‘Who’d you say you was?’ The sheriff’s face was stony.
‘Private investigator looking for a wandering daughter from Nevada.’
‘Thought you was a mighty observant sort of feller. Missing girl, you say.’ He pointed with the straw he’d been chewing on. ‘Now tell me this? Wasn’t about to mistake her for this one, was you?’
Hammett chuckled appreciatively. ‘Mrs Kuhn’s brother did time for white slavery before the war. She wasn’t convicted, but she was involved, too. Somebody answering my client’s daughter’s description got off the ferry in mid-May at Sausalito, and had a hire-car drop her at or near the Kuhn house. Once I learned the background, I had to check these people out. But nothing came of it.’
The three men paused in the weeds outside the barn’s sagging double doors. The flivver that had been parked in the drive of the Bolinas house the night before was now parked near the kitchen door of the farmhouse.
The sheriff’s interest in Hammett had been dulled by the detective’s offhand lies, but he said, ‘Maybe your client decided the Kuhn woman had spirited his daughter away even so, and-’
‘My client is a fifty-seven-year-old bank president confined to a wheelchair since a hunting accident three years ago.’
An old black Chandler with side curtains on the rear windows and a badly dented fender turned in to chug its way toward them up the incline from the road.
‘Doc Straub,’ said the deputy.
A small gray-haired man bounced out of the car with that irrepressible enthusiasm most men who handle bodies professionally seem to develop.
‘Gentlemen,’ he said. He went by them into the barn.
‘Who found the bodies?’ asked Hammett, apparently idly.
‘Jimmy Gibson from the farm a mile down the road. Heard a shotgun here twice, figgered it was Andy shootin’ crows so he come down to see could he tag along. That Andy’d shoot anything that moved. Only just as Jimmy come out of the trees up the ravine, a big man he didn’t know come running out of the barn. He jumps in a big black car and goes tearin’ out of here. So Jimmy naturally looked in and saw-’
‘Didn’t get a plate on the car, I guess.’
‘Big and black. That’s it. If he had to guess, he’d say a Reo.’
Doc Straub came out of the barn wiping his hands on his handkerchief. ‘You figgered they was gonna raise up from the dead or something, Jeremy, you run me out here to see ’em in situ?’
‘Just going by the book, Chet,’ said the sheriff in a soothing voice. ‘What can you tell me about the deaths?’
‘Lead poisoning.’ He gave a short whoop of laughter. ‘Shotgun. Close range. Better th’ow a canvas over ’em unless you want blowflies layin’ eggs in your evidence.’
He went by them down the slope toward his Chandler. The deputy went back into the barn with an unhappy look on his face to cover up the bodies.
Hammett and the sheriff started down the slope toward Hammett’s hire-car.
‘Looks like mob work to me,’ said the sheriff. ‘Her brother was a rumrunner for some wop in the city, and with a shotgun being used and all…’
‘You knew the brother?’
‘Hell, knew the whole family. This here’s been the Tokzek farm for fifty years. When they was kids, Heloise was a looker…’
‘Somebody told me Egan was on the hop pretty regular.’
‘For ten years and more, gettin’ worse.’ The sheriff gave a meaty chuckle. ‘Y’know, fathered that boy back there. On his own sister.’ He cast an expectant glance over at Hammett, seemed let down that there was no visible reaction. He said defensively, ‘More of it than you’d guess, rural families. Like to killed their folks. Heloise took the name of Kuhn to explain the kid, and moved over to the city to have it. Started puttin’ on all her weight after it was born.’ He paused a moment. ‘Born here, raised here, now she’s dead here. Ain’t a hell of a lot of sense to any of it, is there?’
‘They were executed for not delivering me,’ said Crystal in a tight, terrified voice.
‘I could buy that except for one thing.’ Hammett leaned back against the garish flowers painted on his chair. His eyes burned and he was yawning with fatigue, but otherwise he felt all right. ‘If they expected hired killers from back east to be looking for you, why’d they hang around to be found?’
‘You do not believe what I have told you?’
He made angry gestures with hands, eyebrows, mouth. ‘Quit clowning around, Crystal. Too many people are dying. Who’s after you, and why?’
‘But I cannot tell anyone, ever, because-’
‘I’ve had enough of this.’
He was on his feet, hurling his cigarette across the room against the radiator. It fell to the floor in a shower of sparks. As he picked up his hat and coat from the dresser, he ground it into the rug with his heel. Crystal was off the bed to catch his hand in both of hers and try to kiss his fingertips. He jerked his hand away. She started to cry.
‘It’s a nice act.’ Hammett sneered.
He watched her wipe her face on her sleeve. ‘I must tell it in my own way.’
‘Just so you tell it.’
When she had fled Capone’s Harlem Inn in Stickney, she had hidden in Chicago’s Chinatown for several weeks, until her cash had run out. Then she had gotten a job as a domestic in a rooming house on North State Street. She held it for over two years.
‘Mrs Rotariu was very nice. She called me Crystal and let me call her Anna even though I merely worked for her. The house was owned by a famous author named Keller or something-’
‘Harry Stephen Keeler?’
‘You know of him?’ she exclaimed.
‘I’ve read some of his stuff.’ Hammett’s voice was flat, and a tense, wary look had entered his eyes.
Crystal went on with her story. Early in October, 1926, a very pleasant young man calling himself Oscar Lundin had taken the back second-floor room that had been Keeler’s studio. Then one of the front rooms overlooking State Street had become vacant, and he had taken it even though it was much smaller and cheaper, with worn-out furniture.
‘Just two wooden chairs and a dresser and an old brass-frame bed and a gas ring,’ said Crystal with her eyes far away. ‘The day he switched rooms he paid a week’s rent on the new one, and then walked out and didn’t come back. The next day two men who’d visited him once before moved in.’
Two days later Crystal had just started down the back stairway to the alley after she had finished work, about four o’clock, when there was a tremendous racket from the front of the building.
‘It sounded like many auto backfires very close together, with a heavier, sort of booming sound, too. Then it stopped and the door of Mr Lundin’s room flew open and the two men ran out.’
The man in front was about twenty-five and carried a tommy gun. The second man was heavily built, and dark, and had a shotgun. She was slammed up against the wall by the man with the tommy gun. The second man ran by her, then a dozen steps below her stopped and said, ‘Hey!’
‘That was when I saw his face clearly for the first time.’ Her hands were twisting in her lap like warring animals. ‘Twice I had seen him out at the Harlem Inn. He…’ Her cheeks began to burn. ‘Both times he… used me. He did not pay like the others.’
‘And he recognized you on the stairs.’
‘Yes. He pointed the shotgun at me and pulled the triggers, first one and then the other. I heard two clicks. He cursed and turned around and ran after the first man. They climbed out the ground-floor window into the alley.’
She had run to her cheap Chinatown rooming house, got her money from under the mattress, and caught the first train leaving Chicago. It was going to Minneapolis so that was where she went. She stayed there until one icy night a car tried to run her down. She went to Detroit. The restaurant where she worked as a waitress was bombed when she should have been there, but had been off sick. She finally returned to San Francisco where the mob had few connections, and went to work for Molly as a maid.