Joe Gores: Hammett

Laverty’s eyes gradually unglazed. When he realized what he had done, he crossed himself and vomited a few yards from the corpse.

With sudden impatience, Dashiell Hammett thrust aside the December, 1927, issue of Black Mask. He needed more complication, another scene showing the Op stirring things up in Poisonville, for the four published novelettes to work as a novel. And with the book version, titled Red Harvest, already scheduled for publication, he had to do any insert scenes damned quick.

He began pacing the narrow cramped living room. How about a… no, that wouldn’t work. But…

Yeah. Maybe a fight scene. Good. Set in a fairgrounds casino or something, out on the edge of town. Now, how to make the Op the catalyst in it…

Hammett paused in his pacing to look at his strap watch. Still time to get out to Steiner Street and catch the Friday night fight card at Winterland. Just opened, he hadn’t even seen the inside of the place yet. So why not? He’d be bound to get an idea or two he could work into Red Harvest during his stint at the typewriter that night.

As Hammett emerged into Post Street he almost cannoned into Goodie Osborne, just coming home from work. He caught her by the shoulders.

‘Can you live without food for a few more hours?’

‘Of course, but what-’

‘C’mon.’ He guided her across Post Street without noticing the very big man who was supporting the corner building while relighting his cigar stub. ‘I’m on my way out to Winterland for the fights. Want to come along?’

Goodie’s eyes were sparkling. ‘Try to stop me.’

The big man straightened, tossed aside the newly lit stub, and crossed Post toward their apartment building. His name was Victor Atkinson, and he was a man not easily forgotten: six feet three, two hundred and fifteen pounds, huge restless hands, and a bony icebreaker jaw.

With his work cords and heavy wool lumberjack, he looked like a logger down from Seattle — which is what he wanted to look like.

Atkinson went down the narrow dim hallway beside the elevator to tattoo the manager’s door with heavy knuckles. The bleary-eyed woman who opened it and squinted up at him wore her hair in a wispy bun and had about half a bun on herself; he could smell the bathtub gin from three feet away.

‘Ain’t got no rooms.’ Her face brightened. She added with a simper, ‘Big boy.’

‘Yeah.’ He crowded her back into the littered, close-smelling apartment without seeming to. ‘I want a line on one of your tenants.’

‘That’s privi…’ She hiccuped. ‘Privileged infor-’

‘Hammett. Third floor front, far end. Was up there. Nobody home.’

‘I told you-’

‘Habits. Who he sees. What’s he do for a living. Things like that.’

‘I don’t-’

‘Ain’t got all night, lady.’ His heavily boned face was brutal in its lack of expression. The boredom in his voice somehow had a menace beyond mere bluster. ‘I gotta catch the fight card out to Winterland.’

Hammett and Goodie paused in front of the row Victorians across Steiner from the huge amphitheater.

‘Quite a place,’ he commented.

‘And so many people.’ The blond girl was clinging to his arm with excitement.

Winterland was a massive white stucco structure, four stories high, with spotlights to illuminate the American flags on the poles jutting up past the coping of the red-tiled roof. They let themselves be carried across the street to the open doors under the unadorned sidewalk-width marquee.

‘Who do you like in the main event, Mr Hammett?’

The fresh-faced urchin in knickers, drab moleskin coat, and golfing cap was peddling newspapers and boxing magazines. Hammett bought a Knockout.

‘The Canadian in the fifth or sixth.’

‘I dunno,’ said the boy dubiously. ‘I seen Campbell in a couple a’ workouts and he looked awful strong to me.’

‘So’s a bull, but it can’t match a mastiff,’ said Hammett. ‘The Frenchie’ll cut him to pieces.’

The ticket windows, flanked by ornamental green shutters, were set under little roofed cottagelike facades at either end of the foyer. Hammett got two in the third row ringside, which cleaned him out except for cigarette money.

‘Who was that boy, Sam?’

‘Just a kid hangs around on fight nights. He’s got an uncle makes book out of the candy store at Fillmore and McAllister.’

‘Sam, a candy store?’

‘Next best place to a smokeshop,’ he said piously.

They surrendered their tickets and passed through a thick-walled archway beside the narrow balcony stairway. Open side doors, guarded by uniformed ticket-takers, let in the noise of the Post Street evening traffic that inched through the sporting crowd. Over the heads of seated fight fans they could see the square canvas ring that had been set up on the main arena floor.

‘Sure beats Dreamland,’ said Hammett.

But not, he thought, as a place for him to stage Poisonville’s fights. Until a couple of years before, this had been the site of the Dreamland roller-skating rink where Hammett had seen a lot of Friday-night fights and Tuesday-night wrestling matches. The old echoing wooden building, with its narrow second-floor balconies extending out toward the ring, fitted Poisonville’s grubby atmosphere better than this fancy new place. Unless he picked up something usable from the bouts themselves, he’d wasted his evening.

They took their seats on the vast main floor of the arena, which could be flooded to make ice but was now covered with row upon row of wooden folding chairs linked in pairs for easy setting up and removal.

Goodie craned up at the ceiling. It was very high, arched and vaulted, pierced by glassed-over skylights and with a square frame of spotlights centered above the ring. Around three sides were balconies, their steep rows of permanent seating finally lost in the blue haze of tobacco smoke.

‘Evening, ma’am.’

The man who owned the breathy voice beside her was very fat and wore a heavy tan coat with an astrakhan collar. His shoe-button eyes had an unusual intensity which frightened Goodie. She turned quickly to Hammett.

‘Sam…’

But the fat man was leaning past her, not toward her.

‘Dash, I hear you tell the kid outside you take Boulanger in the fifth?’

‘Not picking a round, two-to-three he does it by the sixth.’

‘Thirty says you’re wrong.’

Hammett nodded. The fat man began talking with great animation to a dapper slick-haired individual with a slightly lopsided face and a carnation in his lapel.

Goodie whispered, ‘Sam, who is he?’

‘Another of those gamblers you’re so anxious to meet.’ The spotlights went on above the ring. ‘Freddy the Glut. I saw him lose a grand to Benny the Gent in Bones Remmer’s Menlo Club on Eddy Street one night, and walk away laughing. Fellow with him is Carnation Willie. Local lads, not in a class with Eddy Sahati or the Rothsteins.’

The announcer interrupted with the information that Al Flores was going to engage in ‘four rounds of boxing’ with Dancing Frankie Whitehead in the curtain-raiser.

‘Keep your eye on the Portagee,’ said Hammett.

But Dancing Frankie opened fast: Halfway into the round he put the Portuguese boy on the canvas for a six count with a roundhouse right that wasn’t fooling. Goodie was on her feet, shouting. She sat down shame-faced when Hammett tugged at her coat sleeve.

‘I’m sorry, Sam, I just got so excited-’

‘Heck, yell all you want, kid. I just think you ought to know you’re backing the wrong boy. Whitehead won’t last.’

‘I’ll bet you supper he wins,’ said Goodie recklessly.

In the second round, Flores put the badly winded Dancing Frankie down with a flurry of punches that kept him down.