‘Look, Hammett, I’m sorry about your friend, but you can’t expect me to act all broken up. I only met the gentleman the one time.’ She shrugged. ‘I heard somewhere that Scarface Al uses a baseball bat to-’
‘Now you sound like the cops,’ said Hammett. ‘Nope, this was local, something Vic was working on.’ He paused deliberately. ‘He was going to find you, and he was going to shake you until something fell out. Say you were scared enough to make a phone call after we left your cathouse’
‘Parlorhouse,’ she interrupted automatically.
‘Bullshit.’
‘All right, I was scared.’ She wore a black floor-length dress with a cameo brooch at the throat to set it off. ‘But that’s all you’re getting from me. I know what you’re doing, bringing your bottle to-’
‘Have a drink,’ suggested Hammett.
‘Go to hell.’
‘Have a drink, Hammett.’ He leaned the other way. ‘Thanks, I will.’
Watching him pour, she said in sudden impatience, ‘Gimme that bottle. I can match a beanpole like you drink for drink any day.’
‘You’ve got more to lose,’ warned Hammett.
She laughed harshly. ‘Try it, buster, you’ll be walking like a cowboy for a month.’
‘I meant names,’ said Hammett. ‘All those big important names you’d never dare talk to me about.’
‘Damn right. Hoping I’ll get drunk…’
‘I think one of us already is.’
A surprising shudder ran through her. ‘I hadn’t ought to be talking to you like this. If certain people-’
‘I could always tell them you spilled your guts,’ said Hammett thoughtfully to help her along.
‘Jesus H. Christ, you seemed like pretty straight Ghees last week.’
‘Vic was, see what it got him.’
Hammett lurched to his feet, stood waiting for the dizziness to pass. The jug was mortally damaged. Those water glasses could fool a man. He pulled aside the Nottingham lace curtain and looked out. Beyond the path, the stream purled and foamed between its banks. Dusk. And he hadn’t learned a damn thing, except that neither he nor Molly was liable to drink the other under the table. He turned back to the room.
‘All I’ve got is that Vic was looking for you, and that he was murdered. Is there a connection? Help me out, for Chrissake! If I was going to snitch you away to the gumshoes, you’d have the sheriff’s brogans on the back of your neck instead of me with a bottle of bad hootch. Speaking of which…’
He refilled the glasses, sat down again, and cocked his feet on the edge of the table.
‘Okay, ask your goddamn questions. I probably won’t answer any of them, but you might get lucky.’
‘Who’d you call after we left last Sunday?’
She shook her head, slowly, her brilliant blue eyes fixed on his face, then grimaced and said, ‘Oh, what me hell? You were barely out the door when Boyd Mulligan called. He knew you’d been there and he wanted to know why. I told him you were after names. That’s all.’
Hammett put his feet back on the floor and found his crumpled pack of cigarettes in one pocket. He shook his head.
‘Nope. I can’t buy the Mulligans as ordering Vic killed because he’d been around asking for names. They’d know he’d do that. There had to be some desperation…’ He interrupted himself. ‘Who do you pay off in the cops?’
She hesitated. ‘Hammett, you aren’t stringing me along, are you? If you rat to the DA or-’
‘You’re safe with me, Molly.’
‘Where’d I hear that before?’
‘The rumble seat on your first date.’
‘Screw you. Okay.’ She grimaced. ‘The man on the beat, the sergeant and lieutenant at Bush Street station. They might give the captain a cut, but he’s never been around with his hand out. You have to realize that the patrolman is usually more important than the brass in a payoff setup.’
Hammett lit a cigarette, nodding, expelling smoke with the words, ‘Sure. But there’s nothing there, Molly. Nothing worth a man’s life. Now, if someone thought you’d been willing to talk to Vic about some of the things you and your girls hear from customers who are on the inside in San Francisco-’
‘I never would, and they know it. That would be worth my life.’ She dismissed it with a shrug. ‘Jesus, am I getting high!’
‘We may as well kill the bottle before it spoils.’
They drained it equally between the two glasses, taking exaggerated care not to spill a drop. Hammett sighed.
‘So it doesn’t have anything to do with you, Molly. Then who? And why?’
‘You said the police think it was a mob killing. Are you sure they aren’t right?’
He drained his glass. ‘You too? Why does everyone have the mob on the brain?’
‘It’s that damned Crystal. She told me once she was on the run from somebody in the mob in Chicago.’ Her eyes and voice brooded. ‘Never told me who or why. But that Sunday you were there, she saw something on the front page of the newspaper that made her pack up and want to leave. Good kid, ’at Crystal. Been with me a y’r.’ She had begun slurring words.
‘Sure,’ said Hammett blearily. ‘First Chinese saint onna Cath’lic calendar.’
‘Screw you! I doubt you ever spent a whole hell o’ lotta time helping out WCTUers ’cross th’ street. Tell ya, offered Crystal chance to be one of a’ girls, work th’ schoolgirl lay — you know, school uniform, she can pass for ten, twelve, drive the ’ole goats wil’. But
…’ Her hand got up to her face just too late to intercept a ringing belch. ‘But she jus’ wanna be maid! Bright kid. Talks like college grad-you-ate.’ She added sadly, ‘Booze all gone.’
‘Lissen, gotta talk to ’er,’ said Hammett. ‘P’rade ’er out. Gotta ask ’er ’bout a fat, bad woman near Bolinas who-’
‘But Crys’al isn’t here.’ Tears came to Molly’s eyes. ‘Monday mornin’, Brass Mouth, he tol’ her not come with Molly.’
That struck Hammett as strange, even as he realized that Molly was crying. Crying over li’l lost Crystal. Or over empty bottle. He went around the table so he could put a comforting arm around her shoulder. A nice warm shoulder.
‘Hammett will find ’er. Hammett, th’ eye that never closes, th’ ear without wax, th’ nose that never drips…’
Molly leaned her head back against his hip. He bent and kissed her. His tongue touched a salt tear that had run down to the corner of her mouth. It was a nice mouth. He left it to get his overcoat from the sofa. He took his hand triumphantly out of the coat pocket. The hand had another bottle in it.
After that, things got hazy. He remembered trying to get back into some items of clothing so they could troop up to the main house for some bright city lights. And he remembered them raising their voices in glorious song together.
City girls use Kotex,
Country girls use rags.
But LuLu is the only girl
Who uses burlap bags.
Or was that after they’d trooped up to the main house?
‘It serves you right,’ said Goodie cruelly.
‘Please.’ Hammett’s voice was broken.
‘They’ll never invite us back again, or…’
‘Tell me about it tomorrow.’
‘It is tomorrow.’
Hammett staggered across to the railing and peered wisely out over the water, crinkling his eyes in the far-seeing way of old salts. He could see seven, perhaps eight inches into the roiling fog.
‘How d’you know it’s tomorrow?’ he demanded triumphantly when Goodie materialized beside him.
‘I have to go to work in just a few hours.’
Antiphonal, he thought. Like the two sides of the church choir singing at each other during the Holy Week services at St Nicholas Church down the road from his granddaddy’s tobacco farm. How about them apples, kid? Antiphonal, and drunk besides. They’d sung ’em in Latin.
‘Why don’t you talk in Latin?’ he suggested. ‘Very softly.’
‘Who was that terrible woman? That… that song. And when she got up on the piano in the drawing room and started to shimmy-’
‘I don’t remember that.’
‘Do you remember what went on in that cozy little cottage of hers?’
‘I detected.’
‘Mr Biltmore was very upset. He offered to take me to lunch next week to make up for-’