Lillian and Dash (7 page)

She and Hammett sat at their regular table at Barney’s Beanery with the rough
Thin Man
script and tried to slip in as much iniquity as possible. So, for example, there’s Nickie at the bar, high as usual, with two chorus girls. Lilly wrote in the margin:

Hammett’s contribution to the same scene struck her as less witty, more mean-spirited.

Lillian never told him that the nine-iron banter bothered her, that it crossed a line between erotic and obscene, but worse, that it struck her as cruel to Nora. That thought clarified something for her: cruelty was in fact precisely what made the erotic obscene. She understood then her discomfort when Hammett got too rough with her in bed. It wasn’t just the force of his smacks; or perhaps it was, even though he stopped when she made it clear that he had hurt her. More, it was what he said, the taunting. He would squeeze her nipples, playfully at first. Then he’d say,
So you like that, do you?
As he got a bit rougher, so did his voice:
And that? How about that!
And then meaner:
Not so much fun now, is it? Is it?
She knew that same line had been crossed—that this was the onset of cruelty. Hammett had that in him. Could a man work all those years in that criminal world, that demimonde, and not become cruel? Or maybe the reverse was true. Maybe he was drawn to that world precisely because its cruelty matched his own. Another thought: the only way Hammett’s behavior made any sense was to see him as two men, two personalities.

The problem with reason was that it undermined passion. As her flight approached Los Angeles now, her severest anger had subsided. Understanding had produced that undesirable effect.

Hammett, she reminded herself, had only gone to the eighth grade before his lout of a father pulled him out of school so he could put the boy to work at a man’s job at half-a-man’s pay. Nevertheless, this was someone who taught
himself Latin and Greek, who never met a crossword he couldn’t defeat. Who’d read all the classics, could discuss the arts brilliantly when he chose to, had a grasp of European and Asian history, a knowledge of wine and fine cuisine, who could talk baseball or boxing with the best sportswriters in America. Not to mention archaeology and analytical psychol … Lillian closed her eyes.

I
T IS REALLY VERY HARD
to tell people what my father did—for a living, I mean. Unless, of course, they paid people to be drunks back in those days, which I seriously doubt. I’m not trying to be obscure or mysterious here; I honestly do not know. Sometimes he came home wearing overalls, sometimes his Sunday suit, sometimes a lumberjacket and boots. Mostly he didn’t come home at all. “On the road” was my mother’s explanation. Sometimes she added, “He’s doing it for us.” I never quite believed her or knew quite what that meant.

When he was home, he hardly ever spoke. And he never talked to any of us.
Us
was Reba, my older sister, and my little brother Dick, and of course my mother. When he did speak it was to tell us what we could not do. “No dolls at table, young lady, if you want to eat here tonight.” “Young man, I don’t want to hear you sass your mother ever again, or it’s out on your ear.” Dickie, who looked like my father and carried
his name as well, took the brunt of his
could nots
. There was such a sour smell about the man. I’m sure my mom was happier when he was “on the road, doing it for us.” We all were.

In the family I was called Sam. I didn’t choose to become Dashiell—my middle name—until I left home and decided who I really wanted to be in the world. My mom used to call me Dash sometimes. My father made fun of the name. “When was the last time that slowpoke ever dashed?”

I realize now that maybe he was too defeated a man to sit down and talk, especially to his older son, who he must have known was watching him very carefully all the time. I’ve always been grateful I never had sons. You might think drink would have loosened his tongue a bit. It did at the gin mill. At home Richard Thomas Hammett was one sullen SOB.

The closest we ever came to a talk was one night when I was probably about nine or ten. I had a bad dream and must have woken myself up. I made some noises I was hoping my mother or sister would hear but no one came. I saw a light on in the kitchen. My father was alone at the table. It would be convenient to say I remember a bottle and glass, but I honestly do not. He may have been crying. He waved me in. I sat on the floor by the kitchen door. He talked. He said he always tried to do the right thing, always, by his family, by his neighbors, by the Lord, even to strangers. Yes, he wanted to go to church more often—we were Catholics—but there were so many days he couldn’t, he didn’t feel wanted there, felt like a Judas. That’s what he said,
a Judas
.

He was talking more to himself. I was just there. But then he did look at me and I sensed he was sending out a warning. It all began with his grandfather, he said, or maybe even earlier than that, this curse on the Hammett men. His own father had passed the warning along to him. Did that mean, I wondered, that his father had heard this same nocturnal talk when he was a boy?

“There is the wolf within us, Sam, and there always has been.” He said it and left a pause he seemed reluctant to fill. “We are men. You will be a man. But that is not our only nature. There is the wolf too, lonely, hungry, untamed. It makes us the kind of men we are. Our eyes, they’re different from other men’s.”

That part was true. I could see it was true. Pale eyes, pale, pale eyes. He had them, Grandpa had them, I had them. Kids called me Ghost because of my pale eyes. But the eyes weren’t the real issue. They were only the sign of our wolfish natures—restless, solitary, ravenous. Jesus, what a thing to tell a boy.

