Lillian and Dash (5 page)

From time to time, whenever I’d run into old Ops, we’d naturally and automatically drift back to talking about old
cases. Rather,
they’d
talk about old cases. That wasn’t my style. I wanted to write about them—that’s how I made my money when my health went bad and I couldn’t work for Pinkerton. A good Op and a good writer always learns more when he listens. You’d think it was murder or kidnapping cases, or even the gaudy embezzlements the guys wanted to talk about. It wasn’t. What most other Ops wanted to talk about were the missings. I think deep down most of the guys envied someone who could step out of one life and try another one on for size. Actually I just got a pang of envy writing that last sentence.

After I married Josephine and had the kids, and given my lousy health, there was no possible way I could do the Pinkerton job and hold the family together, which finally was okay with both of us as long as I could make enough money to keep them safe and, as the man says, free from want. Something else was happening to me too. Ops deal with crimes of one kind or another—some pretty terrible—and the darkest sort of cynicism comes with the territory, and cynicism eats families. So eventually I worked alone in San Francisco. Jose and the girls moved out to Montana. I might have missed a check to them occasionally, but Jose will tell you I took care of them well enough, even during the times when my health went bad and I couldn’t work.

Unlike my old man who went off on toots that lasted months and never came back with any cash for us, until thankfully he hardly ever came back at all. I learned about
missing persons early. How do I feel about him now? I feel nothing. Absolutely nothing. And a hundred sessions with Dr. Freud won’t change that because nothing is exactly what the bastard deserves from me.

I remember that I had left Pinkerton by then. It was late ’28. I’m in Frisco working on the
Falcon
. I’m typing away nonstop at the Post Street apartment, twelve, fourteen hours at a clip. The story is pouring out of me. Even though I had a detailed plot outline—a good one, really tight—the story kept wanting to run away from me because the characters were so strong they each wanted to take it in their own direction. It was getting stretched way out of shape. The characters all started out as variations on the same grifters I’d known when I was an Op, but once they got on the paper the greedy bastards wanted lives of their own, wanted to say things that even the real grifters wouldn’t say.

Whenever I fell asleep, there they were, Gutman and Cairo and Iva, and especially Brigid O’Shaughnessy, telling me what they wanted me to know, whom I ought to trust and not trust. In Brigid’s case, of course, it was nobody but herself. I didn’t get many good nights’ sleep. Didn’t matter; personal turbulence was good for the book. I was trying not to drink, first not at all and then not too much, which made things harder—and easier.

The
Falcon
was the last of my three-book deal with Alfred Knopf in New York. I’d missed the last payment to Jose, who wrote just the week before to say she needed some money
for the girls. Never for herself, and I’m sure that was true. I intended to mail out the first big chunk of the book, six chapters, about eighty pages, tomorrow morning first thing and ask Knopf for an advance. There’s a natural break in the action right there, end of Chapter Six. The story was going to pick up again in Chapter Seven with Brigid in Spade’s apartment—which is also on Post Street, why not?—where the two are waiting for Joel Cairo to show up. My plan was a dinner out and then an all-nighter with Brigid and Cairo exchanging lies.

I bought a
Racing Form
on the corner and made for Tait’s. Wednesday, the goulash was the special. Who’s sitting at my regular table but Buddy Krinsky, an old-timer from Pinkerton. No one else at the agency called me Samuel, my given name, but Krinsky. He saw it once on my license. I wasn’t sure I wanted him to spot me. He bellowed, “Samuel, come join me, my friend.”

Krinsky assumed I was still an Op, had no idea I had quit to become a writer. I let that go. He told me about a missing he was just wrapping up: “Damnedest thing in all my years, Samuel. Damnedest one ever.” He assumed I would say, “Tell me about it,” and he did. Krinsky was one hell of a talker.

When I got back to my Underwood I typed Krinsky’s story pretty much verbatim, I didn’t want to miss any details. Krinsky didn’t want to tell me his missing’s name, which I thought was a pretty professional thing to do. He said, “Let’s just call him Flitcraft,” which is what I did when I got back
to the apartment. I don’t know when I decided to use the Flitcraft story in
Falcon
, but if I didn’t intend to use it, why couldn’t I wait to get back and start typing?

I can’t say I absolutely understood the Flitcraft story myself, certainly not what it meant as a general description of the human psyche. I think I might have typed it to try to understand it better. Because Krinsky and I had both been trained to be respectful of facts, and I knew him to be a loudmouth but a damned good Op, the Flitcraft story probably only means what the facts tell us it means. In the detective business you soon learn that meaning is nothing more than what people do, what they want, what they need, and how they go about trying to get it.

Rule number one in detective fiction:
Thou Shall Not Stop the Plot
. For any reason. Ever. So then what made me want to begin Chapter Seven with the Flitcraft story and bring everything to a dead halt? And why in the world do I have Spade—my own Samuel—tell the Flitcraft story to Brigid as though it were a case he worked on himself when it has nothing to do with the Falcon? Why? You tell me. Lillian says I put it there precisely because I realized that was where it didn’t belong, and that’s why she loved it. Who knows, maybe I thought the plot needed the squeal of brakes to build suspense. A couple of times that night I almost pulled it out but decided finally that’s what editors are for.

