Hammett (Crime Masterworks) (21 page)

‘I don’t quite understand why you think the missing girl might be held at the farmhouse here in Bolinas.’

Hammett explained the way he had been run off on his previous visit.

‘The way a bootlegger chases off someone snooping around his barn. We know there’s a connection between the girl and the woman, we know the girl was once kidnapped into the white slavery racket and taken to Illinois. We know the Kuhn woman and her brother were arrested for white slavery back in sixteen – picking up naïve Chinese girls through newspaper ads for domestics, and running them back to brothels in Burnham, Illinois. I think that all goes beyond coincidence.’

In hairpin turns the road made its descent along the face of the coastal hills toward Stinson Beach. The wind whipped and plucked at them as it poured up over the bluffs from the sea. Hammett was glad of his wool clothing and knitted cap in the open touring car.

‘But how would the Kuhn woman get her hands on Crystal at this time?’

‘On May twenty-seventh, Crystal apparently saw something in the papers that terrorized her so completely that the next afternoon she disappeared. Nobody’s seen her since. She might have come up here to hide, if she’d been told the house was now empty. Anyway, that’s what I hope we’ll find out.’

They had passed Stinson Beach, a crossroads store with a gas pump and a couple of houses, and had swung away from the
coast toward the long lance of Pacific known as the Bolinas Lagoon. The Kuhn Farm was on the eastern shore of the lagoon.

‘What did she see in the papers that frightened her so?’

‘Again, I just don’t know. But I think it was an article about a man named Egan Tokzek who was killed in a running gun battle with police and had a dead Chinese girl in his car when they got him. Tokzek was the brother of Heloise Kuhn.’

Harry cut the lights and motor, and the sounds of the marshland night closed in on them. Carrunking frogs, sawing crickets, and trilling cicadas. The car motor creaked as it cooled. Harry took a gun from the pocket of his black horsehide coat and laid it on the pale leather seat. Hammett picked it up.

‘Holy Christ!’ he exclaimed, startled. ‘What kind of howitzer is this?’

‘A howdah gun, sir. Originally intended as a personal sidearm when hunting tigers from the back of an elephant. In case the beast leaped up on the elephant’s back with you—’

‘I can stick my fingers down the bore,’ said Hammett in awe.

‘Yes, sir. It fires a .577 Snider with eighty grains of black powder. Made by Wilkinson, the London sporting goods suppliers. Beyond about two yards it’s rather less effective than throwing a rock, sir, but—’

‘Yeah. But you’d hate to have it blow its nose at you, even so.’

Hammett walked up the grass ruts shoulder to shoulder with the South African. He was damned glad the case had brought him back here. He didn’t like the depth of terror this woman and her idiot son had opened in his psyche; he wanted to scab over the wound with a second confrontation.

When the house came into sight, they hunkered down. Harry brought his lips close to Hammett’s ear.

‘If I might say so, sir, I’m damned good as a red Indian.’

Hammett watched his bulky shape melt into the night. Strain as he could, his ear could catch no crackle of leaf or rustle of grass. He waited with the placidity of long hours spent in windy
doorways, tailing suspects. He yearned for a cigarette, but otherwise . . .

To mind, abruptly, vividly, came the time Gloomy Gus Schaefer’s jewel gang had been traced to a roadhouse near Vallejo. Hammett had been sent in to learn where the Shapiro jewels, stolen in Minneapolis, had been hidden. He’d waited in the weeds like this for an hour, then tried to climb up the side porch to the second-story window of the room where the thieves were meeting. The drainpipe gave way and dumped him in the underbrush, bruised but unhurt. Shapiro’s men had searched for half an hour before . . .

A strong hand imprisoned his, with his .38, in his pocket. Harry, after a moment, took his own hand away. Red Indian was right.

‘Nobody on watch, sir,’ he said in almost normal tones. ‘Just that light in the living room. I checked the barn, also. No auto. The back door is locked . . .’

‘And the front porch creaks like hell, I noticed that the other day. Is there a pantry window?’

‘Locked, sir.’

‘That’s all right.’

When they were pressed up against the side of the house, they heard a high thin ululating whine through the wood. After a moment, Hammett chuckled and motioned the South African on. At the rear of the house he found the pantry window and took a roll of automobile friction tape from his pocket to lay three overlapping strips against the glass where the inside thumb-latch was. He tapped the tape twice with his gun butt, then peeled it away in one piece. He snaked a forefinger through the opening where the adhering glass had come away with the tape. He opened the lock.

