Joe Gores - Hammett

In front of a half-ton brass mailbox facing the locked Van Ness Avenue entrance, he shook hands with the larger of two dark waiting shapes. Preacher Laverty hadn’t changed much with the years. Same heavy features, same pinkish hair just now beginning to frost with age. They were nearly of a height, although Hammett was seventy pounds lighter.

‘So you want to go after the murdering bastards, now that it’s too late for Vic.’ Laverty’s soft south-of-Market brogue made it sound very slightly like ‘murthering.’

‘Will you back me or not?’

Laverty rasped a heavy hand down over that morning’s shave. ‘Vic thought a lot of you as a detective, and Jimmy here tells me you can’t be bought.’

‘We’ve already spent the last hour up there arguing for you,’ said the fat little op.

Hammett went up the marble staircase. As he skirted the mezzanine above the rotunda, his eyes were caught, as always, by the slogan McKenna had caused to be incised above the ornate arch:

SAN FRANCISCO

O GLORIOUS CITY OF OUR HEARTS THAT

HAST BEEN TRIED AND NOT FOUND WANTING

GO THOU WITH LIKE SPIRIT TO MAKE

THE FUTURE THINE.

He paused for a moment before the darkly varnished door with THE MAYOR chisled into the granite coping above it, marshaling what Jimmy Wright had told him of the members of the reform committee. Then he pushed on through it.

Evelyn Brewster was a slim handsome woman just shy of forty. Her chestnut hair was short and finger-waved in the latest style. She wore a white sleeveless frock with a tailored collar and a white jacket in heavy crepe de Chine, the ensemble set off by a bright silk scarf around her slender throat. She smelled pleasantly of eau de cologne.

She cast a covertly furious glance at her husband, Dalton. He was lounged in his chair with one knee braced against the edge of the oak conference table. He’d come to the mayor’s office, she was sure, only because their son had been one of those apprehended in that woman’s place, not from any sense of moral urgency.

Which meant it was up to her to make sure that they were represented by an investigator of impeccable personal habits. A moral man. An upright man.

‘Even though you come highly recommended by Mr Laverty and Mr Wright,’ she said to the lean man standing across the table, ‘I… that is, we, feel that a professional detective should represent this committee in this trying and delicate investiga-’

‘I spent eight years in the profession, ma’am.’ As an afterthought, Hammett added, ‘And Vic Atkinson didn’t intend to represent you.’

Evelyn Brewster’s husband stirred for the first time. He was youthfully trim, his hair dark and unthinned by his forty years, the heavy muscles in his jaws giving his face an unexpected craggy appearance. He ran with absolute authority the small coastal shipping empire his grandfather had founded back in gold rush days, and it showed in his voice.

‘Then what did Atkinson intend to do?’

Jimmy Wright had been mistaken. Get Dalton W. Brewster on your side, and you had his wife no matter how much noise she made ahead of time.

‘When you hire a detective, you hire a bloodhound. He uncovers facts and leaves evaluations to the people who hire him.’

‘I find that unacceptable.’

Dr Gardner Shuman, opening his campaign of opposition. Jimmy had warned Hammett that Shuman was the Mulligans’ man, body and soul. He was a bald, stout, middle-aged man sitting next to the mayor.

‘You aren’t hiring my views, you’re hiring my expertise.’ Hammett added, with an indifference that lent it strength, ‘You hired Vic Atkinson, and I was a better detective than Vic ever thought of being.’

‘Why aren’t you a detective now?’

‘I retired. Voluntarily.’

Shuman was hurting him; he could see it in the other faces around the table. Especially with Evelyn Brewster.

‘We were led to understand that Mr Atkinson was returning to Los Angeles to organize his staff,’ she said. ‘Now he turns up dead in San Francisco.’ She already had decided that this lean, cool-faced fellow just would not do. Not in the face of Dr Shuman’s opposition. Dr Shuman was a trustee of the San Francisco Opera Company and a Knight of Columbus. ‘So I do not feel we can even be sure that Mr Atkinson’s death had anything to do with his planned work for this committee.’

‘If you really believe that, then you’d better all fold up your tents and quietly steal away.’

‘Hmph,’ said Mayor Brendan Brian McKenna from the head of the table.

Eyes turned toward him. He was rotund and balding, with a silvery mustache that lent his face a spurious weight and purpose. A black pearl stickpin gleamed in his gray cravat. A fresh carnation, like those the City Hall wags suggested he wore in his pajama top at night, bloomed in the lapel of his dark cutaway.

‘What I mean to say, perhaps Mr Hammett has an excellent thought there.’ His own thoughts were with the cut-glass decanter behind a sliding panel in his office. ‘Perhaps we ought to disband for this evening. Mr Atkinson’s death has been a terrible shock-’

‘I want an answer tonight.’

Hammett had set his feet, as if the room had begun to rock and he was bracing against it. But he knew he could not carry the fight to Bren McKenna personally. This was the man who, after the 1906 earthquake and fire, had literally directed disaster relief from the back of a prancing white steed; the only mayor in Prohibition America who dared have as his campaign song a ditty titled ‘Smile with Brandy Bren.’

So Hammett said civilly, ‘Mr Mayor, Vic Atkinson has been dead for nearly forty-eight hours. Somebody killed him and that somebody’s out there right now’ — the rough power of his voice held them all momentarily motionless — ‘trying to make damned sure he’s going to get away with it. I want to make damned sure he doesn’t. And meanwhile this committee wants to sit around arguing whether I’ll be able to use the correct fork for the fish course at their victory dinner.’

The silence that followed was broken, not by Shuman as he had expected, but by Dalton Brewster.

‘I can understand the temptation to reduce this investigation to a personal vendetta against the men who murdered your friend. But by your own admission what is needed is dispassion, not-’

‘I hadn’t seen Vic Atkinson in over six years, hadn’t written to him or communicated with him in any way. But yes, he was my friend. He was also a husband, a father, a good detective, and an upright man. He died because he wanted to do something about a department full of cops who’d become a little too corrupt, and a Board of Supervisors a little too openly for sale, and a district attorney-’

‘As a member of the San Francisco police commission, I resent your remarks about our fine department,’ interrupted Shuman.

‘Vic believed in this investigation — and because he had this committee behind him, because he thought his banks were secure, he got careless. And he died.’

Shuman was almost sputtering. ‘You dare to suggest that Victor Atkinson was betrayed by someone in this room?’

‘That’s your suggestion, Doctor, not mine.’

‘I suggest that Victor Atkinson was struck down by someone from his own highly unsavory past. A man who drank and-’

Hammett let his voice go tight and furious, and his eyes became coals. He leaned across the polished hardwood table so he could thrust his face close to Shuman’s.

‘ You have the gall to call Vic Atkinson unsavory?’

He straightened up. He looked around at the dozen or so uncomfortable faces. McKenna, the Brewsters, Hayden from the City Planning Committee, Walcott, president of the Civil Service Commission, Superior Court Judge Fitzpatrick, Boyle of the Anglo-California Trust, DiReggio of the Bank of Italy, Fremont Older of the News-Call, a couple of others he didn’t know by sight, Shuman himself.