Hammett (Crime Masterworks) (7 page)

Pronzini stood up, shaking his head sourly. ‘C’mon, we can’t talk in all this racket.’

Atkinson, carrying the bottle casually by the neck, followed him through the break in the drapes. He was glad to get out of the suddenly stuffy barroom.

Beyond the door was a long narrow room stacked floor to ceiling with wooden crates of liquor. Over his shoulder, Pronzini said, ‘We got a private room back here we won’t be disturbed.’

The door at the far end led to another room, this one small and square with a bed and table and dresser and chairs. Three other doors: bathroom, closet, and one probably opening on stairs down to the dark narrow alley he could see from the window. Pronzini sat down at the table and gestured Atkinson to a seat across from him.

‘Okay, bo, you tell me what sort of financing you’ve got, I’ll tell you whether there’s any chance we can deal.’

‘Maybe you could lay out your setup for me a little first.’

He treated himself to Scotch as Pronzini talked about payoffs and which cops had to be juiced on a regular basis. Atkinson drank and listened and reminded himself to go easy on the hootch; he had a long night ahead, and a lot of details to remember, and he was already getting a heat on.

Only it wasn’t a heat. He started clumsily to his feet as he realized what was happening to him. The bitter edge to the Scotch! He cursed the heavy, grinning, distorted face. He reached across the table for it. Tear it off its fat neck. But the floor moved sideways under his feet to spill him over so his chin struck the edge of the table.

Through waves of nausea, Vic Atkinson could hear a voice that sounded vaguely familiar. Then he placed it. Dominic Pronzini. It came back to him. Like a rube from the sticks. The real stuff, Tony. The
real
stuff.

‘. . . he used to hang around North Beach in the old days when I was a kid . . . Huh?’

Atkinson realized Pronzini was on the phone. ‘Naw, I don’t know his grift, nothing in his poke but a few bucks . . . Yeah. No. Sure. He ain’t going nowhere . . .’

Atkinson tried to move his head, but the waves of nausea swept over him again. Chloral hydrate. Probably would have knocked him out for hours if he’d been a smaller man. As it was, hitting his chin had knocked him out. The Mickey Finn had him drifting . . . paralyzed . . .

He came back again, maybe a little stronger. Pronzini was back on the phone with the same guy and a different conversation.

‘Who you sending to – no, check that, I don’t want to know. The alley door’ll be open for him. But what difference does it make
who
this guy is? My boys can make sure he gets the message. He wakes up in an alley somewhere with his teeth in his pocket . . .’

Away again, drifting. Try to move the head, so he’d know if he was . . . gently.
Gently
, goddamn you! Ohh-h-h . . .

Sound of door opening. Footsteps approaching. He realized he didn’t even know if he was lying on his back or his face. No feeling. But better now, even so. Not going away and coming back.

Above him, a grunt of surprise. On his back then. The newcomer seeing his face and recognizng him. Had to get eyes open, see who it was had come in from the downstairs alley door Pronzini had left open.
Had
to. It could be the man.
The
man. Crack his case before he even got started on it.

Now!

With a supreme effort, Vic Atkinson forced his eyelids open. He was flat on his back, staring straight up. Up, high as the
moon, at the elongated, distorted image his eyes gave his foggy brain.

The
man, all right. But opening his eyes had been a mistake.

‘Yes, well, that’s it, isn’t it?’ said the man looking down at him. Turned away, regret in his eyes, Atkinson could see him go to the door, open it six inches, call Pronzini and shut it again.

He was standing at the window, overcoat collar turned up, hat pulled low on his head, when Pronzini came in.

‘Yeah?’

‘He opened his eyes. He saw my face.’

Goddamn chloral hydrate. If only Dash had come with him, none of this would have . . .

‘I’ll need . . . something . . . to—’

‘In the closet,’ said Pronzini quickly. ‘I don’t want to know about it.’

‘Just so you get rid of it later,’ said the deliberately muffled voice.

Pronzini’s footsteps, going away. Door closing. Other footsteps to same door, key turning in lock, then footsteps to closet.
In the closet
. Coming at him.

