Joe Gores - Hammett

‘Then you won’t mind if I glance around.’

He went by her up the weathered front steps toward the screen door leading to the front room. The screen sagged in its frame. When he reached the porch, she said behind him, ‘Don’t try it, mister.’

He looked down at her, unmoving beside her rain barrel.

‘What’ll you do? Drown another kitten?’

He swung back toward the door. The woman said, ‘Andy,’ in her fat, pleasure-filled voice.

The screen door opened a foot and the muzzle of a double-barrel shotgun — an Eastern Arms hammerless takedown twelve-gauge — came through the opening. The muzzle bored into Hammett’s breastbone. He backed down the steps. He felt breathless.

The door was shouldered wider by a towheaded seventeen-year-old with the build of a bull and a snubnosed freckled face almost idiotic in its vacuity. Sweat stood on his forehead and his cheeks were flushed as if from sustained physical effort. His faded workshirt was buttoned crookedly. It hung outside his trousers. His grin was delighted and quite mad.

‘Shud I do him, ma?’

‘Let be.’

Andy quit advancing. Hammett was three steps below the porch with the twin muzzles angled down against his collarbone.

Hammett made himself take another backward step, then another, and then a third to the ground. He turned stiffly away. Flies were already buzzing around the little heap of dead fur by the corner of the house.

As he went by her, the fat woman said, ‘Just a minnit you.’

Hammett stopped.

The woman looked at him, the raisins unwinking in their sockets of suet. She took a breath and made a sustained grating noise in her throat. Her rosebud mouth worked. She spat what she had hawked up against Hammett’s necktie, just under the knot.

Hammett went wordlessly down the narrow rutted grass track. Behind him, mother and son were making noises he took to be laughter.

As soon as the track dipped and curved to hide him from the house, he stopped and took off his tie. He threw it into the waist-high reed grass that flanked the track. He began to curse in a rising voice, as much madness in his tone as there had been in Andy’s laughter. The muscles stood out cleanly along the sides of his jaws as he ground his teeth. His face was fashioned from scraped bone. Somewhere in the trees arched over the narrow ruts a crestless scrub jay began its rusty-hinge of protest at his presence. Hammett could feel the black rage loosening its fingers from his mind.

Without being reckless, he’d never been afraid of dying. He didn’t like finding out that now he was.

He started down the track again toward the high-shouldered old Model-T coupe he’d hired in Sausalito. His progress sent a pair of mourning doves careening away, sunlight gleaming off the white feathers edging their pointed grey tails.

‘The hell with them,’ he muttered aloud.

Molly Farr wouldn’t be jungled up at a place like this. She wouldn’t give anyone like that fat woman that much of a hold over her. A fat woman who, goddammit, seemed familiar.

He came out on the Bolinas Road. His teenage driver was leaning against the fender of the Model-T. The coachwork of the car had been cut away with a blowtorch behind the cab so a pickup bed could be welded on. A devil with a thumb to his nose rode the cap on the flat-sided brass radiator.

Hammett jerked his head back at the house. ‘Where’s her husband?’

‘Ain’t nobody ever seen him that I know,’ said the boy. ‘Guess she was married just long enough to have Andy.’

‘No man around at all?’

‘Just her brother, sometimes. Big, mean-looking guy runs rum for some bootlegger over in the city.’

‘What’s the brother’s name?’

‘Don’t rightly know. Maybe my paw…’

‘Doesn’t matter.’

He got in the car. The leather seat was hot from the sun. Hot breeze came through the opened upper half of the windshield as they started off with a jerk. He was reduced to Phineas Epstein after all. Epstein was going to be a damned tough nut to crack.

The fat woman and her son had watched Hammett out of sight around the bend in the twin grassy ruts. The boy stood spraddle-footed on the porch, the shotgun muzzle-down in the crook of his arm.

‘He comin’ back, maw?’

She turned to look up at him, considering, squinting against the late afternoon sunlight. Finally she shook her head. ‘We scairt him.’ She added, ‘I need them kittens th’owed back up the ravine ’gainst they start stinking.’

‘Right after I finish, maw. I promise.’

Andy leaned the shotgun against the edge of the porch and went off. While he was gone, the fat woman heard, very faintly, the Model-T start up down at the foot of their track.

‘You can go finish up now, son.’

He went back into the house eagerly, letting the screen door flap shut behind him. He climbed narrow stairs to the second floor two at a time.

The window shades were lowered, making the room dim despite the bright sunshine outside. Andy carefully locked the door behind him before turning toward the bed. His face was already flushed with renewed excitement.

‘He ain’t gonna be back,’ he crowed. ‘Ain’t no way he’s gonna find out we got you here.’

Crystal, nude, was crouched back against the juncture of the walls at the head of the bed, tense as a coiled spring but her face totally without animation, her eyes, too old for her fifteen years, totally fathomless. If her features bore an expression, it was resignation.

‘Where was we?’ demanded Andy with a clumsy attempt at roguishness. ‘Oh, sure…’

He started to take off his trousers again.

Brass Mouth Epstein didn’t run to front. His second-floor office at 35 Powell Street was small, crowded by a big golden oak rolltop and a couple of massive fumed oak chairs with brown Spanish-grained leather upholstery. The three unwindowed walls were outfitted with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves crammed with dark-bound lawbooks in enough disarray to suggest use, not show.

Epstein was on his feet behind the desk, taking in Hammett with shrewd sparrow eyes. He was a small dark man in a brown suit to match his eyes; a gold watch chain glinted across his spare belly. His big nose dominated the other features.

‘Take off your coat, Mr Hawkins. Heat builds up here, afternoons.’

Hammett nodded his thanks and draped his overcoat across the back of one of the leather chairs. He sat down in the other. Beside the desk, within reach of both men, was a walnut smoking stand with brass fittings. At its foot was an old-fashioned brass cuspidor. On the wooden coatrack in the corner was the lawyer’s melton Chesterfield and fashionable beaver fedora.

‘Now, what can I do for the Fourth Estate, Mr Hawkins?’

Hammett settled back in his chair and got out his Camels. ‘The name is Hammett. I’m a private sleuth.’

Epstein’s eyes got sleepy in the same way that Jimmy Wright’s got sleepy when he was thinking. He fiddled with a spindle upon which was impaled a fistful of memoranda. ‘Why the charade this morning? And why tell me now?’

Hammett glanced up at the attorney through fresh cigarette smoke.

‘I want Molly Farr. We don’t have to fight about it.’

Epstein chuckled. Somewhere back in the open mouth a gold-capped tooth glinted. ‘We won’t fight about it, Hammett. This office has no information concerning Miss Farr’s present whereabouts.’

‘I’ve been hired by the reform committee to take Vic Atkinson’s place. Forget all that stuff in the papers about a gangland slaying. Vic wanted to talk with Molly about police corruption. Instead, you let her talk with the newspapers and then dust while they built her up into the biggest story since the Gray-Snyder electrocution. That’s fine with me. You’re doing a great job for her. But if you’d let Vic talk to her before-’