The radio had stopped playing. The silence of the room was broken only by the softening hiss of the kerosene lantern.
Harry dropped the plates on the floor. He carefully brought his heel down on them, then twisted and turned the heel. The teeth gnashed themselves to rubble beneath his boot.
Tears spilled over to run down Heloise’s satiny skin and into the corners of her shrunken mouth.
‘Goddamn you!’ she cried mushily. ‘I was beautiful once!’
‘Where’s the chink?’ said Hammett.
25
‘Brighton Street,’ lisped the fat woman on the front seat between them.
The main street of Bolinas, Brighton wound around the point of the peninsula and dead-ended at the ocean.
‘Point out the house,’ said Hammett.
It was a plain white Victorian in midblock; the gas lamp on the corner gave just enough illumination to show them the porch pillars. The yard was overgrown with weeds; the house was still and dark. A black flivver was parked in the driveway beyond a white picket fence that needed paint.
‘Right on by,’ said Hammett, before Harry had a chance to slow the big car. ‘Park on the other side of the street facing back this way.’
Animation entered the lisping voice. ‘You won’t hurt my baby.. ’
‘He’s the one with the shotgun.’
‘He ain’t but seventeen.’
‘The girl was eleven when you sold her to the cathouse in Illinois.’
Heloise did not respond.
Harry stopped the car. He started to get out, but Hammett forestalled him.
‘Streets and houses, Harry. My kind of hunting. Remember?’
Harry made a face and nodded. They had planned their strategy after Heloise had given them the layout of the house, but the big South African still felt his role was too passive.
The fat woman quavered. ‘My boy. Don’t hurt my…’
Hammett leaned back into the open car. His irrational fear of the irrational boy with the shotgun lay on his stomach like an undigested meal.
‘Your boy!’ he said in a low tight vicious voice. ‘In the south they keep his kind behind the stove.’
He walked away feeling slightly nauseated. It had been a destructive night, and it wasn’t over yet.
The gate was ajar, the front porch solid and uncreaking underfoot. Only one window was open, that of the second-floor bedroom in which Heloise had said her son was holding the Chinese girl. Hammett’s skeleton key worked the simple mortise lock without difficulty. Nothing came out of the inner darkness at him, but his hands were clammy by the time he had been through the downstairs rooms. There was no way to duck a shotgun blast if it came.
He checked his watch, then started up. Harry and the fat woman would be getting out of the car in another thirty seconds.
He stopped with a foot half raised. Above his head, the boy’s muffled voice. Door of the room shut. A muffled laugh, remarkable for its idiocy, then an answering female voice. What sounded like a pleading tone.
Hammett raised his head slowly above the level of the hall floor. Pitch blackness. From behind the unseen door, the girl’s voice again. The idiotic laughter. Harry and the fat woman would be coming up the silent street now, Harry’s cannon half buried in her side.
The bedsprings started that cadence that can never be mistaken for anything else. Go or not? He went up the final stairs in a quick silent rush.
The tempo was increasing, becoming frenzied. He felt his way down the hallway to that door, traced enough of its surface to know which way it opened. Downstairs, the creak of a floorboard told him that Harry and the fat woman had come in.
The boy started making animal noises. The girl cried out, a wild lost sound. Hammett was flattened against the wall beside the door, his gun in his pocket, his soap-weighted wool sock in one hand and his flashlight in the other.
Three… two… one… now!
From downstairs came Heloise’s terrific bellow. Another. A cry, a curse inside the room.
The Chinese girl shrieked, the sort of shriek that brought the hairs erect on Hammett’s neck.
Scuffling noises downstairs. Harry’s cursing. Then the fat woman’s yell of warning.
‘ANDY! LOOK OUT!’
Bare feet hitting the floor inside the room. Pause to get gun. Running feet. The door was ripped open…
Hammett was already spinning off the wall. His right arm swept the homemade blackjack as his left hand thumbed blinding light into Andy’s face. The soap-weighted sock caught the youth between the eyes with such force that his head snapped back and the shotgun squirted from his nerveless fingers unfired.
Hammett’s light followed him down, the arm swinging the sock with the tireless rhythm of panic even as Crystal, inside the room, cried, ‘Look out! He’s got a gun!’
Hammett dropped the sock and straightened with the. 38 in his hand, his light arcing the other bedroom doors. None of them opened. Andy had been a lone jailer.
‘Hammett!’ yelled Harry from below. ‘Is…’
‘He’s out.’
The Chinese girl hurled herself into the lean detective’s arms, crying and clawing at him, tears streaming down her face, her naked body twined around his.
‘He was… they wouldn’t… he forced me to…’
‘That’s all right, it’s okay now, that’s all right…’
Hammett’s voice was soothing. He tried to disentangle himself from her. Her body was hot and lithe, arousing.
‘Get some clothes on, Crystal, we’re getting out of here.’
He got her back into the room and himself out into the hall. Harry followed his flashlight up the stairs.
‘Heloise get away all right?’ asked Hammett.
‘Should have seen the fat bitch run.’ Harry was chuckling.
‘We can be damned sure she won’t go to the police,’ said Hammett. ‘But she’ll be sure we won’t either. She’ll be back to get Andy, so you’d better get back to the car just in case she tries to disable it or something.’
Hammett turned on the hallway light for the first time, and broke the fallen boy’s shotgun to jack out the shells. Andy was breathing regularly, still out cold.
Hammett could hear Crystal’s muted sobbing as she moved around the room. Through the closed door, she called, ‘I will be ready right away.’
She came out looking very young and very fragile, her long black hair pulled back and tucked under a rope-stitch wool hockey cap with an incongruous bushy pompom on top. She wore tweed knickers and argyle socks and a leatherette sport jacket with a corduroy collar. The clothes were rumpled and coated with the sort of thick dust that accumulates on the floors of closets.
The girl’s huge, famished, tearstained eyes looked at Hammett across the boy’s naked body. ‘Thank you,’ she said.
The boy stirred and groaned at the sound of her voice. She looked down at him gravely. Her shoes were heavy square-toed sport brogues of imitation alligator. With all the force at her command, she kicked him in the side of the head.
‘Now I am ready to go,’ she said to Hammett.
At the head of the stairs she faltered, so he half led, half carried her down, uncomfortably aware of the slight, beautifully formed body beneath the cheap clothing.
When they reached the car, she thanked Harry with simple dignity and added, ‘I’m sorry she escaped. I wished to kill her.’
‘Do you think you’d of been able, dear?’ Harry grinned.
A ghost of a smile touched her small mouth. ‘I could have kicked her.’
‘You’d have had a big enough target,’ said Hammett. To Harry, he said, ‘How’d you make her yell right on cue?’
‘Jabbed her in the arse with my knife. Could have put it in six inches without touching bone.’
Crystal fell asleep on the drive back to Sausalito. Hammett picked two splinters from the ribbed wool of his sweater, and wondered how he was going to get the whole truth out of her. It had become complicated again.
Dawn was breaking behind the Oakland hills as the four thirty car-ferry churned its way toward the Hyde Street pier. The light made pastels of the harsh gray granite and cruel yellow-stone disciplinary barracks as they passed Alcatraz. Hammett was blear-eyed and yawning. It had been a hell of a night.