‘And you think that’ll make her and the kid do a bunk?’
‘I guarantee it.’
‘Sounds awfully complicated to me.’
‘It’ll work,’ Hammett insisted. ‘It worked before, on a case that you… that I was involved in. Just throw a scare into her, and after that it’s just a straight tailing job.’
The op sighed. ‘What’ll you be doing all this time?’
‘Sleeping,’ said Hammett. And hung up the phone.
27
The op pulled on the handbrake of the ’25 Marmon 8 Sedan he’d rented from a Third Street hire-car outfit. By God, Hammett had been right. The fat woman and her idiot son had stuck around. At least their flivver was parked behind the farmhouse.
Dragonflies hovered on gossamer rainbow wings in the scorching sunlight, but the op wore his overcoat as he trudged stolidly up the creaking porch steps. In the right-hand pocket was a big black Colt. 45, just in case Andy the idiot boy mistook him for a gorilla from Chi-town and started waving around that twelve-gauge.
He used the heel of his hand on the screen-door frame. It was warped enough to rattle loudly. By pressing his nose against it he could see the fat woman waddling toward him from the kitchen. Fat? That was like saying that Babe Ruth played baseball.
‘This here’s private property, mister.’
‘And this here’s my ID as an operative for the Pinkerton Detective Agency, lady,’ said Wright in his nastiest tone.
He didn’t expect her to fall on her knees and babble out a confession of white slavery, but he’d hoped for more than a crossing of fat-huge arms on her immense bosom and the single monosyllable she dropped at him.
‘So?’
‘So we’re looking into the death of the little Chinese girl your brother raped and murdered…’ He went through the pitch that Hammett had worked out, but could see it wasn’t taking. He finished up barking, ‘So you’d better come over to the city with me now, sister. We can do our fighting in court.’
She turned her head to yell, ‘Andy! You, Andy! Git on down here.’ She turned back to Wright. ‘You ain’t got nuthin’, gumshoe. Nuthin ’. Me ’n’ my baby boy hadn’t been over’n the city in weeks, and cain’t you nor nobody else prove no diffrunt.’
Andy clattered down the stairs from the second floor. Hammett had done a job on him, all right. His lips were puffed and split, one eye was swollen shut, and there was a nasty bruise on one temple. The fat woman was now standing arms akimbo like Strangler Ed or the Scissors King squaring off for a wrestling card at the State armory.
‘You move outta here quick, mister, afore Andy moves ya.’
The op hesitated, then with a muttered curse turned away. It rankled, but Hammett had wanted him merely to throw a scare into them and depart. He went back down the steps. The only one who’d got scared was him. The look on that witless kid’s face…
He fired up the Marmon, adjusted the spark and smoothed out the mixture. Hell, maybe Heloise had been acting, raising his call, riding out his bluff.
Two hundred yards north of the farmhouse lane, the main road took a curve. Here he pulled the Marmon off into the weeds and got out. No place to leave it, close enough to keep the mouth of the lane under surveillance, where it wouldn’t have been seen. That meant he’d have to go up through the woods afoot to take his plant on the house.
Sweating and swearing and slipping, he swarmed up the steep earth bank and into the greasewood. And him in city suit and shoes! Nettles stung his face and hands; once he stepped squarely into a red-leafed cluster of poison oak. Damn Hammett, anyway. If they didn’t run…
Then a new thought made him try to make better time through the baffling underbrush. What if they ran too soon, before he was even in position? He planned to go afoot down the lane behind them if they fled, counting on the Marmon’s eight powerful cylinders to soon catch him up. But if they were gone when he got there…
Twenty minutes later he’d worked his way around through the hardwoods to the ridgetop behind the depression that cupped the farmhouse and outbuildings. He still couldn’t see the place, but he was pretty sure he’d have heard the flivver being cranked up. He paused, spent and blowing, under a live oak tree. About time to start downhill toward the edge of the cleared land.
A shotgun crumped. He froze, after a moment mopped his tough lumpy face with his handkerchief while listening intently. No repeats. But it had seemed to come from the farm.
Slick leather soles sliding on the dry grass, he went quickly downhill through the trees, hanging on trunks and branches to keep from landing on his backside. Summer-dry blackberry bushes clutched at his suitcoat.
Whump. Another shot.
He broke into a shambling, sliding, stumbling run, cursing and slapping at the mean black-bodied deerflies that seemed to have found him suddenly tasty.
He pulled up, chest heaving and eyes smarting with sweat, at the edge of a copse of birch trees a couple of hundred yards above and to one side of the weathered sagging barn. The Model T was still in the yard, but he could see the top of a black touring car just disappearing down the lane. Goddammit, anyway. But then he saw that a boy had emerged from the woods in front of him. Not Andy. A much smaller kid, eleven or twelve, maybe, just ambling down across the open fallow fields toward the barn.
The op still hesitated, the. 45 from his waistband now in hand. What had gone on down there while he’d been stumbling around in the woods? Andy shooting crows? Or had he and Heloise been in the car he’d seen departing? Or were they…
The boy burst from the barn before his scream of terror, delayed and thinned by distance, reached the op’s ears. His cap sailed off as he fled down the lane with his head back and his arms working.
Jimmy Wright went out across the uneven weed-furzed furrows, picking his way. He was in no hurry; he was pretty sure what he’d find in the barn. If he were right, all he had to do was clear out before the kid came back with the law, and find a phone to call Hammett.
‘ What? Both of them?’ Hammett scratched washboard ribs under his white shirt. ‘Okay. I’m on my way now. I’ll call you at your hotel when I get back.’
He rehooked the receiver, stood frowning at it, then picked up the phone again and was connected with the Weller. Pop answered.
‘How’s the patient?’ asked Hammett. He listened. ‘Fine. Keep her locked in that room unless I’m…’ He broke off abruptly to listen, exclaimed, ‘ Telephone? ’ and listened some more. He finally said, ‘Yeah, okay, I should have thought of getting word to her folks myself that she’s okay…’ He interrupted himself. ‘Listen, make damned sure she doesn’t wander around the hotel anymore where someone can see her. All of a sudden it’s gotten tricky and I don’t know why. Yet.’
When he hung up, he became aware of Goodie at his elbow, holding the toilet articles she had gotten for the Chinese girl.
‘What is it, Sam? What’s happened?’
‘Those killers on the train from back east must have gotten in. Somebody gunned down the fat woman and her son a half hour ago.’
‘Hell, all I know for sure is that somebody didn’t like ’em.’
The sheriff was nearly as tall as Hammett, heavier in the way that a bull mastiff is heavier than a greyhound, with direct pale eyes and a mouth made angry by a sullen lower lip. His deputy was an overweight youngster wearing cord trousers and a wide leather belt with a brass buckle.
‘Can’t even be sure it’s them,’ said the deputy.
They lay side by side on their backs in the barn. The straw around their heads and shoulders was sodden with blood and brain matter. The bodies had no faces left.
‘Kid had a broken finger on the left hand, improperly set,’ said Hammett. ‘So does the corpse. And you’d raise hell finding that woman’s double outside a circus. Once you get comparison prints from-’