Atkinson tried, despairing, to move. Couldn’t. God, so sick. Meet it.

With a supreme effort, Vic Atkinson raised his head three inches and opened his eyes.

The bulky man swung the baseball bat. The arc ended with a sickening abruptness on the bridge of the detective’s nose. As the home run exploded against Atkinson’s eyes and into his brain, his bladder and sphincter let loose. The killer leaped back with a little exclamation to avoid the mess. And the blood. Then he stepped back in to use the bat some more. As long as it had to be done, he might as well enjoy it.

I
t was coming right, now. Felix Weber, the ex-con, was gone. The Primrose Hotel was gone. Hammett’s typewriter clacked. The ashtray was overflowing; flecks of tobacco drifted on the top of black coffee long since gone cold.

He stopped, rubbed bloodshot eyes, tugged his mustache, considered. Aaronia Haldorn. Her husband Joseph. And instead of the run-down hotel, their exclusive Pacific Heights place, the Temple of the Holy Grail. Joseph would work as a character where Weber hadn’t.

He got up and started to pace. Hell, yes. Joseph would
believe
. That was it. Wield the knife himself. Sure. As for Aaronia . . .

Aaronia.

Hammett quit pacing to light himself a cigarette. Aaronia. He’d given her the name but not the physical description of his older sister, Reba. Of all his relatives, the only one he still wrote to. He chuckled. Aaronia Rebecca Hammett, as stiff-necked as he was. He’d send her a copy of
The Dain Curse
when Knopf published it. If he ever got the damned thing revised.

But still he stood, gripped by the past. Philadelphia. He’d been . . . what? Two? Three? White house with a little wooden porch and initials carved penknife deep in the railing. Tagging along after Reba to the park to fetch drinking water. Must have been Fairmont Park. And the time the old man took them both – maybe even the baby, Dick, too – to the city dump. There’d been a billy goat with a long white beard and mad eyes, eating tin cans. Or at least the labels off them.

Circle of men around the goat, laughing. Every time one of them would toss a cigarette butt, quick as lightning the goat would piss on it and put it out. Every time. He’d never seen his father laugh so hard.

He became aware that knuckles had been rapping against the
front door for some time. He rubbed a hand over his sandpaper jaw and called, ‘I’m asleep.’

‘Sam. It’s me. Goodie. You’ve got another phone call.’

Hammett went to the window and jerked at the bottom of the shade. It shot up to slap twice around the roller. Sunshine burst in to squint his eyes. He threw up the bottom half of the double-hung window and sucked in shocking dawn air. Where the hell had the night gone?

Goodie was dressed for work in a checked gingham apron frock with a collarless square neck and a midcalf hem that would turn no sufferer’s head in the doctor’s waiting room. Following her to her apartment, he talked at her back.

‘I’m going to give that damn Atkinson a blast he won’t forget, after that trick he pulled last night . . .’

He knelt on the couch, picked up the phone, clipped the receiver between the side of his neck and a raised shoulder so he could make drinking motions with his left hand to suggest coffee. Goodie nodded and disappeared into the kitchen.

‘Yeah, I know, Vic. The cops picked you up and—’

‘Dash? Jimmy Wright here.’

A well-remembered voice from his Pinkerton past, another operative who’d stayed on when Hammett had left.

‘Jimmy, how’s the boy, long time no see. You still with the Pinks?’

‘Not for a year. I quit to go with Vic down south. Why I called, they found him behind the Southern Pacific station this morning. Worked over with a baseball bat or something, then dumped there.’

I’m in danger, Dash! Strange men . . . Hope they beat . . . goddamn head in
. . .

‘Dumped?’ he asked almost stupidly. The tips of his fingers had turned pale against the phone. ‘Dead?’

‘You never saw one deader.’

He was without movement for a full twenty seconds; then a long ripple that might have been a shiver ran through his lean body.

‘I’m on my way.’

Goodie came from the kitchen with a steaming cup of coffee half-extended. Hammett felt hollow.
Hope they, beat . . . goddamn head
. . .

