Hammett (Crime Masterworks) (29 page)

And why had Crystal told Hammett that Tokzek broke her in, four years ago, when the man already had been a hopeless junkie, incapable of even normal sex, let alone the determined sexual effort necessary to rape and condition a child?

And how had she known who Lynch was and where he could be reached on that Monday she had disappeared?

And why had she called Lynch to come and remove her from the Weller Hotel, where she was safe?

And finally, why had the fat woman and her son died, unless to protect – and perhaps delight – someone? And why with their faces blown away in Marin, unless to insure that no one would question a Chinese girl’s face being blown away in San Francisco?

He was not even surprised when the interior door across the room swung open. He merely said, ‘Hello, Crystal.’

‘H
ow did you know?’ cried the Chinese girl in great delight. With a joyous laugh she stepped over the policeman’s exploded head as if it were a section of curb. ‘How did you figure it out?’

For one of the few times in his life, Hammett was speechless. He was looking at evil: sprightly, beautiful, and totally corrupt. She was dressed in a spun jersey bloomer dress, hand-embroidered around the collar and cuffs, with sweet little pearl buckles on each side of the front pleats. It was the outfit a girl of nine or ten might wear, with bloomers of lustrous sateen just peeking out from beneath the hem of the childishly short skirt.

Crystal pirouetted slowly in front of him, then curtsied like a child completing her number at the school recital.

‘Do you like it?’

Her lispy little-girl voice literally raised the hairs on the back of Hammett’s neck. The voice, the slight body in the child’s dress, even the curtsy – these all
belonged
to a little girl. But beneath the bodice were a woman’s breasts, beneath the sateen bloomers a woman’s hips. And the naked pale legs were a woman’s, beautifully rounded.

The face, framed in its gleaming mane of ebony hair, was a child’s face. But it was made up as a woman’s – and had a look of innocent depravity that was terrifying.

Crystal batted her eyes and stuck out her tongue at him.

‘Mean Mr Hammett doesn’t like little Crystal’s dress!’

She darted to Lynch’s body, and swooped over it to take the handcuff keys from his pocket. In the process, she gave Hammet a flashing look at the tautened shiny bloomers. She looked back at him with childish delight as she did.

‘
Daddy
liked my dress.’ She straightened. ‘Daddy liked to take my dress off me. I was Daddy’s
little girl
. ’ She kicked the
dead man in the temple. She smiled sweetly at Hammett. ‘Daddy wasn’t a very nice man.’

‘Daddy’s little girl isn’t a very nice little girl.’ It was the first thing he had said since she entered the room. He felt only that same odd, debilitating lassitude he had felt ever since Lynch had chained him there.

‘Well, she’s had a lot of lessons, hasn’t she?’ The lisp was gone.

‘Not from me.’

‘No. Not from you.’ She sat down on the edge of the bed, her hands clasped between her thighs, just as she had sat on her bed at the Weller a couple of lifetimes ago. He recognized it as a habitual pose. ‘How
did
you guess? What did I do wrong?’

Hammett yawned, hugely and involuntarily. He could almost welcome death, he thought. Then at least he could quit talking. He had talked the night and two lives away. Three, counting his own.

‘So many things, Crystal. It wasn’t luck. Just logic.’

Her pout was genuine. ‘Tell me. I thought I was awfully good.’

‘At the acting, yes. I’ve never seen anyone better. It was almost too good. The first time I saw you, at Molly’s, you were playing the dumb little chink. Every time I saw you, it was a different role. Once I realized you’d gone into hiding deliberately, for your own purposes and not because you were in fear of your life, I was ready for that whole Capone scenario—’

The girl made a slight deprecatory gesture. ‘I’d told Molly I was scared of mobsters from back east, just to keep her from asking questions, but I’d never bothered to make up a story. When I saw I was going to have to give you one, I thought the Hymie Weiss killing would work fine. I didn’t know you’d remember so much about it.’

‘Yeah. And once I knew you
hadn’t
spent your three years back east dodging Capone, I had to wonder what you
were
doing.’

‘I could have just been at the Harlem Inn in Stickney.’

‘I believed that part of your story,’ said Hammett.

Her eyes had a quizzical expression. ‘You’re a funny kind of detective. It’s too bad you have to . . .’ She broke off.

‘And you’re a funny kind of ex-whore.’

His hands in the tight handcuffs had gone numb, but he knew it would do no good to ask her to remove them. Lynch’s death hadn’t altered his peril any.

‘So here were three years of your life unaccounted for, and here you were with a command of English, when you forgot yourself, like a college graduate. Molly mentioned that you would have been terrific dressed up as a little girl, driving the older johns wild – deflowering young virgins is a common sexual fantasy. You said yourself that they dressed you that way at the Harlem Inn. So I thought about the possibility that some rich old man in Chicago had taken you out of the cathouse and . . .’ He raised his shoulders in as much of a shrug as the cuffs permitted him.

The girl’s eyes were momentarily far away, as they’d been when she’d told him of her introduction to whoredom.

‘He was seventy years old; and important enough in Chicago that he could just tell Capone he wanted me, rather than ask. He kept me in a house on the West Side. After the first year, he trusted me to serve as hostess when he entertained. I watched and listened and learned.’ It was her turn to shrug. ‘Then he died of a heart attack at home with his wife. I just packed up and left.’

‘And came out here to go after Lynch. But why him? Was he the one who really—’

‘Yes.’ She spat the word, her tilted eyes narrowed and alive with hatred. ‘He liked them ten years old, eleven. First, he’d take down the bloomers and give them a spanking. Then—’

‘But it got away from him.’

