‘Fair enough.’ Lynch extended his hand to Hammett; the mayor was working on his second brandy. ‘I’ll get written authorization for you before your men arrive. You’ll see that I meant what I said about the total backing of this office.’ He chuckled. ‘And you can be as secretive as you wish about your methods and findings, even with us.’
‘That’s right,’ said Hammett pleasantly.
When the lean detective had departed, McKenna lowered his snifter almost sadly. ‘That’s a man with a grievance, Owen, and you’ve turned him loose in my city with a meat ax.’
Surprising anger suffused the secretary’s heavy features. ‘Goddammit, man, this is your only chance to get out of the mess you’ve gotten yourself into!’
‘Mess?’
Lynch sighed. He plopped his briefcase on a walnut and gilt console table and fished in his watch pocket for the key.
‘I didn’t plan to spring this on you until tomorrow morning on the Sacramento train, Bren, but…’ He delved for papers. ‘You know they’ve taken to calling you Randy Bren around City Hall these days?’
‘Haw! That’s good, that!’ McKenna tossed off half his third brandy with a practiced flip of the wrist. ‘Randy Bren. I like that.’
‘I doubt that Colleen would find it very amusing.’
‘She ain’t likely to hear it.’
Lynch said nothing. McKenna turned a hard questioning stare on him. Mention of his wife seemed to have troubled him.
‘Well, is she?’
Lynch had removed a thin file folder from the briefcase. ‘Report from a private detective dated Monday, May 21, 1928. Subject of Investigation: BRENDAN BRIAN MCKENNA. Client: COLLEEN DOROTHEA MCKENNA. Quote: “Subject was observed leaving-”’
‘Col… you mean that Colly put a private snoop on me?’
‘What did you expect, Bren? She’s no fool and you’ve been getting more flagrant with it. Quote: “Nine thirty A.M., subject was called for at City Hall by a blonde…” Hmm… ah, yes. “Left Whitcomb Hotel, Market Street, at eleven o’clock A.M…’ Ah! Here: “Twelve ten P.M. ascended to upstairs room above Jack’s Restaurant with a brunette”… There’s a good word, Bren, “ascended”; it gives a scriptural flavor that I’m sure Colly would find comforting. The investigator points out that there are beds in those upstairs rooms, and…’
‘You’ve made your point,’ said McKenna weakly.
Lynch put the folder back in the briefcase. ‘And you can ask what mess you’ve gotten yourself into?’
McKenna said wearily, ‘Thank God Colly didn’t see-’
‘Who the devil do you think gave it to me?’
‘You… can’t be serious, Owen!’
‘With a note that if this didn’t stop, you’d be running for governor as a divorced man.’
McKenna went to the ornate rocaille pier glass to nervously center his cravat. The light slanted down cruelly across the puffiness of indulgence around his jowls, the fine veining in his eyes, the first tiny hints of burst capillaries in his nose.
He mumbled, ‘Colly would go through with it? The divorce?’
‘If you force her hand. If you don’t, she’ll keep it in the family once again. But something that isn’t going to disappear is that Judah Street rezoning stink. It’s all over the papers and liable to-’
‘I vetoed the damned thing Friday.’
‘Two weeks too late. It’s an open secret that your three handpicked boys on the Board of Supervisors took a thousand apiece to vote for the change from Second residential to commercial.’
‘I’ll have their candy asses if they did,’ said McKenna with as much anger as he could muster.
‘Then there’s the rape-murder of that little Chinese girl…’
‘Dan Laverty shot the murdering bastard dead; the blue-noses ought to be cheering.’
‘Would they cheer to know that Dan kicked the man’s balls up into his belly first?’
‘Yes,’ said McKenna defiantly, ‘after what he used ’em for.’
‘Maybe so. But the dead man was a rumrunner for a local ’legger. The teetotals are already saying it wouldn’t have happened if you didn’t allow the speaks to flourish in San Francisco. And finally is this thing of the Brewster pup and his cronies going off to Molly Farr’s place.’
McKenna attempted to shrug it off. ‘So Brady’ll have to make a little noise because he plays handball with Dalt Brewster. It’ll cool down, Owen. It always does.’
‘Not this time. Not with Evelyn Brewster on the reform committee. She wants Molly out of business and in jail.’
‘I’ll not see Molly put away for fifteen years.’ He raised a hand to forestall objections. ‘I know, Owen, you don’t use whores and don’t see why anyone else should, but it’s more than just that. Last election, Molly had every Mary Magdalene in this city out voting tombstones for us from morning till night. I’ll not throw her down.’ He brightened abruptly. ‘Besides, nobody knows where she is.’
‘Epstein does, no matter how much he denies it to the newspapers. If I were Hammett, I’d be trying to make a deal with Brass Mouth for her secret testimony.’
‘And you wanted him hired!’ He burst out suddenly, ‘Why are we suddenly so worried about the reform element, anyway, Owen? In the old days-’
‘The old days are gone. To be governor two years from now, you have to get the clean money in San Francisco behind you now.’
‘It was the not-so-clean money put me in this office.’
‘Don’t you understand yet, Bren? That money has nowhere else to go.’
They descended the broad marble stairway to the floor of the rotunda, and paused at the head of the granite outer stairs while the chauffeur brought up McKenna’s grand yellow and black 1927 Lincoln coaching brougham with its gleaming side-lamps. Then Lynch went up Polk alone to his four-year-old Auburn. His thick shoulders slumped slightly. He was tired. It was all getting so damned complicated.
‘Bren, Bren, you damned fool,’ he said aloud in fond exasperation as he watched the brougham’s retreating taillights.
What wouldn’t he give to still have a wife to buoy him up, comfort him, inspire him as Colleen McKenna would do for Bren, given the chance? But his wife, Clarissa, had died, childless, in the influenza epidemic of 1918, and he had been alone ever since.
12
Hammett went down Prescott Court, a narrow cul-de-sac off Vallejo Street, looking at house numbers. He paused in front of 20/22, an older building with white scroll-work on the roof overhang and around the windows of the lower flat. From somewhere, very faintly, came the tang of fermenting grapes. It was only in the past ten years, since the Italians had begun pushing the Irish out, that the billy goats had disappeared from the lower slopes of Telegraph Hill and the bootleg winepresses had begun to outnumber the whiskey cookers.
Which reminded him that he needed a bottle if he was going to play in Fingers LeGrand’s poker game. It was tricky to try to get information about payoffs over the poker table in seemingly casual conversation; but Fingers knew him as a writer, not a detective, and he doubted that news of his hiring by the reform committee would be out on the street yet. He’d left McKenna’s office less than an hour before.
And the sooner he found Vic’s killer, the sooner he could return to the revision of The Dain Curse.
Hammett knocked, then rattled the heavy brass knob of the alley door. He had to stoop to press his nose against the heavy-gauge wire mesh that covered the window. It was gritty with street dirt.
A blocky silhouette moved toward Hammett, a latch was turned, and the window opened inward. A garlicked voice shoved words at him through the mesh. ‘I don’t know you.’
‘Fingers does.’
‘Fingers who?’
‘For Chrissake, knock-knock.’
The door scraped open. The man’s gray sweatshirt stank of stale sweat and was stretched taut over a broad hard mound of gut. He led the way to the speakeasy, a square concrete cell, the walls dampstained and unadorned with either picture or calendar, the ceiling the rough pine joists of the subfloor above. A single light globe hung from an electric flex stapled to one of the rafters.