell it from outside. The walls were thick concrete with wood facing. The warehouse was like a fortress.

Renzo’s office was blue with the smoke from the Toscanelli stogies he smoked. Why he liked those stinking black tule roots I couldn’t figure. You had to drag hard just to get smoke from one end to the other and even then you couldn’t get enough to inhale.

“Hey, Joey,” he said. “How’d it go up the coast?”

“Like usual. Clean operation.”

“Good, good. So how come you don’t look happy?”

“I think maybe we got a problem.”

“Yeah? What kind of problem?”

I told him what kind.

He fired up another Toscanelli while he thought it over. Then he said, “Yeah. Yeah, I see what you mean. Probably nothing to get worked up about, but we can’t afford to take chances.”

“Just what I was thinking. You want me to handle it?”

“You’re my right hand, Joey. I wouldn’t trust nobody else.”

The next night I called up Angelo and had him come get me in his flivver. He didn’t say much when I told him what we were going to do. Good boy, Angelo. Reliable. Did what he was told and didn’t ask questions.

We picked up Bennie Sago at his apartment on Fell Street. He said when he climbed in, “So what’s happening tonight? Another coast run?”

“No,” I said. “We got some business down in Brisbane.”

“What kind of business?”

“You’ll find out when we get there.”

We headed south out of the city. “How’s that book of yours coming?” I asked him.

“Real good. I’m telling you, Joey, Hooch is gonna be better than Little Caesar, Red Harvest, all the rest. It’ll sell like hotcakes, then get made into a talking picture. Make me famous.”

“Me and Angelo and Renzo, too, huh?”

“Oh, sure. Only nobody’ll know it but us. We’ll all have a big laugh over that, right?”

He was primed now. He kept flapping his gums while Angelo swung us away from the Bay and up into the Brisbane hills. About how swell Hooch was, and did Angelo and me want to borrow some copies of this Black Mask so we could see if he wasn’t right about Hammett and Daly and the other hard-boiled writers. I quit listening after a while. He didn’t care. He went right on jabbering to Angelo.

We were up into the thickly wooded part of the hills, nobody around, no lights anywhere, when he finally ran down. “Say,” he said, “where we going, anyhow? This road’s nothing but a fire trail.”

I didn’t say anything. Neither did Angelo.

“Joey? How much farther we got to go?”

“This’ll do right here,” I said, and Angelo pulled the flivver over to the side. “Get out, Bennie.”

“Here? What for?”

“Get out. Stand in the lights.”

He got out, went around to the front. Stood there looking around, then at me with this puzzled look on his face. Punk kid wasn’t even half as smart as he thought he was. He didn’t have a clue what was happening until I showed him my rod.

His eyes got big then, round and white as eggs in the headlights. “Christ, Joey, why? Why?”

“That book of yours,” I said. “That’s why.”

“Hooch? No! No, wait, listen to me—”

“Too late for that.”

“Please, Joey, please, you got to listen!”

I shot him twice, then went over and put a third round into him to make sure. I’ll give him this — he hadn’t tried to beg or run. He stood there and took it like a man.

I opened the door to the Fell Street apartment with the key I’d taken off Sago’s body. It wasn’t much of a place and it didn’t take Angelo and me long to search it top to bottom, every corner, every nook and cranny.

There were a bunch of books in a little case, the ones the kid had talked about and a few he hadn’t. A stack of Black Mask magazines and some other pulps too.

But there wasn’t any Hooch.

No manuscript pages, no notes, nothing at all written down. The kid hadn’t even owned a typewriting machine.

“He never wrote a word about us and the operation,” Angelo said. “Damn fool was just trying to make himself sound important. You didn’t need to bump him after all.”

“Yeah, I did. Can’t trust a punk even thinks about doing something like that.”

“Well, you and Renzo don’t have to worry about me writing a book. I ain’t ever even gonna read one.”

“That’s playing it smart,” I said. “All them things do is put ideas in your head.”