Hammett read it through to the end. A typical Brass Mouth Epstein maneuver. Take Mulligan Bros money to defend Molly, then warn them — and the DA and the cops as well — that Molly knew too much for them to expect her to pull fifteen years at Tehachapi. Smear it all over the newspapers through exclusive interviews with feature writers. Make Molly a cause celebre. And then pull the plug, spirit her away, and let everyone sweat a little bit.
And into the midst of all this sweating and careful orchestration, perhaps, had stepped Vic Atkinson. What if he had found a lead to Molly that someone heard about? If someone didn’t want him to get to her, there was a motive for murder.
Which, however, only worked if you assumed that Molly knew something worth murder. You’d have to talk to Molly to know for sure.
Hell, he needed a licensed grift, so he could lean on the people who had to be leaned on. That meant convincing the committee he should take Vic’s place — just as Jimmy Wright had been urging him. Once he had that…
Who was he kidding? He was a writer now, not a sleuth. He lowered the level in his glass. The cops would turn up some bum or wino who’d ridden the rods up from Stockton or down from Portland, had rolled Vic as a drunk, and had hit too hard. Had carried the body across the street to dump it by the tracks.
Did he really believe that?
‘Do you really believe that, Hammett?’ he asked aloud.
Goddammit, Vic’s death had nothing to do with him, was nothing to him. Right? He sat on the edge of the bed, rubbed his hands down over his face. He had a book to revise. So many things…
But all in an orderly progression. First things first.
Where in hell had that bottle gotten to?
9
At three A.M. the heavy hardwood door of 891 Post was slammed wide. Hammett came through at an angle so sharp that one tough stringy shoulder hit the wall. This spun him around. To keep his balance, he stepped back on the raised vestibule terrazzo a foot beyond where the terrazzo ended.
He fell heavily on his back on the sidewalk. He lay there motionless, then started coughing. The violence of the spasms curled him to one side. He spat against the concrete and stared intently at it for a few moments.
Then he clambered to his feet. He had not bothered to put on a collar and the bare stud glinted at the back of the neckband.
‘’Rested,’ he said aloud.
That’s what the medicos at the veterans’ lung hospital had told him about his consumption. An arrested case. No blood in what he had spat against the sidewalk. No hemorrhaging for over three years, not since he’d twice come around in a pool of his own blood on the floor of Samuels’ Jewelers and had quit to go write before it was too late.
And Josie, before she’d left him that first time, My God, Dash, don’t you understand? You’re killing yourself with your drinking. Josie. Nurse and wife and…
‘It was the whiskey that stopped the TB,’ he said stubbornly.
He realized that his right hand still clutched an unbroken quart whiskey bottle. The street was deserted, dark between streetlamps pooling light at the intersections. On Sutter, a block above, an all-night Owl went by with a mournful thinning rattle-rattle and clang-clang-clang. My God, what lonely sounds! He looked at the bottle and chuckled.
‘Never spilled a drop,’ he bragged.
He looked closer. Empty. Must have been empty when he’d left the building. He stepped to the edge of the sidewalk and hurled the bottle, spinning, across the street like a German potato-masher grenade. It just cleared the fabric top of a parked ‘27 Falcon Knight to burst against the face of Guaranteed Cleaning and Tailoring with a sullen thud.
‘Take that, you rotten Hun bastards!’ Hammett yelled.
The rotten Hun bastards didn’t answer He had the street to himself. And he was out of booze. That, he remembered abruptly, was what he had come downstairs for. A man couldn’t prosify if he was out of
Prosify. Word? Hell with it.
Couldn’t revenge ol’ Vic without lubrication. All the working parts would seize up. Engine so worn the pistons changed valves every other stroke.
How the hell did anyone get along without booze? The old man, never touching a drop of it. Didn’t like him drinking, didn’t even like him smoking — but Hammett’d always been the family wild one. Still just a kid, ten or eleven, he and Walt Polhaus sneaking down to the corner to buy cigarettes two for a penny. Polhaus always got… yeah, Piedmonts, that was it, while he always got Old Mills because they were supposed to be stronger.
Walt Polhaus, where’d he ever get to? Use him in a book sometime. Now, though, where’d his booze go to? All gone. But he’d lobbed that bottle grenade like old Pop Daneri in the trenches at the Somme.
Pop Daneri!
Hell, yes, Pop always had a jar of shine around to get him through the long insomniac hours when the mustard gas he’d whiffed in France seemed to curl through his lungs again.
Hammett started across the intersection. Maybe Pop’d have something a cut above his usual. A tin of turpentine, maybe, or a slug of paint thinner.
Clem Daneri’s tousled white thatch was thrust out of the office door so his snapping black eyes could size up any prospective customer coming up the stairs of the Weller Hotel.
‘How’s it going, Pop?’
‘Settin’ up and taking nourishment,’ exclaimed the old man happily. ‘I thought you was off the sauce.’
‘What makes you think-’
‘Don’t I know you, Hammett?’ He shut the lower half of the Dutch door and belatedly the upper half behind the lean writer. A buzzer beside the door would announce any opening of the downstairs street door. ‘You only come around when you don’t have the price of a jar or can’t find anyplace to sell you one.’
Hammett sat down all at once in a hardwood arm rocker that had the rockers attached to the posts in the old cleft style. ‘I fell down,’ he said. ‘I hit my head.’
‘Good it’s the head. That’s where it can’t hurt you none.’ The thick blue-veined gentle fingers explored the back of the scalp. ‘I’ll get the horse linament.’
The old man went through the connecting door to the other room of the tiny suite that came with his manager’s job at the Weller. Hammett sat without moving, his head slightly lowered and his long-fingered narrow hands hanging laxly off the chair arms until Pop bounced back into the room with a dark bottle. Hammett uncorked it to sniff the contents.
‘I’d be afraid to rub a horse down with this stuff,’ he said.
‘Just apply internally.’
Hammett’s Adam’s apple worked in his lean throat. Pop sank down into a worn mohair rocker.
‘Knew a feller killed himself like that.’
‘Sure you did. See in the papers where a nun choked to death taking communion?’ A mulish look on his face, he tipped up the bottle again for a second long slug and lowered it wet-eyed. ‘Whew! Jesus, that’s rotten.’
‘Just off the boat,’ said Pop absently.
‘Cattle boat.’
‘Okay, what’s chewing at you, Sam?’ demanded the old man harshly.
A somber light entered Hammett’s eyes. ‘Vic Atkinson.’ He lowered his head and started to cry. His sobs had a harsh nighttime sound in the little room. Pop watched him with bright speculative eyes.
‘So what makes him being dead your problem?’ he asked when Hammett subsided.
Despite all the whiskey, he told it as if he were writing a report, dryly and factually in grammatical, unadorned English. The two men passed the bottle back and forth until Hammett’s voice began to slow, soften, slur, lose resonance and direction. His head dipped. He gave a long soft snore.
‘Hammett! Sleep on your own time.’
His head jerked up. ‘You old bastard.’ He’d met Pop in an Army hospital in the desert near San Diego in 1920, where they’d each been sent for damaged lungs. The same hospital where Josie… He demanded blearily, ‘Where’s that bottle?’
‘It’s empty.’