Joe Gores - Hammett

McKenna attempted to shrug it off. ‘So Brady’ll have to make a little noise because he plays handball with Dalt Brewster. It’ll cool down, Owen. It always does.’

‘Not this time. Not with Evelyn Brewster on the reform committee. She wants Molly out of business and in jail.’

‘I’ll not see Molly put away for fifteen years.’ He raised a hand to forestall objections. ‘I know, Owen, you don’t use whores and don’t see why anyone else should, but it’s more than just that. Last election, Molly had every Mary Magdalene in this city out voting tombstones for us from morning till night. I’ll not throw her down.’ He brightened abruptly. ‘Besides, nobody knows where she is.’

‘Epstein does, no matter how much he denies it to the newspapers. If I were Hammett, I’d be trying to make a deal with Brass Mouth for her secret testimony.’

‘And you wanted him hired!’ He burst out suddenly, ‘Why are we suddenly so worried about the reform element, anyway, Owen? In the old days-’

‘The old days are gone. To be governor two years from now, you have to get the clean money in San Francisco behind you now.’

‘It was the not-so-clean money put me in this office.’

‘Don’t you understand yet, Bren? That money has nowhere else to go.’

They descended the broad marble stairway to the floor of the rotunda, and paused at the head of the granite outer stairs while the chauffeur brought up McKenna’s grand yellow and black 1927 Lincoln coaching brougham with its gleaming side-lamps. Then Lynch went up Polk alone to his four-year-old Auburn. His thick shoulders slumped slightly. He was tired. It was all getting so damned complicated.

‘Bren, Bren, you damned fool,’ he said aloud in fond exasperation as he watched the brougham’s retreating taillights.

What wouldn’t he give to still have a wife to buoy him up, comfort him, inspire him as Colleen McKenna would do for Bren, given the chance? But his wife, Clarissa, had died, childless, in the influenza epidemic of 1918, and he had been alone ever since.

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.