‘You have a houseguest in Mill Valley-’
‘I have a lot of houseguests at various times.’ He got to his feet and went to the window. There was no fat on his seventy-year-old frame, no sag of age. ‘I’ve been a seafaring man, I remember my friends.’
‘This houseguest is a woman, a client of Phineas Epstein’s.’
‘A gentlewoman from back east,’ he boomed. ‘Tragic personal loss-’
‘Molly Farr,’ said Hammett. ‘The missing madam.’
Biltmore returned to his desk to select a cigar from his humidor. He raised shaggy eyebrows at Hammett and, when he was rebuffed, clipped the cigar and lit it with a wooden match. He watched Hammett sideways through clouds of aromatic smoke.
‘I’ve got dogs on the estate, son. Hounds, a whole pack of ’em. The sheriff in those parts, I own a good piece of him, too. Not because I’ve tried to, but because it’s the natural order of things, power being what it is…’
‘Sure,’ said Hammett readily. His voice was thin; he hitched his shoulders unconsciously. If he read the old man’s temperament wrong, he wouldn’t get to Molly. He said: ‘When I was a Pink, I worked for a lot of men like you, Mr Biltmore. Men having labor trouble at the mine or the factory who needed somebody to bust heads and put the workers back in line. You’re big and old and tough and mean, and you think you’re never going to die. So you take what you want and do what you want, and worry about the consequences afterward.’
Biltmore seemed unangered by this appraisal. ‘You’ve drawn your full ration of gall, son, I’ll give you that. But tell me: Why was I supposed to be hiding out this Molly Farr?’
‘Because you get a hell of a kick out of it. Or because Epstein has something on you that even your money and influence can’t-’
‘Nodody’s got anything on me, son,’ he snapped. ‘I came up rough and I came up hard, but I came up clean. I don’t have to look behind me on dark streets…’
‘“I’ve picked up my fun where I found it,”’ quoted Hammett. ‘Only Evelyn Brewster wouldn’t call it fun. She takes her sin seriously.’
‘Mmph. How’d you find out I was hiding Molly?’
‘Epstein got so clever he got careless.’
The big ex-seaman stared at him from eyes that were blue chips of ice. ‘What d’ya want her for? Hey?’
‘Talk, that’s all. The man who got killed talked with her the day before she lammed. I think one reason she lammed was because she didn’t want to talk with him again. I don’t intend to put her on any witness stand and I don’t intend to turn her over to the DA, but I have to know if she has anything that would help me find my friend’s killer.’
Biltmore brooded a moment more, then slapped the desk in sudden vast delight.
‘Yes! All right, goddammit! Tomorrow afternoon. If you know a presentable lady friend, bring her for a social afternoon. Then you just slip away — Molly spends her time in one of the guest cottages, you can go talk to her there and no one else the wiser.’
They shook hands. At the door, Hammett paused. ‘Why are you hiding her out? And why are you letting me see her?’
‘I like Molly. Within her own limits, she’s an honest woman. As for you…’ Biltmore’s expression became that of a gleeful schoolboy. ‘I’ve been waiting for years for somebody to come along who could stick a thumb into Brass Mouth Epstein’s eye.’
18
Chinatown wore a new aspect at night, especially with the sea fog drifting through its narrow alleys and steep side streets. The hurrying pedestrians were mere undetailed forms in the swirling mists. Only the sound of heels on concrete betrayed their passage.
Hammett turned up Jackson past a group of tourists huddled under a streetlamp, ingesting their guide’s lies about the labyrinths six and seven stories below Chinatown streets. Hammett knew you could work your way down the hill from cellar to cellar, but you were never more than one flight below the pavement.
In Ross Alley — known as Old Spanish Alley before the Chinese pushed the Mexicans out — he went down a shallow set of stairs from street level into deep gloom. At the foot of the steps was a small concrete alcove holding a pair of battered stinking garbage pails. Hammett slapped his hand with a measured beat on the naking red door behind them. Nothing happened. Hammett kept on. Finally a voice inside called something in Chinese. Hammett persisted. The voice repeated its high-pitched exhortation. Hammett continued.
‘Go ’way,’ the voice finally called in English.
Hammett didn’t. There were sounds of a whole series of bolts being drawn. The door opened a bare two inches on a stout length of chain.
‘Go ’way.’
‘Chin Kim Guy,’ said Hammett.
The door was slammed shut and bolted.
Hammett sat down on the steps and lit a cigarette. He finished it and started a second. Mist wet his face. The bolt ritual began again. He ground the butt against the pale brick wall, dropped the shredded remains at his feet, and was waiting in moody patience, hands in overcoat pockets, when the door opened again.
‘You come,’ said a different voice from the darkness.
A dim unshaded lightbulb at the far end of the twenty-foot hallway showed that his grossly heavy Chinese guide was as tall as he, and wore Occidental clothing. He stopped at a door halfway down the hall and called out in Cantonese. The door was unlocked. They went through into a passage like the one they had just left, only at right angles to it.
Near the far end of this hall they paused before another door, different from the others. Its seasoned oak panels were thickly studded with the square heads of iron carriage bolts.
This door had a buzzer, which the binder pushed in a quick uneven rhythm; no voice could have carried through the two-inch hardwood thickness. Noise and lights and tobacco smoke came out at them — underlaid with incense and the faint sweetish reek of opium. The voices, high-pitched and singsong and excited, all male, mingled with the clack of buttons. Which meant fan-tan, not a pai gow parlor or a do far lottery.
Blocking Hammett’s way was another Oriental, dressed in loose baggy trousers of a coarse material, wearing slippers and a wide-sleeved buttonless jacket cinched at the waist with a two-inch sewn cloth belt. Between the parted edges of the jacket were the shifting planes of his immense hairless chest. He was six-six and two hundred and fifty pounds, none of them fat. His head too was hairless. His features were more Mongol than Chinese.
He stepped back a pace, crossed his arms into the wide sleeves, and bowed deeply from the waist. ‘We are honored, Prince of Men.’
‘You been demoted, Qwong?’ asked Hammett cheerfully.
‘Demoted, oh King of Pursuers?’
‘Chin has you on the door.’
He bowed again. ‘Merely awaiting your August Self.’ He made a graceful gesture. ‘My Master is impatient for the unutterable joy of your presence.’
Hammett bowed himself. ‘Lead on, O Giant of China.’
‘That’s terrible,’ said Qwong Lin Get.
Hammett’s earlier guide manipulated the heavy swiveled bar on the door back into the cleats that held it in a locked position. The lean detective followed Qwong down the square low-ceilinged basement room. It was crowded with a couple of hundred male Chinese, massed around a dozen four-by-ten fan-tan tables. The din of voices flowed and ebbed as the buttons were drawn down.
Qwong indicated the tables with an almost contemptuous sweep of one steel-muscled arm.
‘What your friend Mau Yee would give to know of this!’
‘You think he doesn’t?’
The enormous homosexual bodyguard caressed Hammett with his eyes. ‘I know that you would not tell him.’