Hammett (Crime Masterworks) (12 page)

‘I’m . . . sorry about your friend.’ In a small voice, she added, ‘The newspapers say it was a gangland slaying, but you said . . .’

‘Don’t let it get cold.’ He waved at the table and sat down himself. Around bites of sweet roll, he outlined what had happened since Atkinson’s death, ending with the attack a few
hours previously. ‘I really red-lighted Shuman, and this must have been his idea of a smart way to get back at me. It was actually stupid, because it’s given me a place to start.’

‘A member of the
police commission
ordering you beat up?’ Goodie sounded rather dazed. ‘I bet you were followed to the poker game, and—’

‘Uhuh. Spotting a tail is like riding a bicycle, darling – you never forget how.’

She turned Hammett’s wrist to check his watch, then was on her feet and flying for the bathroom. ‘It’s after seven thirty – I’ve got to comb my hair and get to work!’

‘I’ll just use your phone . . .’

She stuck her blond head back around the doorframe from the big wall bed closet beyond which was the minuscule bathroom. ‘Is
that
why you’re being so sweet this morning, Sam?’

‘What sort of bum do you take me for?’ he demanded virtuously.

He could hear her laughter as he sat on the sofa, set the telephone on his knee, and told the operator that he wanted DAvenport 20. When a voice said, ‘Police,’ Hammett said, ‘Central Station,’ waited some more, them asked for Sergeant Manion.

‘Jack, Dash Hammett here. I’m trying to get a line on a Chinese girl named Crystal Tam, who . . . huh? Right, that’s the one, Molly Farr’s maid . . . Mmm-hmm. No, I’m not even sure she’s local, but I thought . . . yeah. Right. That fast? Okay, many thanks, Jack.’

He broke the connection, released the hooks, gave the operator a SUtter exchange number, got no answer, and was hanging up when Goodie emerged from the bathroom fully dressed and pulling on her coat.

‘Will you shut the door when you leave, Sam?’

He blew her a kiss, returned to the phone and got DAvenport 8398 and asked for Jimmy Wright. When the fat little detective came on the line, his voice was still full of sleep.

‘What have the cops turned up on Vic?’ Hammett asked him.

‘Last solid thing is him leaving the Chapeau Rouge at the foot of Powell sometime after midnight, under his own power. They thought he was a timber beast out of Seattle. The Homicide boys are checking cabs now.’

‘All right, I want you to ask around the Army-Navy Y, the Lawrence Hotel, the Commodore – places like that near Mission and The Embarcadero.’

‘Will do,’ said the cop, without asking where the lead had come from.

Hammett tried the SUtter number again, and this time was told that Phineas Epstein would be in court until four thirty. Hammett identified himself as a reporter named Hawkins from a Los Angeles paper, and made an appointment to see Epstein at six
P.M
.

His last call was to the business office of the phone company.

‘My name is Harrison LeGrand, I have TUxedo eight-two-seven-three. I’d like to check my toll calls for the past week . . .’

He got the information, thanked the girl, and hung up. He carefully pulled Goodie’s door shut behind him, tried it to make sure it was locked, and went next door for his overcoat and his now-battered gray Wilton fedora. He went out into Post Street.

Hammett hadn’t known Chinatown before the fire, when Grant Avenue had been Dupont Gai, Street of a Thousand Lanterns, and the climb up from Bush had been lined with clattering shooting galleries. Where now were restaurants and bazaars and import shops and warehouses, then had been houses whose half-open shutters revealed scantily clad, foulmouthed Caucasian whores.

He passed Old St Mary’s Church on the corner of California. Even that had been gutted to the walls by the fire following the quake. Catty-corner across the intersection was the new, beautifully oriental Sing Fat Trading Company, with tilt-edged pagoda roofs and narrow balconies with delicate filigree railings.

Mostly gone, too, were the trousered women and silk-jacketed shopkeepers, the lily-footed wives of rich merchants, and the
highbinders swarming around the gambling clubs even at noon. Some of the hatchet men were still around, but the last tong killing had been in 1922, a year after Jack Manion had taken over as sergeant of the Chinatown Squad. Manion, who had earned the fear and hatred of the Six Companies and the name of
Mau Yee
. The Cat. Because he seemed to have eyes that could look behind him.

