‘Yeah, come to think of it,’ said Manion in a chagrined voice. ‘Fishermen and bootleggers and farmers and not a hell of a lot else. All of a sudden I have the feeling you might be saying hello to Molly Farr this afternoon.’
‘That’s the idea,’ said Hammett.
14
The woman bent over the wooden-staved rain barrel was better than six feet tall and weighed three hundred pounds. Her back was to Hammett as he came up the weed-grown drive to the white farmhouse; great knuckles of hard fat rode over the buried hipbones under her faded check housedress.
‘Mrs Heloise Kuhn?’
‘Huh?’ The huge moon buttocks tensed in unconfined nastiness as she straightened in surprise and swung around to face him. ‘Who’s asking?’
Her face was decorated with a rosebud mouth above too many chins, and mean black raisins stuck behind square-rimmed eyeglasses.
‘Hammett. Homemaker’s Insurance Agency.’
‘I ain’t buying.’
He moved around her to the other side of the rain barrel. She was drowning a kitten. The water boiled briefly around her thick forearms. Pleasure pursed the rosebud lips. One tiny taloned paw spasmed a despairing arc of red parallels across her flesh.
‘Bastard!’ she burst out softly.
She slammed the small dark head against the side of the barrel. Hammett saw the glint of bone through the wet-plastered fur on the delicate skull as she buried the kitten in the water once more. Four more small bodies, their thinness emphasized by wet clinging fur, lay in the weeds beyond the corner of the house.
‘Kittens ain’t as much fun ’thout you do their ma with ’em.’
The water was quiet around her forearms. Her voice filled as if she were eating pastry.
‘Put ’em all in a sack an’ th’ow ’em offen a bridge into a river, ’long with a old hunk of scrap iron. One old tabby I seen stayed up near twenty minutes that way, tryin’ to save them kits.’
‘Yeah,’ said Hammett. He had broken a fingernail on the rim of the barrel.
She clacked ill-fitted dentures together. ‘Near bust a gut laughin’, I can tell you. My brother won hisse’f five bucks off another feller, bettin’ how long she’d stay up.’ With a regretful sigh she abandoned the past. ‘Insurance, you say. Payin’ out a claim?’
‘Tracing a witness, Mrs Kuhn. We think your maid saw a car hit a woman over in the city two Sundays ago, and-’
The fat woman started to laugh. Her whole body participated, like waves bouncing back and forth in a bathtub.
‘I look like I got a maid out here, mister?’
‘Lillian Tam Pong,’ said Hammett. ‘Oriental minor.’
‘I wouldn’t have no chink on the place.’
‘Miss Pong gave this as her place of employment to the police officer investigating the accident. Mrs Heloise Kuhn. The old Borne farmhouse on the Bolinas Road.’ Hammett was reading from the blank back of an envelope he had taken from his suitcoat inner pocket. He returned it. ‘The driver I hired in Sausalito brought me here. If there’s some mistake…’
The fat woman jabbed a still-wet finger against his chest. ‘You better clear out of here you don’t want no trouble. Ain’t no chinks on my place, ain’t been no chinks on my place, ain’t gonna be no chinks on my place.’
‘Then you won’t mind if I glance around.’
He went by her up the weathered front steps toward the screen door leading to the front room. The screen sagged in its frame. When he reached the porch, she said behind him, ‘Don’t try it, mister.’
He looked down at her, unmoving beside her rain barrel.
‘What’ll you do? Drown another kitten?’
He swung back toward the door. The woman said, ‘Andy,’ in her fat, pleasure-filled voice.
The screen door opened a foot and the muzzle of a double-barrel shotgun — an Eastern Arms hammerless takedown twelve-gauge — came through the opening. The muzzle bored into Hammett’s breastbone. He backed down the steps. He felt breathless.
The door was shouldered wider by a towheaded seventeen-year-old with the build of a bull and a snubnosed freckled face almost idiotic in its vacuity. Sweat stood on his forehead and his cheeks were flushed as if from sustained physical effort. His faded workshirt was buttoned crookedly. It hung outside his trousers. His grin was delighted and quite mad.
‘Shud I do him, ma?’
‘Let be.’
Andy quit advancing. Hammett was three steps below the porch with the twin muzzles angled down against his collarbone.
Hammett made himself take another backward step, then another, and then a third to the ground. He turned stiffly away. Flies were already buzzing around the little heap of dead fur by the corner of the house.
As he went by her, the fat woman said, ‘Just a minnit you.’
Hammett stopped.
The woman looked at him, the raisins unwinking in their sockets of suet. She took a breath and made a sustained grating noise in her throat. Her rosebud mouth worked. She spat what she had hawked up against Hammett’s necktie, just under the knot.
Hammett went wordlessly down the narrow rutted grass track. Behind him, mother and son were making noises he took to be laughter.
As soon as the track dipped and curved to hide him from the house, he stopped and took off his tie. He threw it into the waist-high reed grass that flanked the track. He began to curse in a rising voice, as much madness in his tone as there had been in Andy’s laughter. The muscles stood out cleanly along the sides of his jaws as he ground his teeth. His face was fashioned from scraped bone. Somewhere in the trees arched over the narrow ruts a crestless scrub jay began its rusty-hinge of protest at his presence. Hammett could feel the black rage loosening its fingers from his mind.
Without being reckless, he’d never been afraid of dying. He didn’t like finding out that now he was.
He started down the track again toward the high-shouldered old Model-T coupe he’d hired in Sausalito. His progress sent a pair of mourning doves careening away, sunlight gleaming off the white feathers edging their pointed grey tails.
‘The hell with them,’ he muttered aloud.
Molly Farr wouldn’t be jungled up at a place like this. She wouldn’t give anyone like that fat woman that much of a hold over her. A fat woman who, goddammit, seemed familiar.
He came out on the Bolinas Road. His teenage driver was leaning against the fender of the Model-T. The coachwork of the car had been cut away with a blowtorch behind the cab so a pickup bed could be welded on. A devil with a thumb to his nose rode the cap on the flat-sided brass radiator.
Hammett jerked his head back at the house. ‘Where’s her husband?’
‘Ain’t nobody ever seen him that I know,’ said the boy. ‘Guess she was married just long enough to have Andy.’
‘No man around at all?’
‘Just her brother, sometimes. Big, mean-looking guy runs rum for some bootlegger over in the city.’
‘What’s the brother’s name?’
‘Don’t rightly know. Maybe my paw…’
‘Doesn’t matter.’
He got in the car. The leather seat was hot from the sun. Hot breeze came through the opened upper half of the windshield as they started off with a jerk. He was reduced to Phineas Epstein after all. Epstein was going to be a damned tough nut to crack.
The fat woman and her son had watched Hammett out of sight around the bend in the twin grassy ruts. The boy stood spraddle-footed on the porch, the shotgun muzzle-down in the crook of his arm.
‘He comin’ back, maw?’
She turned to look up at him, considering, squinting against the late afternoon sunlight. Finally she shook her head. ‘We scairt him.’ She added, ‘I need them kittens th’owed back up the ravine ’gainst they start stinking.’
‘Right after I finish, maw. I promise.’
Andy leaned the shotgun against the edge of the porch and went off. While he was gone, the fat woman heard, very faintly, the Model-T start up down at the foot of their track.