Joe Gores: Hammett

‘Forty years I knew him. Forty years I loved him. He was closer than any brother could have been. Do you understand that? Do you?’

‘I understand.’

‘You wanted me to come back and hear. You.’

With a sleepwalker’s movements he took out the long-barreled police positive with which he had shattered Egan Tokzek’s spine. He thumbed back the hammer.

His mad eyes glared into Hammett’s.

‘You,’ he said.

He rammed the muzzle of the revolver, upside down, into his own mouth and blew the top of his head up against the ceiling.

Hammett sagged against the shackles. He squeezed his eyes tight shut so only the pink nothingness of the lids moved against his pupils. But when he opened his eyes again, nothing had changed. Nobody had gone away. And it was still there. The blackness he had first glimpsed in the cemetery, the blackness he had fought by telling himself it was the result of eight years as a detective, eight callous years of brutality and cynicism. And of the years since, writing about that brutality and cynicism.

But it was no good.

Too many indications, too many clues for a good detective to ignore. And goddammit, he’d been a good detective.

Like, why had Crystal suddenly begun dutiful visits to the parents she had previously ignored? Could it have had something to do with Heloise finding it more difficult — and dangerous — to procure girls who wouldn’t be missed?

And why had Crystal told Hammett that Tokzek broke her in, four years ago, when the man already had been a hopeless junkie, incapable of even normal sex, let alone the determined sexual effort necessary to rape and condition a child?

And how had she known who Lynch was and where he could be reached on that Monday she had disappeared?

And why had she called Lynch to come and remove her from the Weller Hotel, where she was safe?

And finally, why had the fat woman and her son died, unless to protect — and perhaps delight — someone? And why with their faces blown away in Marin, unless to insure that no one would question a Chinese girl’s face being blown away in San Francisco?

He was not even surprised when the interior door across the room swung open. He merely said, ‘Hello, Crystal.’

‘How did you know?’ cried the Chinese girl in great delight. With a joyous laugh she stepped over the policeman’s exploded head as if it were a section of curb. ‘How did you figure it out?’

For one of the few times in his life, Hammett was speechless. He was looking at evil: sprightly, beautiful, and totally corrupt. She was dressed in a spun jersey bloomer dress, hand-embroidered around the collar and cuffs, with sweet little pearl buckles on each side of the front pleats. It was the outfit a girl of nine or ten might wear, with bloomers of lustrous sateen just peeking out from beneath the hem of the childishly short skirt.

Crystal pirouetted slowly in front of him, then curtsied like a child completing her number at the school recital.

‘Do you like it?’

Her lispy little-girl voice literally raised the hairs on the back of Hammett’s neck. The voice, the slight body in the child’s dress, even the curtsy — these all belonged to a little girl. But beneath the bodice were a woman’s breasts, beneath the sateen bloomers a woman’s hips. And the naked pale legs were a woman’s, beautifully rounded.

The face, framed in its gleaming mane of ebony hair, was a child’s face. But it was made up as a woman’s — and had a look of innocent depravity that was terrifying.

Crystal batted her eyes and stuck out her tongue at him.

‘Mean Mr Hammett doesn’t like little Crystal’s dress!’

She darted to Lynch’s body, and swooped over it to take the handcuff keys from his pocket. In the process, she gave Hammet a flashing look at the tautened shiny bloomers. She looked back at him with childish delight as she did.

‘ Daddy liked my dress.’ She straightened. ‘Daddy liked to take my dress off me. I was Daddy’s little girl. ’ She kicked the dead man in the temple. She smiled sweetly at Hammett. ‘Daddy wasn’t a very nice man.’

‘Daddy’s little girl isn’t a very nice little girl.’ It was the first thing he had said since she entered the room. He felt only that same odd, debilitating lassitude he had felt ever since Lynch had chained him there.

‘Well, she’s had a lot of lessons, hasn’t she?’ The lisp was gone.

‘Not from me.’

‘No. Not from you.’ She sat down on the edge of the bed, her hands clasped between her thighs, just as she had sat on her bed at the Weller a couple of lifetimes ago. He recognized it as a habitual pose. ‘How did you guess? What did I do wrong?’

Hammett yawned, hugely and involuntarily. He could almost welcome death, he thought. Then at least he could quit talking. He had talked the night and two lives away. Three, counting his own.

‘So many things, Crystal. It wasn’t luck. Just logic.’

Her pout was genuine. ‘Tell me. I thought I was awfully good.’

‘At the acting, yes. I’ve never seen anyone better. It was almost too good. The first time I saw you, at Molly’s, you were playing the dumb little chink. Every time I saw you, it was a different role. Once I realized you’d gone into hiding deliberately, for your own purposes and not because you were in fear of your life, I was ready for that whole Capone scenario-’

The girl made a slight deprecatory gesture. ‘I’d told Molly I was scared of mobsters from back east, just to keep her from asking questions, but I’d never bothered to make up a story. When I saw I was going to have to give you one, I thought the Hymie Weiss killing would work fine. I didn’t know you’d remember so much about it.’

‘Yeah. And once I knew you hadn’t spent your three years back east dodging Capone, I had to wonder what you were doing.’

‘I could have just been at the Harlem Inn in Stickney.’

‘I believed that part of your story,’ said Hammett.

Her eyes had a quizzical expression. ‘You’re a funny kind of detective. It’s too bad you have to…’ She broke off.

‘And you’re a funny kind of ex-whore.’

His hands in the tight handcuffs had gone numb, but he knew it would do no good to ask her to remove them. Lynch’s death hadn’t altered his peril any.

‘So here were three years of your life unaccounted for, and here you were with a command of English, when you forgot yourself, like a college graduate. Molly mentioned that you would have been terrific dressed up as a little girl, driving the older johns wild — deflowering young virgins is a common sexual fantasy. You said yourself that they dressed you that way at the Harlem Inn. So I thought about the possibility that some rich old man in Chicago had taken you out of the cathouse and…’ He raised his shoulders in as much of a shrug as the cuffs permitted him.

The girl’s eyes were momentarily far away, as they’d been when she’d told him of her introduction to whoredom.

‘He was seventy years old; and important enough in Chicago that he could just tell Capone he wanted me, rather than ask. He kept me in a house on the West Side. After the first year, he trusted me to serve as hostess when he entertained. I watched and listened and learned.’ It was her turn to shrug. ‘Then he died of a heart attack at home with his wife. I just packed up and left.’

‘And came out here to go after Lynch. But why him? Was he the one who really-’

‘Yes.’ She spat the word, her tilted eyes narrowed and alive with hatred. ‘He liked them ten years old, eleven. First, he’d take down the bloomers and give them a spanking. Then-’

‘But it got away from him.’

‘Even four years ago I knew it would. He broke one of my ribs. When they locked me in a train compartment with a man who didn’t care whether I had a broken rib or not, I stayed alive by telling myself that one day the one who’d had me first would kill one of the girls, and when he did I would be ready for him.’