Hammett stopped with one foot in the gutter to keep from running into a blue-denimed waiter hurrying someone’s hot lunch from the Shanghai Low. Half a block beyond, an aged man with the beard of a billy goat and the timeless Oriental eyes of Confucius was wielding a gleaming cleaver in a white tiled butcher shop, sectioning up a whole pig, smoking hot and roasted to a deep mahogany color. A dozen smoked ducks hung by their necks behind him.

Hammett doubted that Manion would have anything for him on Crystal Tam. It was only three hours since he had called. Still, Jack could do some incredible things in Chinatown.

The heavy warring odors of ginger, hot grease, and herbs drifted from an import shop as he stepped around a big wet wooden tub half-filled with sea snails; next to it was a wooden crate of dried South Seas
bêches-de-mer
used in making soup.

He bought a Mandarin orange from a sidewalk stand, and pushed toward the thickset, unruly-haired Caucasian who seemed to be reading the calligraphy posted outside one of the Chinese-language newspaper offices.

Hammett dropped peels on the sidewalk. He shoved a juicy segment of orange into his mouth. To Manion’s back, he said, ‘What’s the news?’

The Irishman turned and grinned. There was a cleared space around him. In these narrow streets, The Cat bore invincibility like a physical aura.

‘The price of opium is going up.’

‘They put that in the papers?

When they were clear of the throng and crossing narrow Grant Ave to the far sidewalk, Manion said, ‘Hell, you know I
can read only about six words of Cantonese. Psychology, Dash just psychology.’

‘You have anything for me, Dr Freud?’

Manion grinned again. He was craggy-browed and square-jawed, and moved with the easy grace of a man who never hesitated to drop through a skylight in pursuit of a hatchet man. ‘Have I ever failed you?’

‘How about lunch at Yee Chum’s while you tell me about it?’

‘Lead on, Oh Father of Detectives.’

Hammett stopped dead on the Washington Street sidewalk. ‘Don’t tell me you save old
Black Masks
. “Dead Yellow Women” appeared three years ago—’

‘
Black Mask
is better than corncobs in the bathroom,’ Manion assured him seriously. ‘You can read ’em before you use ’em.’

On the corner of Waverly Place, narrow worn stairs led down to the basement, a spotty inset mirror giving them back their reflections. At the bottom were heavy wooden double doors that they shoved wide as they entered the noisy, steamy, clattering, low-roofed room. The round-topped tables were crowded with Chinese shoveling in rice with chopsticks while the singsong of high-pitched conversation went on unabated. They were the only Caucasians.

‘Hello, Daddy!’ cried the little girl standing on the cashier’s stool behind the glass-topped counter to the right of the door.

‘Hello, Sweet Flower,’ said Manion. ‘Still studying your lessons?’

‘Study very hard, Daddy!’ the moon-faced child shouted with delight.

The girl’s mother came from the rear of the restaurant, wiping her hands on a limp dish towel. ‘
Min Bok
, we are honored.’

To the noncriminal citizens of Chinatown, Manion was
Min Bok
– Old Uncle. The woman led them across the white tile floor and between close-set tables to a curtained enclosed booth. A skinny waiter with a seamed yellow face and bad teeth brought
the tea and two small heavy white handleless cups with green and gold dragons painted around their sides.

‘Who was the little girl?’

‘One of my godchildren. I can’t keep track of them anymore.’

The waiter returned with their order: chicken clear soup, pork fried rice, green
chow yuk
, sweet-and-sour pork, almond duck. They ate with chopsticks, with Manion doing most of the talking.

‘You wanted to know about Crystal Tam. Christened Lillian Tam Fong by her folks, educated at the Sunday school of the Methodist Chinese Mission. She was an excellent student, especially at English—’

‘How old is she?’

‘Fifteen. Why?’

‘She looks twelve and talks forty. Are we sure we’ve got the same girl? This one didn’t strike me as having only a mission-school background.’

Manion was dipping startlingly green
chow yuk
into hot sauce. He chewed thoughtfully. ‘It’s the same girl, all right. She visits her folks on Sunday afternoons. Told them she was a domestic for a well-to-do family up in Marin County, and leaves them in time to catch the Sausalito ferry back before supper. Really, I suppose, going back to Molly’s in time for the Sunday-night trade.’

Hammett pushed away his barely touched plate and fished for cigarettes. ‘She visit them last Sunday?’

‘And told ’em she was going away on a trip with the people she works for, and would be in touch when she got back. Apparently planning to skip out even then. Now they’re damned worried.’

‘Because you came around?’

Manion poured green tea into both cups. The waiter appeared to set a fresh pot in place of the old.

