Joe Gores - Hammett

‘Shuman, Gardner, medical doctor.’ Hammett made it a flat recitation. ‘Degree from the University of California med school in 1899. Entered general practice, but soon…’

Shuman half-rose, face furious. ‘I’m not going to-’

‘Shut up!’ snapped Hammett.

Shuman’s face turned pale, but he sank back in his seat. McKenna’s half-raised remonstrative hand gradually lowered. Brewster sat up straighter, with a ghost of a smile on his face. Used to wielding authority himself, he could recognize it in others.

‘Member of the Police Commission since 1915, very popular with the department. Carries an Honorary Policeman’s badge. We all know that a good deal of the corrruption in this city stems from the Mulligan Bros Bailbonds Company, even if there is no courtroom proof of this fact. Correct?’

He looked from face to face, deliberately. Rapt silence. Shuman was chalk-white.

‘Right. Now, Griffith Mulligan holds — personally holds — the mortgage on Dr Shuman’s office at the foot of Post Street. He personally holds the mortgages on Dr Shuman’s house on the corner of Scott and Pine. He personally holds the mortgage on the building at Sutter and Divisadero that houses the general office of Shuman’s Prescription Pharmacies and store number one in the Shuman drugstore chain.’

Shuman seemed to have shrunk in his clothes. ‘You have no right..’

‘And Mulligan Bros Bailbonds holds the mortgages on the other twenty-five Shuman pharmacies scattered around town. What was your word, Doctor? Unsavory?’

Shuman was on his feet, face ashen. He gripped his walking stick like a club. His voice shook. ‘I do not intend to stay here and listen to any more of this. There are legal remedies…’

He collected his hat and cape. As he stalked out, Hammett was going on exactly as if he had not departed.

‘Through his position on the police commission, Dr Shuman receives all — all, every one — of the department assignments to examine arrested prostitutes for venereal diseases. He also gets as much medical business involving accident, rape, and assault victims as the police department can shove his way without the rest of the doctors squawking too loudly…’

‘Facts,’ interrupted Dalton Brewster abruptly. He seemed to have taken a sudden shine to Hammett. He raked the table with his coolly appraising look, then turned back to the lean detective. ‘But you want a friend’s murderer caught. We want a structure of corruption and vice exposed. The two things aren’t the same.’

‘You can’t accomplish one without the other, Mr Brewster. I’m not opposed to your moral crusade. I merely say that the city of San Francisco is the way it is because that’s the way its citizens want it. This system has worked so well that the eastern mobs have never been able to get a toehold here. But whoever rubbed Vic Atkinson changed the rules. I want him. I’m going to have him. In getting him, I’ll shake enough other bad apples out of the tree to satisfy you people.’

‘That’s as much of a commitment as you can give this committee?’ demanded Evelyn Brewster’s tight, quiet voice.

‘It’s as much of a commitment as any honest detective could give you, ma’am. Chopping down the tree is the job of the grand jury and the DA. Yours is making sure they do theirs.’

‘It isn’t enough!’ she cried. Her voice quivered. ‘It has no moral dimension! We are not here merely to stop corruption. We are here to root it out; it is that, and only that, which is important, no matter who is hurt or what hardships are worked upon their families. Civic duty takes precedence over personal convenience. The guilty must suffer. Every policeman who has ever taken a bribe, every bookmaker who has ever taken a bet-’

‘My dear,’ said her husband.

‘Every speakeasy proprietor who has ever sold an illicit drink-’

‘Evelyn.’

‘Every woman who has ever sold her body to lustful men-’

‘ Evelyn! ’ His voice was a whipcrack.

‘Oh!’ she exclaimed. Her voice was breathless, half-smothered, as if her husband had tossed a bucket of cold water over her.

‘I’ve sent plenty of wrong Ghees to the can, and I’ve never lost any sleep over any of them,’ said Hammett. ‘I wouldn’t lose any sleep over sending crooked cops up either. But you wouldn’t have any police graft if you didn’t have prostitution, or gambling, or bootlegging ‘Exactly! Stop those…’

‘The trouble is, ma’am, you can’t stop those. Statutes that conflict with human nature are ultimately unenforceable and just create disrespect for all law, as we’ve seen with Prohibition. But if you legalized gambling and prostitution, and then licensed and controlled them with the regulating power assigned to someone other than the police, you’d cut off the sources of police graft and corruption, and-’

‘Do you think this committee could ever agree, even in principle, to such immoral, outrageous suggestions?’ she demanded.

‘No,’ said Hammett, ‘they haven’t invented a committee yet that has that much sense. So you still need an investigator. I’ll be out in the hall.’

Hammett, on his third cigarette in the corridor outside the mayor’s complex of offices, turned quickly when a door opened behind him. The man framed in the opening was about fifty, bulky and powerful, clean-shaven but with thick curly hair, a strong, slightly down-curved nose, and fleshy lips above a stubborn, meaty chin.

‘Mr Hammett. Could you come in, please?’

Hammett went through the door, and realized that he was in McKenna’s private office.

‘I was eavesdropping from in here,’ said the man. He gestured at his clothes: patterned plus fours, diamond argyle socks, a V-neck cricket sweater. ‘I never got home to change after leaving the golf course this afternoon.’

Hammett had him then. Owen Lynch, McKenna’s executive secretary. Also aide-de-camp, adviser, political guide, speech writer, and — if political opponents could be believed — chief conniver. A man with a private income and no personal political ambition, on whose judgment McKenna relied explicitly.

‘Brandy?’

Hammett shook his head. ‘I’m just coming off a two-day drunk.’

‘I thought you said that you and Atkinson had drifted apart.’

‘That doesn’t change anything.’

‘Of course not. Sorry.’ Lynch slid back a panel to pour himself a generous drink from a Stourbridge decanter. He held it to the light. ‘“He who aspires to be a hero must drink brandy.”’

‘Sure. But I don’t suppose you asked me in to hear you quote Boswell.’

‘A private detective who reads Boswell. I like that. I pounded that line into Bren’s thick head during the twenty-two campaign when the teetotals took to calling him Brandy Bren. It was very effective at rallies. The public likes its heroes slightly flawed.’

‘I don’t follow politics much.’

‘Meaning you didn’t — or wouldn’t — vote for Bren? There was a time when I didn’t myself.’

Hammett knew the story. In 1913, as a feature writer on crusading editor Fremont Older’s Bulletin, Lynch had been one of the few who opposed McKenna’s candidacy for mayor. But despite Lynch’s clever and biting attacks, McKenna had won even in the home district of his incumbent opponent, P. H. ‘Pinhead’ McCarthy.

‘He’s gotten better since then?’

‘Or I’ve gotten less discriminating,’ said Lynch with an easy smile.

Four years later, embittered by personal tragedy, he had resigned from the newspaper to direct McKenna’s drive for reelection. It was successful, for McKenna’s personal magnetism had found its perfect complement in Lynch’s hard-headed pragmatism.