“When you least expect it,” he said, “that’s when the wolf comes. In your belly. In your throat. All over your skin.” He shivered. He was sobbing again. Try to imagine how hard it was for a boy to understand what this father was saying, how he was acting. Imagine also how the man that boy would eventually become would be shaped—well, maybe not
shaped
but
touched
at least—by his father’s madness.

“Wolf? You mean there’s a wolf’s blood in me, Paw?”

“We attack defenseless things, we Hammetts. Things that mean us no harm.” I could see now in the dim light he was crying more deeply now. “We can’t let things be peaceful. We have teeth and claws and have to use them. Pity us, Samuel.”

He rose, stood me up, took each of my shoulders in his strong hands, and said, “It isn’t so terrible after all, boy, as long as you never let anyone see you do this.” Papa threw his head back and released a long whispered howl. He was laughing.

He was gone not many days later. I didn’t see my father except on and off briefly for a great many years. Eventually I developed a vague sense of what he meant about Hammett men. I would never have come up with wolves myself—every drunk has at least one great metaphor in him—but that’s a better understanding than what I did come up with. His poetry was better than mine. I only have a sense of something dark, something dangerous, something other, and there is a compelling desire to free it, precisely because it is shrouded or caged or whatever … so why not call it my father’s wolfish nature? I’d been the wolf with Jose. I’ve tried not to be the wolf to my children, but I hurt them simply by staying away. And now Lilly. God help me.

Did I know what I had done? I knew, whatever anyone else may believe, that I had no choice in the matter. I knew I would have to ask her for some consideration but that I
would do even that in a wolfish way. Worst of all, I knew I would do something like it again. Wolves don’t apologize.

Wolves never apologize.

H
ELLMAN WAS SOUND ASLEEP
when her plane touched down at Mines Field in Los Angeles, so soundly asleep that she was the last passenger into the terminal. Their regular man, a tiny Filipino named Kai Mindao, met her at the gate. He worked for them when they were both in town and kept their place when they were not. She asked him if he knew where Mr. Dash was. He believed Hammett was at the studio. She told him to take her to the Santa Monica apartment as long as he was sure Mr. Hammett was not there. Kai said he’d make sure, but he had driven Mr. Dash to the studio yesterday and he had not seen him return.

“And how was he? Yesterday I mean?”

“Himself, Mrs.”

“Which himself?” She tasted her gall again.

“Himself. As always.”

Lillian needed time. To sleep. To make some phone calls. To think.

Kai had indeed located him. Hammett was in a bar in Culver City, right across the street from the M-G-M commissary.
Of all possible venues for a showdown, not so bad. Certainly better than breaking into a hotel room. She still didn’t know what she would say. She had a better sense of what she would do. Hit him. Try to hurt him if she possibly could; there was a chance if he was drunk enough.

As they approached the bar on La Cienega, Lilly realized she knew the place. She had spent some time there with Hammett when they first met during her days with Kober at Paramount. The familiarity of the bar both calmed her and made her more angry. For some reason the matter of leaving or staying with him never came to mind; all she wanted to do was batter him.

The day was warm, the bar very dark. For her it was like entering a movie at midday. She stood by the door and let her eyes adjust. The clock above the cash register said 1:20. She noticed as she approached from behind that he’d had his hair cut very recently. He was newly shaved too. There was talc on his collar. Sure signs that his toot was recently over. It must have been an incredible drunk.

Once when she was a teenager back in New Orleans, Max took her to the fights on a barge in the harbor. She wore a newsboy cap, a leather jacket, knickers, and she passed too easily for a boy. The fight she saw and still remembered, a coal-black man against a Creole, ended so suddenly she never saw the punch that put the black man down and out. Not many others saw the punch either; men in the crowd booed and shouted “Fix!” Later her father explained to her
as he counted his winnings that the knockout blow was no phantom but a short, perfectly placed solar plexus punch.

“Solar plexus, Daddy?”

Boxing historians, of which Max was one, knew the provenance of this particular blow. The huge American heavyweight champion “Gentleman Jim” Corbett lost his title to the slight Brit Bob Fitzsimmons back at the turn of the century when he was hit in the small, particularly vulnerable area—the solar plexus—just below the chest cavity and above the stomach. When perfectly placed, the blow didn’t have to be powerful to arrest an opponent’s ability to breathe and render him absolutely helpless. Exactly the outcome that would satisfy her this afternoon with Hammett.

That was her ideal retribution. The image of Hammett on his knees, gasping for air, unable to speak, pleased her greatly. The two were, after all, already well beyond words. First a fist, then an openhanded smack, a clawed hand, a kick, and why not a scream—no, a shout—while pummeling him, that at least would tame the rage pulsing through her now.

Lilly had no idea he saw her coming up behind him in the mirror—there are some things a detective never forgets to do. She noticed when she got closer he had only a coffee cup before him on the bar. The drying out had indeed begun, probably it had started just this morning with the haircut and the shave.