‘Very handsome,’ breathed Harry.

‘Streets and houses, Harry. My kind of hunting.’

From another pocket, Hammett pulled a black woolen sock with a knot in it. From this he took a heavy square-cut oblong
of brown laundry soap with which he waxed the tracks until the lower half of the window slid up easily and noiselessly.

Gun in hand, he slipped over the sill to the utter blackness of the pantry. Only the pale strip of light under the door was visible. He crouched and laid an eye to the floor. Nothing to trip over between him and the door to the kitchen.

They went toward it and through it.

The dim light came down the hall from the front room. At the far end of the hallway were the stairs to the second floor and a wide archway into the front room. Hammett slid an eye around the doorframe.

It was a barren room with dime-store shades, no drapes or curtains at the windows. The couch spilled horsehair from half a dozen rips. The kerosene pressure lamp that coned light down on the fat woman in the overstuffed chair needed pumping. The chair was so permanently sagged by her weight he could see the bottoms of half a dozen springs resting right on the floor beneath it.

Heloise had her head back and to one side and was snoring. Her mouth was open and her false teeth had slipped enough so one edge of the upper plate was visible.

Against the wall was a floor-model Silvertone radio receiver, the six-tube console model. One of the knobs on the cabinet door had been replaced with an acorn. From the radio came the thin whine Hammett had earlier identified as a dead station.

He stepped back into the hall, pointed at Harry and then into the room, then pointed at himself and up the stairs. Harry nodded. Hammett started up the inner edge of the stair treads, his .38 cocked and ready in his hand.

Nobody.

The bathroom held a claw-footed tub and a surprisingly modern low-tank closet toilet. The three bedrooms held only beds, chairs, and bureaus. The far one stank of Heloise and its bed sagged nearly to the floor.

In the middle room, Hammett was rewarded with several long glossy black hairs on a greasy pillow. He stood cold-faced for several moments, staring down at the circle of light from his flash: There were blond hairs, too. Andy, the idiot son. The bathroom clothes hamper yielded a pair of silk panties that would not have stretched around Heloise’s thigh.

He went back downstairs and into the living room.

‘The kid took her off somewhere, probably right after I was here last time. Somebody isn’t taking any chances.’

He didn’t bother to lower his voice. Heloise slumbered on, merely stirring in her sleep and making chomping noises. Spit had dribbled from the slack corner of her mouth.

Harry said in an almost apologetic voice, ‘Better let me have a bash at it, sir. I had a bit of experience at this sort of thing during my younger days in South Africa. Now, if we could just have a bit of dance music on the radio . . .’

Hammett twiddled the knob. ‘Ain’t She Sweet’ suddenly came from the instrument.

‘KPO. They go off the air in twelve minutes,’ he warned.

‘That’s time enough. Now turn it up sharply, sir.’

Hammett turned it up sharply, and backed away as a blaring voice began extolling the virtues of Iswan Ginger Ale. A hoarse shriek that did not come from the radio whirled him about.

Heloise bellowed again and tried to crowd her vast bulk back into the chair. Harry’s face was six inches from hers. His left hand was holding up his eyelid so the first thing she had seen upon being jarred from sleep was the moist empty pink socket the lid usually covered.

Harry straightened up. ‘That’s got you awake, then, has it?’ he shouted over the radio cheerily. He turned to Hammett with a quieting motion.

Hammett was glad to reduce the volume as Bob Nurok and the Ginger Ale Joys began rendering ‘Give Me a Ukulele and a Ukulele Baby.’

‘Where’s the chink twist?’ demanded Hammett of the fat woman in the language she’d be most likely to respond to.

But Heloise had recovered from the shock of Harry’s gaping eye socket. She told Hammett where to go. She told him what to do when he got there.

‘On your feet, you disgusting sow,’ said Harry. ‘We want a little dance from you.’

Heloise began repeating her advice, this time to Harry. He made a smooth movement that brought the pistol into his hand, and blew the arm off the couch across the room. He swung the gun muzzle toward her.

Heloise found a remarkable turn of speed in getting to her feet.

Harry blew a hole in the floor beside her right shoe.

