‘You’ve got another.’
The old man paused in the open doorway to the other room. ‘You’re goin’ after whoever did it, ain’t you, Sam?’
‘What else can I do?’
Vic was dead because of him, that was the long and short of it. I hope they beat your goddamn head in.. And here was Hammett piss-ass drunk instead of out finding the bastard that did it. Everything he touched turned to shit. Every living thing.
He started to curse in a low hoarse voice. Pop Daneri came through the doorway with a new bottle. It looked to him like a long night. But all his nights were long, and would be a damned sight longer if it weren’t for Hammett. Hammett had gotten him this job back in ’21, when Pinkerton’s had used the Weller as a place to stash surprise witnesses in court cases. Except for Hammett, he’d have lived at the veterans’ hospital until he rotted.
‘Drink up, you damned fool.’
Hammett drank. The whiskey seemed to revive him. The cursing jag, like the crying jag, had passed. He started to talk about the hospital, and the desert, and the other patients. Everybody but Josie.
‘… time Whitey Kaiser bought the five bottles of patent medicine that was about ninety proof, and drank them all and slugged his doctor?’ He didn’t wait for a reply. ‘Remember that bushy-headed guy with half an ear missing that you suckered into betting on the sidewinder against our Gila monster in that boxcar out on the edge of a desert?’
‘And Josephine A. Dolan,’ Pop cut in deliberately. ‘What d’ya hear from Josie these days?’
It stopped Hammett like a wall. She was still his wife, even if.. He cleared his throat.
‘You know how it is, Pop.’
‘No, I don’t know how it is, Sam. You tell me.’
Hammett reached a long arm for the bottle. How did you sum up a love and two lives? Josie. Nurse in his ward. Round face that smiled easily, freckles and the sort of coloring that went with red hair, though hers really wasn’t. Slender and wiry, tireless and inventive when aroused.
‘Poor Josie,’ he said aloud.
Married to a lunger and a lush and a writer — all in the same guy. Win, place, or show, and he came in out of the money every time.
After lights-out, they’d sneak out together hand in hand, across the desert to a little ravine where there was a flat place under some trees. You could smell the dry earth and cooked vegetation cooling off after the day’s heat, especially the small plants that were crushed under their excited bodies. Athletic and fun and rough-and-tumble, leaving them spent and breathless.
‘We used to make a game out of cursing each other, Pop. I always won. She’d put her hands over her ears because I knew more words than she did.’
The tenderness was afterward, when they’d stare up through the trees at the big close desert stars while their hearts slowed and the sweat dried on their bodies.
‘I think the only really happy times Josie had with me were when I was working for Al Samuels. Steady job, steady paycheck…’
Not fair. It was the drinking that bothered her, not the uncertainties of a beginning writer’s life. In the crummy apartment down on Eddy Street. Then after she’d left him once and come back again, out in the nicer place on Hyde, with the old beauty there under the darkness of a thousand waxings of wood-paneled walls. But there it had finally become destructive: the drinking and the cold-faced scenes, and she hadn’t covered her ears anymore when the cursing started.
‘We were going in different directions,’ he said aloud.
‘Where are Josie and the girls now, Sam?’
‘Down south. Up in Montana.?Quien sabe? ’ He staggered to his feet. ‘Don’t ever need me for anything, Pop.’
‘Go to hell,’ said the old man without heat.
‘Yeah, sure,’ said Hammett. ‘I’ll take this with me.’ He waved the bottle, lurched, straightened. ‘Vic Atkinson counted on me, and where’s he now?’
He weaved to the door, opened it, and rammed his head into the upper half that hadn’t opened. He cursed and fumbled at the latch. Pop Daneri could hear him carom off walls to muttered comments on his progress down the hall.
When the sounds had faded, Pop went over and shut the door. From below, faintly, came the careless slam of the front door. He reached in under the scalloped green shade of the floor lamp to pull the chain and plunge the room into darkness.
Pop threw the window up so he could lean on the sill and stick his head out. Hammett was cutting across the deserted intersection, weaving, bottle in hand.
As he slid the window back down, Pop shivered as with a chill. God help whoever had killed Vic Atkinson.
10
It was shortly after nine o’clock on Thursday evening. Hammett, his pace firm, his clean-shaven face pale but his eyes clear of any trace of dissipation, crossed the floor of the echoing rotunda at City Hall. His steps rang on marble so highly polished it gave the illusion of being soft underfoot. As he passed each claw-footed, ridiculously ornate brass light standard, his elongated shadow wheeled across the floor. He skirted the central staircase and moved between pillars supporting the vast domed ceiling five stories above.
In front of a half-ton brass mailbox facing the locked Van Ness Avenue entrance, he shook hands with the larger of two dark waiting shapes. Preacher Laverty hadn’t changed much with the years. Same heavy features, same pinkish hair just now beginning to frost with age. They were nearly of a height, although Hammett was seventy pounds lighter.
‘So you want to go after the murdering bastards, now that it’s too late for Vic.’ Laverty’s soft south-of-Market brogue made it sound very slightly like ‘murthering.’
‘Will you back me or not?’
Laverty rasped a heavy hand down over that morning’s shave. ‘Vic thought a lot of you as a detective, and Jimmy here tells me you can’t be bought.’
‘We’ve already spent the last hour up there arguing for you,’ said the fat little op.
Hammett went up the marble staircase. As he skirted the mezzanine above the rotunda, his eyes were caught, as always, by the slogan McKenna had caused to be incised above the ornate arch:
SAN FRANCISCO
O GLORIOUS CITY OF OUR HEARTS THAT
HAST BEEN TRIED AND NOT FOUND WANTING
GO THOU WITH LIKE SPIRIT TO MAKE
THE FUTURE THINE.
He paused for a moment before the darkly varnished door with THE MAYOR chisled into the granite coping above it, marshaling what Jimmy Wright had told him of the members of the reform committee. Then he pushed on through it.
Evelyn Brewster was a slim handsome woman just shy of forty. Her chestnut hair was short and finger-waved in the latest style. She wore a white sleeveless frock with a tailored collar and a white jacket in heavy crepe de Chine, the ensemble set off by a bright silk scarf around her slender throat. She smelled pleasantly of eau de cologne.
She cast a covertly furious glance at her husband, Dalton. He was lounged in his chair with one knee braced against the edge of the oak conference table. He’d come to the mayor’s office, she was sure, only because their son had been one of those apprehended in that woman’s place, not from any sense of moral urgency.
Which meant it was up to her to make sure that they were represented by an investigator of impeccable personal habits. A moral man. An upright man.
‘Even though you come highly recommended by Mr Laverty and Mr Wright,’ she said to the lean man standing across the table, ‘I… that is, we, feel that a professional detective should represent this committee in this trying and delicate investiga-’
‘I spent eight years in the profession, ma’am.’ As an afterthought, Hammett added, ‘And Vic Atkinson didn’t intend to represent you.’
Evelyn Brewster’s husband stirred for the first time. He was youthfully trim, his hair dark and unthinned by his forty years, the heavy muscles in his jaws giving his face an unexpected craggy appearance. He ran with absolute authority the small coastal shipping empire his grandfather had founded back in gold rush days, and it showed in his voice.