Here is what Krinsky told me: “A man named Flitcraft had left his real-estate office in Tacoma to go to luncheon
one day and never returned. As best I could make out, his wife and he were supposed to be on the best of terms. He had two children, boys, one five and the other three. He owned a house in a Tacoma suburb, a new Packard, and the rest of the appurtenances of successful American living. There was nothing, absolutely nothing, to suggest that he had more than fifty or sixty bucks in his immediate possession at the time of his going. His habits for months past could be accounted for too thoroughly to justify any suspicion of secret vices, or even another woman in his life …”

Krinsky said Flitcraft’s wife wanted Pinkerton to find her husband, bring him home, and make him pay for what he had done to their family. Krinsky was the company’s missings specialist in the Northwest so he began by picking up the usual loose ends. The guy didn’t gamble. The dealership was still making money for the family. Even a good-looking secretary didn’t lead anywhere. Nothing led to Flitcraft’s whereabouts. It was one thing to type out Krinsky’s story, quite another to have Spade take up the tale and tell it to Brigid as his own.

I had Spade pick up Flitcraft’s trail after someone spotted a man in Spokane who had won a car race in a vintage Packard. His description matched Flitcraft to a T. Years had lapsed since Flitcraft’s disappearance when Spade finally caught up with his man and discovered that he had indeed changed his name, owned a successful business, and was married with a baby boy. Flitcraft, when Spade discovers him, didn’t feel a great deal of guilt; after all, he had left his Tacoma family well provided for
and felt that what he had done was perfectly reasonable under some very bizarre circumstances.

Five years earlier in Tacoma Flitcraft was walking past an office building that was being put up—just the superstructure. A beam fell eight or ten stories down and struck the sidewalk alongside him and then toppled over. Now even Brigid, who was only interested in matters that affected her well-being, became a bit more attentive. At that point I went back to my Krinsky notes and read: “He felt that somebody had taken the lid off of life and let him look at the works. And that scared the bejesus out of the man.” He realized that the good father-citizen-husband could be wiped out between office and restaurant by the accident of a falling beam. He knew then that men died haphazardly like that, and lived only while blind chance spared them. Chance ruled everything. So why were we kidding ourselves?

After the beam fell and missed, Flitcraft chose to live a random, uncommitted life of chance. But a few years later up in Spokane when there were no more falling beams in his life, he pretty much becomes his old Flitcraft self again, a stable, predictable, solid citizen. This idea Spade particularly enjoys and he tells Brigid, “That’s the part of it I always liked. He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling.” If you want to know our species in a nutshell, there you have it.

Rarely do I falter or allow myself to be taken in by my own rare good writing. “Somebody had taken the lid off of
life and let him look at the works.” Jesus, that’s an epitaph. Does it even matter whether that was Krinsky or me? My whole life up to the
Falcon
—up to Lillian—was nothing but dealing with “the works” under the lid, so much so that I thought that “works” were all life had to offer. Not complaining, no, not at all. Some people don’t even know life has “lids” and “works” and couldn’t even give a damn about the difference. Samuel Spade, however, is not one of them. Nor am I. Lillian, of course, makes metaphysical poetry out of Flitcraft, but then again she functions on an entirely different plane of existence than I do.

Even though we’re both Samuels, Spade is not quite Hammett, nor vice versa. I have to remind myself of that in certain situations. It made sense to me then that Spade wanted to hear himself tell Brigid something she couldn’t possibly understand. And I certainly knew better than to allow myself to wax philosophical in a thriller and stop things cold. But that’s what I did, so I wrote a note to Alfred telling him to knock the story out if he didn’t think it worked. He left it in. Thank God, John Huston, when he made the movie, got rid of the damned thing.

W
HICH VERSION OF IT
is he dishing up now? The old Buddy Krinsky bullshit or the truth as he invents it on the
run? I hope you’re smart enough to figure out why he made up that Krinsky cover story out of whole cloth. I called him on it the moment I saw it in an
Esquire
interview.

I was in New York when I read it and phoned the apartment in L.A. He was there but wouldn’t pick up. I left a message three places at the studio for him to call me, which he did, three days later. God only knows how he filled those days. He swore he was crashing on a
Thin Man
script. Not possible, but I allowed myself to believe him. It didn’t matter at that point for me, my concern was the unadulterated crap he was telling people about the Flitcraft section. When he finally phoned back, I said, Why are you doing this? There is no Krinsky. You know there is no Krinsky and I know there is no Krinsky. He said, Lill, I swear to you there is. I said, I called Pinkerton. There is no Krinsky. There never was a Krinsky. Long pause. He said, I do not appreciate the people I care about not believing me. He was seething. And you never would have called Pinkerton.

I told him he was right, that I hadn’t actually called Pinkerton. I told him I wanted to but finally didn’t. I loved him too much.

I’ve desired many men over the years for a variety of reasons but mostly for the short term. Dash was for a lifetime, unfortunately
his
lifetime. He was still unusually handsome until well into his ruin, but even ruined he was beautiful. I was the only one of his women to have known him fully because we worked so closely for so long.

Once, I remember, he read a book about sixteenth-century glassblowing in Bohemia—he collected esoterica like Lincoln pennies—and after we made love he talked so teasingly about how Cranberry glass was blown that we made love again. The Bohemians made many kinds of glass;
cranberry
, though, became our code word for sex. If we were at a bar and I asked for a little cranberry juice in my gin, Dash knew I had expectations for the evening. So, no, I wouldn’t have called Pinkerton about Krinsky; I didn’t have to. I knew.

Ask yourself this question. Why would a writer, a fiction writer, invent a story attributing some of his very best work to some crude working stiff who does not even exist?

What you had with Dash was, on the one hand, someone who accumulated knowledge like a coin collector but refused to ever show anyone his collection. And on the other hand, someone who absolutely humiliated himself in public with asinine pranks and fall-down drunkenness. Not to mention his insulting faithlessness. It took me a long while to see these were uncorrectable parts of the essential man. Extract them and there was no Dashiell Hammett left. Damn it.

And, really, how could I help him when, let’s face it, back then I was often something of a drunk myself. But never, I don’t believe, out of shame.