Heloise started to dance in time to the music. She was grotesque. Blobs and billows of flesh jounced and shook in ragtime. Her breaths were groans.

The side seam of her cotton wash dress ripped with the sound of a board breaking. She wore no underwear.

‘Where’s the chink?’ asked Hammett. He was goddamn glad Harry was interrogating her, not him.

‘Dance faster,’ ordered Harry.

But as he said it, he put away his pistol.

Heloise saw her chance. With an elephantine shriek of rage and triumph, she charged.

Harry spun back toward her and drove off a crouch as if he were opening a hole for Red Grange. He heaved up and away with a hoarse bellow as his shoulder sank into her gut.

Heloise stopped in midflight. Her feet flew straight out in front of her on either side of Harry. From midair, she sat down.

She landed on her chair like a flash flood. It burst asunder. Collapsed, it looked like a spread-out pattern for itself. Heloise sprawled in the midst of it making noises like a bathtub emptying.

‘Where’s the chink?’ asked Hammett.

Heloise didn’t answer. Harry took out his pistol again and thumbed back the hammer. With the ritual tenderness of a man entering a woman, he pushed the muzzle forward until it
touched the end of her nose. Sweat popped out on her forehead. The mean black raisins buried in the folds of flesh beneath her nearly hairless brows crossed slightly.

Very, very softly, Harry said, ‘Take out your teeth, you unspeakable dung heap.’

Her eyes rolled. Her mouth worked to form some sort of word. It might have been, ‘Please.’

Harry waited. The sweat ran down her face. Finally something he saw in her eyes, some capitulation, perhaps, made him relax and straighten.

Very slowly, while she stared at his face as if mesmerized, her right hand went up to remove the full set of dentures. She slipped it from her mouth and sat with it on her half-opened hand in her lap. Her face looked collapsed from the nose down, as if someone had removed part of the essential underlying bone. The teeth gleamed like an uncatalogued fossil.

Harry put out a calloused palm. After a full thirty seconds, her hand laid the teeth on Harry’s hand.

The radio had stopped playing. The silence of the room was broken only by the softening hiss of the kerosene lantern.

Harry dropped the plates on the floor. He carefully brought his heel down on them, then twisted and turned the heel. The teeth gnashed themselves to rubble beneath his boot.

Tears spilled over to run down Heloise’s satiny skin and into the corners of her shrunken mouth.

‘Goddamn you!’ she cried mushily. ‘I was beautiful once!’

‘Where’s the chink?’ said Hammett.

‘B
righton Street,’ lisped the fat woman on the front seat between them.

The main street of Bolinas, Brighton wound around the point of the peninsula and dead-ended at the ocean.

‘Point out the house,’ said Hammett.

It was a plain white Victorian in midblock; the gas lamp on the corner gave just enough illumination to show them the porch pillars. The yard was overgrown with weeds; the house was still and dark. A black flivver was parked in the driveway beyond a white picket fence that needed paint.

‘Right on by,’ said Hammett, before Harry had a chance to slow the big car. ‘Park on the other side of the street facing back this way.’

Animation entered the lisping voice. ‘You won’t hurt my baby . . .’

‘He’s the one with the shotgun.’

‘He ain’t but seventeen.’

‘The girl was eleven when you sold her to the cathouse in Illinois.’

Heloise did not respond.

Harry stopped the car. He started to get out, but Hammett forestalled him.

‘Streets and houses, Harry. My kind of hunting. Remember?’

Harry made a face and nodded. They had planned their strategy after Heloise had given them the layout of the house, but the big South African still felt his role was too passive.

The fat woman quavered. ‘My boy. Don’t hurt my . . .’

Hammett leaned back into the open car. His irrational fear of the irrational boy with the shotgun lay on his stomach like an undigested meal.

‘Your boy!’ he said in a low tight vicious voice. ‘In the south they keep his kind behind the stove.’

He walked away feeling slightly nauseated. It had been a destructive night, and it wasn’t over yet.

The gate was ajar, the front porch solid and uncreaking underfoot. Only one window was open, that of the second-floor bedroom in which Heloise had said her son was holding the Chinese girl. Hammett’s skeleton key worked the simple mortise lock without difficulty. Nothing came out of the inner darkness at him, but his hands were clammy by the time he had been through the downstairs rooms. There was no way to duck a shotgun blast if it came.