He did indeed. An hour later the lean detective was broke. Drunk or sober, nothing wrong with the old German’s nerve. It had been an education in bluffing. He remembered a story about three drunken patriots during the war who’d decided to show their hatred for the Hun by messing up Geltwasser and his hockshop. One had died, one had fled, and now, ten years later, the third still walked with a limp.
Hammett shook his head at the new stack Fingers had begun to shove across to him. ‘I’m tapped out.’ He jingled the change in his pocket. ‘And I’m already into my bookie. Pleasure, gents.’
The outside air was like wine. He buttoned up his overcoat as he went down the terrazzo steps. A fine damp fog was in to soak up the misty gaslight at the alley’s mouth.
Hammett stopped dead. Three silhouetted figures were coming through the fog toward him. They were spread across the alley so he would have to pass between them to get out to Vallejo.
Hammett fished out smokes and matches and leaned back against the rough stucco of a housefront as they came abreast of him. The closest one checked his stride.
‘Got a match, buddy?’
The one in the middle had stopped directly in front of Hammett, the third a yard beyond. They had him neatly boxed in.
‘A match? Sure.’
It scraped, flared at the end of Hammett’s cigarette. The other man leaned just enough forward, as if to share the flame, so that Hammett would have to take his back from the wall and thus bare the nape of his neck to a rabbit punch.
But Hammett drove off the wall with the toe of his right shoe snapping into the man’s left kneecap. Pivoting on his left foot, he rammed his cigarette into the second man’s eye while the first was still yelling.
That left the third, coming in hard to cut off his break for the mouth of the alley. Instead, Hammett met his charge. He smashed the top of his head against the attacker’s face and through his mashed fedora felt teeth give inward. He sprinted for the concealing shadow at the far end of the cul-de-sac.
‘We’ve got the bastard!’ yelled one of them.
But Hammett had once questioned a witness in Prescott Court and he knew that the blank red brick rear of Broadway’s Washington Irving Grammar School was not completely flush with the final house on either side of the alley. The gaps were closed off with rough plank fences ten feet high. He veered right in the darkness, jumped to catch the top of the fence with his fingers, and swung his lean body to one side so he could hook the back of his shoe over the top also.
Grunting, he heaved again, pulled, rolled belly-down across the top of the planks and let go to fall away into blackness. The twenty-foot drop ended with bone-jarring abruptness on the gravel playground. He limped on stinging feet around the corner of the building and away.
Once on Broadway, he laughed aloud in the deserted three A.M. street. It was the first time anybody had tried to roll him when he’d lost at poker. He drew his overcoat tighter against the chill seeping up off the bay, and wondered if his hat would have any toothmarks in it.
Fast work. The committee had hired him only a half dozen hours before. Too fast. It gave him somebody obvious to work on. They were making mistakes already.
13
‘Just a second,’ Goodie called in answer to the gentle kicks on the bottom of the door. She threw a kimono over her slip, ran a hand through her unruly golden hair, and went to open it.
Hammett came by her bearing a steaming pot of coffee in one hand and a cheap tin tray in the other with both of his cups and saucers on it, both of his spoons, sugar and cream, and two buttered sweet rolls hot from the oven.
‘Look, ma, no hands.’
He continued into the kitchen where he deposited his treasures on the table. He was dressed in a business suit, a dress shirt, and a patterned tie with a large loose knot. He busied himself laying out his peace offering.
‘I have a vague recollection of trying to bust down your door the other night.’
Goodie blushed. ‘I… wouldn’t let you in, Sam. A little later I saw you going over to the Weller.’
He looked at her with keen dark eyes. His mouth quirked beneath the trim mustache. ‘I was hootched up like a bat, sweetheart.’
‘I’m… sorry about your friend.’ In a small voice, she added, ‘The newspapers say it was a gangland slaying, but you said…’
‘Don’t let it get cold.’ He waved at the table and sat down himself. Around bites of sweet roll, he outlined what had happened since Atkinson’s death, ending with the attack a few hours previously. ‘I really red-lighted Shuman, and this must have been his idea of a smart way to get back at me. It was actually stupid, because it’s given me a place to start.’
‘A member of the police commission ordering you beat up?’ Goodie sounded rather dazed. ‘I bet you were followed to the poker game, and-’
‘Uhuh. Spotting a tail is like riding a bicycle, darling — you never forget how.’
She turned Hammett’s wrist to check his watch, then was on her feet and flying for the bathroom. ‘It’s after seven thirty — I’ve got to comb my hair and get to work!’
‘I’ll just use your phone…’
She stuck her blond head back around the doorframe from the big wall bed closet beyond which was the minuscule bathroom. ‘Is that why you’re being so sweet this morning, Sam?’
‘What sort of bum do you take me for?’ he demanded virtuously.
He could hear her laughter as he sat on the sofa, set the telephone on his knee, and told the operator that he wanted DAvenport 20. When a voice said, ‘Police,’ Hammett said, ‘Central Station,’ waited some more, them asked for Sergeant Manion.
‘Jack, Dash Hammett here. I’m trying to get a line on a Chinese girl named Crystal Tam, who… huh? Right, that’s the one, Molly Farr’s maid… Mmm-hmm. No, I’m not even sure she’s local, but I thought… yeah. Right. That fast? Okay, many thanks, Jack.’
He broke the connection, released the hooks, gave the operator a SUtter exchange number, got no answer, and was hanging up when Goodie emerged from the bathroom fully dressed and pulling on her coat.
‘Will you shut the door when you leave, Sam?’
He blew her a kiss, returned to the phone and got DAvenport 8398 and asked for Jimmy Wright. When the fat little detective came on the line, his voice was still full of sleep.
‘What have the cops turned up on Vic?’ Hammett asked him.
‘Last solid thing is him leaving the Chapeau Rouge at the foot of Powell sometime after midnight, under his own power. They thought he was a timber beast out of Seattle. The Homicide boys are checking cabs now.’
‘All right, I want you to ask around the Army-Navy Y, the Lawrence Hotel, the Commodore — places like that near Mission and The Embarcadero.’
‘Will do,’ said the cop, without asking where the lead had come from.
Hammett tried the SUtter number again, and this time was told that Phineas Epstein would be in court until four thirty. Hammett identified himself as a reporter named Hawkins from a Los Angeles paper, and made an appointment to see Epstein at six P.M.
His last call was to the business office of the phone company.
‘My name is Harrison LeGrand, I have TUxedo eight-two-seven-three. I’d like to check my toll calls for the past week…’
He got the information, thanked the girl, and hung up. He carefully pulled Goodie’s door shut behind him, tried it to make sure it was locked, and went next door for his overcoat and his now-battered gray Wilton fedora. He went out into Post Street.
Hammett hadn’t known Chinatown before the fire, when Grant Avenue had been Dupont Gai, Street of a Thousand Lanterns, and the climb up from Bush had been lined with clattering shooting galleries. Where now were restaurants and bazaars and import shops and warehouses, then had been houses whose half-open shutters revealed scantily clad, foulmouthed Caucasian whores.