‘Sam, what’s wrong? What—’

He was already heading for the door.

Hammett paid off the cab and started across Third toward the bulky colonnaded Mission Revival SP station, built of stucco phonied up like adobe. When he saw the craning knot of loungers at the far end of the long wooden baggage shed, he veered down Townsend instead. At the gate in the iron picket fence, a uniform bull was holding back the crowd. He let Hammett through.

Jimmy Wright, five feet eight and overweight, was at the foot of the wooden ramp leading up into the shedlike baggage building. They shook hands.

‘Who found it?’ asked Hammett.

‘Switchman.’

The meat wagon hadn’t arrived yet. Another knot of men, all official and dominated by O’Gar’s bullet head, was clustered in the five-foot-wide area between the side of the baggage shed and the closest of the tracks. The space was for brakemen servicing the rolling stock. Four of the men staggered toward the timbered loading dock at the foot of the ramp with a sagging army blanket. When they dropped it near Hammett’s feet, one corner flopped back. He had such an acute moment of
déjà vu
that he felt dizzy. Words washed over him.

‘. . . stink?’

‘Shit his pants when he died . . .’

Baltimore. His first job, at thirteen, right out of Polytechnic Grammar School. The old man had gotten sick and Hammett had tried to pick up the pieces as messenger boy for the B&O line in their Charles and Baltimore Street office. He was late for work as usual, cutting across the tracks, when he’d stumbled on a brakeman who’d been killed by a switching engine.

A head just like Vic’s: still whole but oddly misshapen, almost soggy, no more interior structure than a beanbag. Same stink of excrement. A shabby way to die. He flipped the coarse brown wool back up with an apparently casual toe.

‘His money was on his hip,’ said Jimmy Wright. ‘No wallet.’ Working undercover, Hammett thought, there wouldn’t be. ‘Clerk from the hotel saw the excitement, came over, and recognized the clothes.’

‘Sure it wasn’t a switching engine?’

‘Brakeman was through twenty minutes before. No body. No trains moving on this track last night anyway. You see everything you want here?’

Hammett nodded. They went up Townsend to the side entrance of the depot arcade and walked under arched ceilings past the train gates. In the Depot Café at the far end of the station, they found a table and ordered coffee. Jimmy Wright also ordered ham and eggs. Watching the stocky two-hundred-pound op shovel in hashbrowns, Hammett felt a little ill. He drank scalding black coffee. He fumbled out a cigarette.

‘You going to take over the investigation of the police department now that Vic is gone?’

The op’s sleepy brown eyes gleamed, then were sleepy again. He was dressed in a brown suit; his collar was soiled and rumpled from an all-night train ride from LA. ‘I was hoping you would.’

‘Me? I haven’t been a sleuth for over six years.’

‘And I’m a hired hand.’ He sopped up the last of the egg yolk with his final bite of toast. ‘I’m lousy behind a desk, whereas
you
—’

‘A writing desk, not a detective’s rolltop.’

‘Mebbe.’ The op lit a Fatima and feathered smoke at the ceiling. He chuckled. ‘Remember that check-raising gang you and Vic and I ran down in the old Blackstone Hotel on O’Farrell Street?’

Hammett remembered. Big blond guy with a broken nose that Vic had hung out of a third-story window by an ankle to
cool down. He said, ‘Remember when I got drunk at that hotel on Taylor? The one where all the ex-cons went on Saturday night because they could get together at the weekly dance and plan jobs without being arrested as parole violators? Vic was . . .’ He broke off abruptly. ‘Jimmy, he called me last night. He was on a round of the speaks, wanted me to meet him. If I had . . .’

‘Right you are,’ said the thickset operative meaninglessly.

Hammett leaned forward, elbows on the table.

‘Any blood where they found him?’

‘No blood. He was dumped.’

‘Coroner’s man make a guess on the time yet?’

‘You know them.’

‘Then here’s something you can give O’Gar when you talk to him. Vic was alive just before one o’clock. If he wants to know what Vic was working on, refer him to Preacher Laverty. I’d think the fewer cops know about your operation right now, the better.’