‘No. Because four years ago, when Lillian was eleven, she answered a newspaper ad for her first domestic position. She didn’t come back from the interview.’

Hammett hitched his chair closer to the table with a sudden glint of interest in his eyes. ‘That sounds familiar.’

‘Yeah, doesn’t it? Next day her folks went to the cops.’ He shrugged. ‘You know how much that got ’em – a yellow girl . . .’

Hammett nodded.

‘A month later, a letter came, postmarked Chicago, to one of her mission-school chums who could read English. Her folks can’t, of course. The letter was in Lillian’s handwriting, asking her to tell the folks that Lillian had a job as servant to a rich man and was well and happy . . .’

‘Yeah,’ said Hammett. ‘Everything fits the white slavery racket except the letter actually being in the kid’s handwriting. Usually the ones they grab can’t read or write. Anyway, how do we get Lillian Tam Fong back from Chicago as Crystal Tam?’

‘You want me to do
all
your work for you?’ grumbled Manion. ‘One Sunday afternoon about nine months ago, Lillian walks in, spins the tale about her job in Marin, and starts showing up every Sunday since. She even finds a few bucks for the folks now and again.’

‘And nary a word about the years in between? Not even to the girlfriend?’

‘Nup. Chicago, that’s it. And apparently the girlfriend dislikes Lillian’s current Chinatown pals so much that they aren’t friends any longer.’

Hammett was silent, frowning, his forearms crossed on the table. The cigarette between his lips spiraled a thin line of smoke up toward the grease-darkened ceiling.

‘What’s the address over in Marin?’

‘It’ll just be a blind anyway.’ Manion was digging out his hip pocket notebook as he argued. ‘No phone, I checked.’

‘A blind?’ Hammett shook his head. ‘This Crystal is a very bright kid, she wouldn’t just pick an address out of the hat. And it’s probably isolated enough to make a hell of a fine hideout for someone on the dodge from the law like Molly Farr is.’

‘I didn’t think of that angle,’ admitted Manion. He read from
the notebook. ‘Mrs Heloise Kuhn, the old Borne house on the Bolinas Road.’

‘Living with all the rest of the rich folks up by Bolinas?’

‘Yeah, come to think of it,’ said Manion in a chagrined voice. ‘Fishermen and bootleggers and farmers and not a hell of a lot else. All of a sudden I have the feeling you might be saying hello to Molly Farr this afternoon.’

‘That’s the idea,’ said Hammett.

T
he woman bent over the wooden-staved rain barrel was better than six feet tall and weighed three hundred pounds. Her back was to Hammett as he came up the weed-grown drive to the white farmhouse; great knuckles of hard fat rode over the buried hipbones under her faded check housedress.

‘Mrs Heloise Kuhn?’

‘Huh?’ The huge moon buttocks tensed in unconfined nastiness as she straightened in surprise and swung around to face him. ‘Who’s asking?’

Her face was decorated with a rosebud mouth above too many chins, and mean black raisins stuck behind square-rimmed eyeglasses.

‘Hammett. Homemaker’s Insurance Agency.’

‘I ain’t buying.’

He moved around her to the other side of the rain barrel. She was drowning a kitten. The water boiled briefly around her thick forearms. Pleasure pursed the rosebud lips. One tiny taloned paw spasmed a despairing arc of red parallels across her flesh.

‘Bastard!’ she burst out softly.

She slammed the small dark head against the side of the barrel. Hammett saw the glint of bone through the wet-plastered
fur on the delicate skull as she buried the kitten in the water once more. Four more small bodies, their thinness emphasized by wet clinging fur, lay in the weeds beyond the corner of the house.

‘Kittens ain’t as much fun ’thout you do their ma with ’em.’

The water was quiet around her forearms. Her voice filled as if she were eating pastry.

‘Put ’em all in a sack an’ th’ow ’em offen a bridge into a river, ’long with a old hunk of scrap iron. One old tabby I seen stayed up near twenty minutes that way, tryin’ to save them kits.’

‘Yeah,’ said Hammett. He had broken a fingernail on the rim of the barrel.

She clacked ill-fitted dentures together. ‘Near bust a gut laughin’, I can tell you. My brother won hisse’f five bucks off another feller, bettin’ how long she’d stay up.’ With a regretful sigh she abandoned the past. ‘Insurance, you say. Payin’ out a claim?’

‘Tracing a witness, Mrs Kuhn. We think your maid saw a car hit a woman over in the city two Sundays ago, and—’