‘It’s as much of a commitment as any honest detective could give you, ma’am. Chopping down the tree is the job of the grand jury and the DA. Yours is making sure they do theirs.’
‘It isn’t enough!’ she cried. Her voice quivered. ‘It has no moral dimension! We are not here merely to stop corruption. We are here to root it out; it is that, and only that, which is important, no matter who is hurt or what hardships are worked upon their families. Civic duty takes precedence over personal convenience. The guilty must suffer. Every policeman who has ever taken a bribe, every bookmaker who has ever taken a bet-’
‘My dear,’ said her husband.
‘Every speakeasy proprietor who has ever sold an illicit drink-’
‘Evelyn.’
‘Every woman who has ever sold her body to lustful men-’
‘ Evelyn! ’ His voice was a whipcrack.
‘Oh!’ she exclaimed. Her voice was breathless, half-smothered, as if her husband had tossed a bucket of cold water over her.
‘I’ve sent plenty of wrong Ghees to the can, and I’ve never lost any sleep over any of them,’ said Hammett. ‘I wouldn’t lose any sleep over sending crooked cops up either. But you wouldn’t have any police graft if you didn’t have prostitution, or gambling, or bootlegging ‘Exactly! Stop those…’
‘The trouble is, ma’am, you can’t stop those. Statutes that conflict with human nature are ultimately unenforceable and just create disrespect for all law, as we’ve seen with Prohibition. But if you legalized gambling and prostitution, and then licensed and controlled them with the regulating power assigned to someone other than the police, you’d cut off the sources of police graft and corruption, and-’
‘Do you think this committee could ever agree, even in principle, to such immoral, outrageous suggestions?’ she demanded.
‘No,’ said Hammett, ‘they haven’t invented a committee yet that has that much sense. So you still need an investigator. I’ll be out in the hall.’
11
Hammett, on his third cigarette in the corridor outside the mayor’s complex of offices, turned quickly when a door opened behind him. The man framed in the opening was about fifty, bulky and powerful, clean-shaven but with thick curly hair, a strong, slightly down-curved nose, and fleshy lips above a stubborn, meaty chin.
‘Mr Hammett. Could you come in, please?’
Hammett went through the door, and realized that he was in McKenna’s private office.
‘I was eavesdropping from in here,’ said the man. He gestured at his clothes: patterned plus fours, diamond argyle socks, a V-neck cricket sweater. ‘I never got home to change after leaving the golf course this afternoon.’
Hammett had him then. Owen Lynch, McKenna’s executive secretary. Also aide-de-camp, adviser, political guide, speech writer, and — if political opponents could be believed — chief conniver. A man with a private income and no personal political ambition, on whose judgment McKenna relied explicitly.
‘Brandy?’
Hammett shook his head. ‘I’m just coming off a two-day drunk.’
‘I thought you said that you and Atkinson had drifted apart.’
‘That doesn’t change anything.’
‘Of course not. Sorry.’ Lynch slid back a panel to pour himself a generous drink from a Stourbridge decanter. He held it to the light. ‘“He who aspires to be a hero must drink brandy.”’
‘Sure. But I don’t suppose you asked me in to hear you quote Boswell.’
‘A private detective who reads Boswell. I like that. I pounded that line into Bren’s thick head during the twenty-two campaign when the teetotals took to calling him Brandy Bren. It was very effective at rallies. The public likes its heroes slightly flawed.’
‘I don’t follow politics much.’
‘Meaning you didn’t — or wouldn’t — vote for Bren? There was a time when I didn’t myself.’
Hammett knew the story. In 1913, as a feature writer on crusading editor Fremont Older’s Bulletin, Lynch had been one of the few who opposed McKenna’s candidacy for mayor. But despite Lynch’s clever and biting attacks, McKenna had won even in the home district of his incumbent opponent, P. H. ‘Pinhead’ McCarthy.
‘He’s gotten better since then?’
‘Or I’ve gotten less discriminating,’ said Lynch with an easy smile.
Four years later, embittered by personal tragedy, he had resigned from the newspaper to direct McKenna’s drive for reelection. It was successful, for McKenna’s personal magnetism had found its perfect complement in Lynch’s hard-headed pragmatism.
‘Bren is backing you all the way in there with the committee.’
Hammett slid down on his spine in a big leather armchair, and said nothing.
After a moment, Lynch chuckled. ‘You think he’ll try to hamstring the investigation?’
‘It’s his town.’
‘Which he’ll be leaving in two years for the statehouse in Sacramento.’ He gestured with his empty brandy glass. ‘ Unless there’s a scandal in his administration that he does nothing about.’
‘Molly Farr,’ said Hammett. There was a thoughtful, vaguely approving look in his eyes.
‘Molly Farr or some other. Oh, I know he has been elected three times because the citizens want a wide-open town. But his popularity extends beyond that. He’s America’s first lord mayor in the British sense.’ His eyes were alight with enthusiasm. ‘When he took office, San Francisco was still a nineteenth-century provincial town; Bren turned it into a twentieth-century metropolis. It was a community with a tradition of political corruption under Abe Reuf, and with a history of mob violence and vigilante violence and labor violence. Bren has brought together employer, employed, and unemployed, and gotten them to-’
‘The only thing that won’t go away is that political corruption,’ cut in Hammett in an almost lazy voice.
‘And that’s exactly why I arranged for Bren to chair this reform committee as soon as I heard about it. That’s why I talked Dan Laverty into advising the committee — so they’d get an incorruptible investigator. And when that investigator was killed, I had Dan get us another one equally trustworthy.’
‘You trust the Preacher’s judgment that much?’
‘He and Bren and I went through grammar and high school together out in the Mission. We’ve known each other for better than forty years.’ He shook his head. ‘The directions people go! Griff Mulligan was another one in the class…’
McKenna bustled in. One pearl-gray trouser cuff was artfully draped into the top of an oak-tanned cowboy boot. Despite his high heels, he was half a head shorter than the other two men. Through the briefly opened door, Hammett could see the committee members still standing in odd groups around the table.
McKenna beamed, pumping Hammett’s hand up and down in both of his. ‘Congratulations! The reform committee has hired you to investigate graft in the San Francisco police department, and to report to the grand jury all material for criminal indictments against policemen guilty of taking bribes.’ He crossed to the sliding panel in the Gillow sideboard, which was supported by two magnificently carved wooden eagles. ‘Brandy?’
‘I’m on the wagon.’ Still wary, Hammett added, ‘I’ll need strong backing in certain areas, Mr Mayor…’
‘Just name them.’
‘I’ll be questioning policemen, everyone from sergeant up, to start — and a lot of them aren’t going to want to talk to me.’
Lynch said, ‘Dan Laverty will see that anyone your people want, your people get.’
‘They’ll be Vic’s people, actually, headed by another ex-Pinkerton named Jimmy Wright. Jimmy’s in town now, the rest are due up from Los Angeles next week. They’ll start interrogations on Monday, in an office we select ourselves so informants can come and go unobserved for their own protection.’
‘Anything else?’ asked Lynch.
‘I’ll need some sort of authorization to talk to the phone company to monitor certain lines, with stenographers taking down all incoming and outgoing calls.’