Kill him how?
And with the thought, he had such an intense need for a cigarette that he actually opened his mouth to cry after her. Then he got control of himself and remained silent.
How? And how long?
Dawn couldn’t be far away, but nobody would wonder about him until long after noon. By then…
Christ, his final dawn.
How? And when?
He sniffed the air automatically, got angry all over again, as if she were still there to witness his weakness. Fire? Or leaking gas? Or
…
It had to be soon. Before an arriving cook or housekeeper found him alive. He caught himself flaring his nostrils again. Stop it, goddamn you, Hammett. Go out right. If only he had a screwing cigarette.
His mind constructed the whole sequence: getting it out, thrusting it between the teeth, getting out the match, striking it, bringing it to the tip, sucking in that first harsh-soothing smoke that…
Death.
Had he ever really — really — considered death before? He’d known it intimately, but now all of a sudden he didn’t any longer. Now he just spewed meaningless words about it on paper. He had to start all over again, refamiliarize himself with it. Death. Cessation of consciousness. Sleep, to never wake. He hated it.
Of course. You hated death because you were involved with life. Life was. And dammit, life would be, when you weren’t. That’s why you hated death. Its unfairness.
Never again, the exquisite moment of sliding into a woman.
And never again the joy of a page dragged up dripping from your guts. Never again realizing that there were ten pages of fresh manuscript stacked beside the typewriter that hadn’t been there before.
Never again the special, little-understood joys of manhunting. The blood-sport of beating the man who was trying to beat you. Most special when the stakes were high, when what you were trying to take from him was something he valued deeply, often his liberty and sometimes his life.
Cessation. Waste, of everything: sensed, learned, read, remembered. All wasted.
You should never regret the was. But you could regret the never-was. And the never-to-be.
Jesus, for a cigarette.
Regret. Because the tomorrow had come. The tomorrow that was the today and the yesterday and the forever and the never. The last, the only, the never-again.
Because he’d become an amateur. He’d played with his typewriter while he’d become a nonprofessional. No longer a real manhunter. He’d known, when he’d crouched over that devastated body in the cemetery, that Crystal was still alive. He’d known it. The old detective instincts. But he’d rejected what they told him. Played the writer’s game of walking around evil, drank himself insensate. Because the writer hadn’t wanted to know what the manhunter had known intuitively about the evil in one slight fifteen-year-old girl.
Hammett cursed aloud. He’d treated Crystal as a literary creation rather than as a real person. He had pretended to be the Op, or Sam Spade, instead of being them. He’d become a writer playing at being a manhunter. A typing desk was safer than a street corner. The tiger in his mind had sheathed its claws. He’d become able to risk less. Death had stopped looking over his shoulder.
And so he had died.
The door across the room opened. Jimmy Wright strolled in, a Fatima in his mouth and a fedora on his head. For a terrible moment, Hammett thought he had died. Jimmy Wright had his hands in his overcoat pockets because each pocket contained a naked. 45 with the safety off. So he could fire through the pocket without having to draw.
Because Jimmy Wright was a manhunter. The fat little op would never be anything else. Drunk or sober, nobody would ever get the drop on him the way that they’d gotten the drop on Hammett. The way the girl…
The girl! Crystal!
‘Jimmy, get to hell out of here! The house might go up any second-’
‘Been through the house, Dash.’ He stepped across Laverty’s body with the same casual disregard Crystal had shown. He crouched beside Hammett to unlock the cuffs. ‘Quite a dump. Fancy. Big for a guy living alone. Give you fantasies after a bit. This room’d give you nightmares. Somebody’s been busy down here.’
‘Laverty,’ said Hammett. He leaned weakly against the wall, waiting for the agony as the blood started getting back into his white, pudgy, useless hands. ‘He killed Lynch with his bare hands, and then shot himself.’
Wright grunted, standing in the middle of the room with his hands on his hips, staring up at the mess drying on the ceiling.
‘Why?’
‘End of a dream. Christ that hurts!’ He had begun gingerly shaking his hands. But he loved the pain because it told him he really was alive, that Jimmy Wright was real, that Crystal… He said delicately, ‘Anyone else in the house?’
The op shook his head. ‘Cook’s day off, maybe. I’d better call O’Gar. We’ll need the meatwagon here.’
‘Sure. Listen, Jimmy, how did you…’ He waved an arm weakly.
‘Goodie was up packi… was still up, when you managed to thump her door as Laverty took you out. Figured out that Pop Daneri would know where to reach me. I went over to her apartment and sat around twiddling my thumbs until the call came.’
The call. A horrible suspicion dawned in Hammett’s mind. He sat down on the edge of the bed and began flopping his aching hands against his thighs to hurry the wake-up process.
‘Call?’
‘A woman. Called Goodie’s, asked for me, said you were shackled in the basement here with a couple of stiffs. Said the front door would be open and the keys to your handcuffs would be on the telephone stand in the front hall. What’s so funny?’
Because Hammett had begun to rock with helpless laughter. Tears streamed down his face.
… you’ll enjoy yourself so much more, wondering… just how evil little Crystal can be…
‘She sounded Oriental, must have been the maid or something.’
Or something. In this single contemptuous gesture she had shown Hammett just how thoroughly he’d been beaten. Sam Spade? Even Sam couldn’t have done much with her. No manhunter, real or fictional, could.
Because Hammett couldn’t touch her. He knew all, could prove nothing. She was above it, beyond it, she’d won. She’d had them all killed, methodically and maliciously, but had killed none of them herself.
Anyone — anyone — who could prove anything against her was dead.
Hammett could tell his story until he was a little old man with a bent back and a long beard, and no DA in the land would take him seriously. A fifteen-year-old whorehouse maid did what?
He stood up.
‘I’d better call Goodie. She’ll be worried.’
‘She’s gone,’ said the op. He didn’t try to soften it. ‘As soon as the call came that you were here safe…’ He shrugged. ‘She was already packed.’
Hammett rested his forearm against one of the bedposts and pressed his forehead against it. So. He’d driven her to it. Stupid drunken bastard. Once Biltmore possessed her, there’d be no turning back for her. No more small town and houseful of well-loved kids and…
‘Said to tell you she’d gone back to the porch-swing cowboys. Said you’d know what she meant.’
He felt a soaring of spirit. For every evil, a good. For every Crystal, a Goodie. He found he was grinning broadly.
Sure, goddammit, who ever said you were going to get it all? A piece of it was the best any self-respecting manhunter ever expected, anyway. And in the meantime…
Hell, in the meantime he was on salary.
He jabbed a finger into the op’s hard, ample gut.
‘Okay, Jimmy, use the phone upstairs to call the rest of the boys. Lynch was behind the Mulligans. It won’t get made public, but it’s going to come out where it counts, so I want a raid on the bailbond office right now. Legal. Court order. Before Mulligan finds out his boss is dead and sends his tame cops in after the stuff. There’s enough dynamite in those files to blow up this goddamn town, and we’re going to light the fuse!’