Joe Gores - Hammett

‘Hello, Daddy!’ cried the little girl standing on the cashier’s stool behind the glass-topped counter to the right of the door.

‘Hello, Sweet Flower,’ said Manion. ‘Still studying your lessons?’

‘Study very hard, Daddy!’ the moon-faced child shouted with delight.

The girl’s mother came from the rear of the restaurant, wiping her hands on a limp dish towel. ‘ Min Bok, we are honored.’

To the noncriminal citizens of Chinatown, Manion was Min Bok — Old Uncle. The woman led them across the white tile floor and between close-set tables to a curtained enclosed booth. A skinny waiter with a seamed yellow face and bad teeth brought the tea and two small heavy white handleless cups with green and gold dragons painted around their sides.

‘Who was the little girl?’

‘One of my godchildren. I can’t keep track of them anymore.’

The waiter returned with their order: chicken clear soup, pork fried rice, green chow yuk, sweet-and-sour pork, almond duck. They ate with chopsticks, with Manion doing most of the talking.

‘You wanted to know about Crystal Tam. Christened Lillian Tam Fong by her folks, educated at the Sunday school of the Methodist Chinese Mission. She was an excellent student, especially at English-’

‘How old is she?’

‘Fifteen. Why?’

‘She looks twelve and talks forty. Are we sure we’ve got the same girl? This one didn’t strike me as having only a mission-school background.’

Manion was dipping startlingly green chow yuk into hot sauce. He chewed thoughtfully. ‘It’s the same girl, all right. She visits her folks on Sunday afternoons. Told them she was a domestic for a well-to-do family up in Marin County, and leaves them in time to catch the Sausalito ferry back before supper. Really, I suppose, going back to Molly’s in time for the Sunday-night trade.’

Hammett pushed away his barely touched plate and fished for cigarettes. ‘She visit them last Sunday?’

‘And told ’em she was going away on a trip with the people she works for, and would be in touch when she got back. Apparently planning to skip out even then. Now they’re damned worried.’

‘Because you came around?’

Manion poured green tea into both cups. The waiter appeared to set a fresh pot in place of the old.

‘No. Because four years ago, when Lillian was eleven, she answered a newspaper ad for her first domestic position. She didn’t come back from the interview.’

Hammett hitched his chair closer to the table with a sudden glint of interest in his eyes. ‘That sounds familiar.’

‘Yeah, doesn’t it? Next day her folks went to the cops.’ He shrugged. ‘You know how much that got ’em — a yellow girl…’

Hammett nodded.

‘A month later, a letter came, postmarked Chicago, to one of her mission-school chums who could read English. Her folks can’t, of course. The letter was in Lillian’s handwriting, asking her to tell the folks that Lillian had a job as servant to a rich man and was well and happy…’

‘Yeah,’ said Hammett. ‘Everything fits the white slavery racket except the letter actually being in the kid’s handwriting. Usually the ones they grab can’t read or write. Anyway, how do we get Lillian Tam Fong back from Chicago as Crystal Tam?’

‘You want me to do all your work for you?’ grumbled Manion. ‘One Sunday afternoon about nine months ago, Lillian walks in, spins the tale about her job in Marin, and starts showing up every Sunday since. She even finds a few bucks for the folks now and again.’

‘And nary a word about the years in between? Not even to the girlfriend?’

‘Nup. Chicago, that’s it. And apparently the girlfriend dislikes Lillian’s current Chinatown pals so much that they aren’t friends any longer.’

Hammett was silent, frowning, his forearms crossed on the table. The cigarette between his lips spiraled a thin line of smoke up toward the grease-darkened ceiling.

‘What’s the address over in Marin?’

‘It’ll just be a blind anyway.’ Manion was digging out his hip pocket notebook as he argued. ‘No phone, I checked.’

‘A blind?’ Hammett shook his head. ‘This Crystal is a very bright kid, she wouldn’t just pick an address out of the hat. And it’s probably isolated enough to make a hell of a fine hideout for someone on the dodge from the law like Molly Farr is.’

‘I didn’t think of that angle,’ admitted Manion. He read from the notebook. ‘Mrs Heloise Kuhn, the old Borne house on the Bolinas Road.’

‘Living with all the rest of the rich folks up by Bolinas?’

‘Yeah, come to think of it,’ said Manion in a chagrined voice. ‘Fishermen and bootleggers and farmers and not a hell of a lot else. All of a sudden I have the feeling you might be saying hello to Molly Farr this afternoon.’

‘That’s the idea,’ said Hammett.

The woman bent over the wooden-staved rain barrel was better than six feet tall and weighed three hundred pounds. Her back was to Hammett as he came up the weed-grown drive to the white farmhouse; great knuckles of hard fat rode over the buried hipbones under her faded check housedress.

‘Mrs Heloise Kuhn?’

‘Huh?’ The huge moon buttocks tensed in unconfined nastiness as she straightened in surprise and swung around to face him. ‘Who’s asking?’

Her face was decorated with a rosebud mouth above too many chins, and mean black raisins stuck behind square-rimmed eyeglasses.

‘Hammett. Homemaker’s Insurance Agency.’

‘I ain’t buying.’

He moved around her to the other side of the rain barrel. She was drowning a kitten. The water boiled briefly around her thick forearms. Pleasure pursed the rosebud lips. One tiny taloned paw spasmed a despairing arc of red parallels across her flesh.

‘Bastard!’ she burst out softly.

She slammed the small dark head against the side of the barrel. Hammett saw the glint of bone through the wet-plastered fur on the delicate skull as she buried the kitten in the water once more. Four more small bodies, their thinness emphasized by wet clinging fur, lay in the weeds beyond the corner of the house.

‘Kittens ain’t as much fun ’thout you do their ma with ’em.’

The water was quiet around her forearms. Her voice filled as if she were eating pastry.

‘Put ’em all in a sack an’ th’ow ’em offen a bridge into a river, ’long with a old hunk of scrap iron. One old tabby I seen stayed up near twenty minutes that way, tryin’ to save them kits.’

‘Yeah,’ said Hammett. He had broken a fingernail on the rim of the barrel.

She clacked ill-fitted dentures together. ‘Near bust a gut laughin’, I can tell you. My brother won hisse’f five bucks off another feller, bettin’ how long she’d stay up.’ With a regretful sigh she abandoned the past. ‘Insurance, you say. Payin’ out a claim?’

‘Tracing a witness, Mrs Kuhn. We think your maid saw a car hit a woman over in the city two Sundays ago, and-’

The fat woman started to laugh. Her whole body participated, like waves bouncing back and forth in a bathtub.

‘I look like I got a maid out here, mister?’

‘Lillian Tam Pong,’ said Hammett. ‘Oriental minor.’

‘I wouldn’t have no chink on the place.’

‘Miss Pong gave this as her place of employment to the police officer investigating the accident. Mrs Heloise Kuhn. The old Borne farmhouse on the Bolinas Road.’ Hammett was reading from the blank back of an envelope he had taken from his suitcoat inner pocket. He returned it. ‘The driver I hired in Sausalito brought me here. If there’s some mistake…’

The fat woman jabbed a still-wet finger against his chest. ‘You better clear out of here you don’t want no trouble. Ain’t no chinks on my place, ain’t been no chinks on my place, ain’t gonna be no chinks on my place.’