‘Even four years ago I knew it would. He broke one of my ribs. When they locked me in a train compartment with a man
who didn’t care whether I had a broken rib or not, I stayed alive by telling myself that one day the one who’d had me first would kill one of the girls, and when he did I would be ready for him.’

A blood-curdling depth of hatred, Hammett thought. He said: ‘So you came back and went to work for Molly . . .’

‘I didn’t know the man’s name, of course. So I needed the fat woman. After three months at Molly’s I picked up word about her. Once I had her name and where she lived, it wasn’t hard to make her do whatever I wanted. She was a stupid woman. Greedy and stupid. First I frightened her by threatening to expose her for furnishing occasional girls to Lynch, then I offered her money . . .’

‘And then, nine months ago, you started visiting your parents again. That’s the part I can’t handle, Crystal. Using your visits to your parents as a way to scout out the occasional girls Lynch wanted. Without him knowing you were involved, of course. But . . . little girls . . .’

She shrugged. ‘There are many who are never missed, they are forever being smuggled in from Hong Kong. Manion’s last slave raids were less than three years ago.’,

‘But you knew what you were condemning them to—’

Her eyes flashed.

‘Let them take their chances as I did!’ She stood up. She strutted in front of him, forcing his awareness of her body. The taunting calculation was back in her eyes and voice. For the first time, Hammet wondered uneasily just
how
she intended to kill him. ‘What else did I do wrong?’

‘You yelled a warning to me about Andy’s shotgun – after it was too late for the warning to help me. You rubbed your clothes on the closet floor to make it seem they hadn’t been worn for days, but you got splinters in them, which got into my sweater and started me wondering. So when Heloise and Andy died in gangland-style and I knew no gangsters were involved . . .’

She looked at her watch. ‘It is as well you must die.’

He was damned if he was going to give her any satisfaction.

‘Their deaths made your mobster scenario real to everyone. Except me, unfortunately.’

She clapped her hands in delight. ‘You think that is the main reason they had to die?’

‘I
hoped
it was. I hoped the slaughter of the Chinese girl in the cemetery was Lynch’s evil, not yours.’

‘Evil!’ she spat. She thrust her face close to his. ‘What is evil? Show it to me! I live and then, after a time, I die. Neither has meaning, except to me. So what is evil?’

Hammett said evenly, his voice back under control, ‘All right, you wanted to be officially dead. You needed someone to die in your place. You found a final Chinese girl, lured or forced her to the cemetery . . .’ He paused, truly curious. ‘If you were there when she was killed – maybe were even doing the screaming to make sure she’d be found right away – how’d you keep Lynch from turning the shotgun on you instead of her?’

‘I had no fears of Lynch. When I telephoned him for the first time on that Monday I disappeared, and told him who I was and what I wanted, I also told him I had everything written down concerning each girl Heloise had furnished him, including the one who’d been in Tokzek’s car. When I called him from the Weller, I told him to kill Heloise and her son, and how to do it. I also told him to take me from the hotel. Of course, after that . . .’

She ran her hands slowly and voluptuously down her body, pausing to cup and massage her breasts. She laughed.

‘After that and before the girl in the cemetery, I had him for a night. I gave him total fulfillment of every fantasy he’d ever had. He was mine, then.’ She looked over at the dead man and giggled. ‘Mine. Begging, like a dog begs for scraps. It was so easy to make him do . . .
everything
I wanted him to.’

Hammett shivered. He believed her. He finally knew what had tipped Lynch over the edge. Crystal, the totally corrupt and endlessly inventive, had transfigured him. She’d be able to do it to any man she wanted. Hammett included.

‘This morning, poor Daddy, out of guilt, was going to
commit suicide. He didn’t know that yet. That was to be the final price.’ She gave her joyous laugh. ‘But how much better that he should have been choked to death by his lifelong friend! So that the marks on his throat will fit Laverty’s fingers. And then that Laverty should kill himself with his own gun, which will bear only his fingerprints! So you see, you are . . . unnecessary.’ She looked at her watch again and giggled. ‘So in an hour, perhaps two hours . . . perhaps five minutes . . .’

He met her mocking gaze steadily. He asked a single question. ‘How?’

‘A fire in the wiring? Gas that seeps in? An explosion? Oh, but you’ll enjoy yourself so much more, wondering . . .’ She came close. She wet her lips and let them get pouty. The lisp was back in her voice. ‘Wondering just how
evil
little Crystal can be to the big detective mans.’

In that moment, Hammett’s only regret was that he would be unable to take her with him. She saw it in his eyes: no terror. Not even fear. Only rage. Realizing that his eyes betrayed him, he shut them. She drew a finger along the line of his jaw. The lisp was gone.

‘Good-bye, Hammett,’ she said in a soft voice.

Kill him how?

And with the thought, he had such an intense need for a cigarette that he actually opened his mouth to cry after her. Then he got control of himself and remained silent.

How? And how long?

Dawn couldn’t be far away, but nobody would wonder about him until long after noon. By then . . .

Christ, his final dawn.

How? And when?

He sniffed the air automatically, got angry all over again, as if she were still there to witness his weakness. Fire? Or leaking gas? Or . . .

It had to be soon. Before an arriving cook or housekeeper found him alive. He caught himself flaring his nostrils again.
Stop it, goddamn you, Hammett. Go out right. If only he had a screwing cigarette.

His mind constructed the whole sequence: getting it out, thrusting it between the teeth, getting out the match, striking it, bringing it to the tip, sucking in that first harsh-soothing smoke that . . .

Death.

Had he ever really –
really
– considered death before? He’d known it intimately, but now all of a sudden he didn’t any longer. Now he just spewed meaningless words about it on paper. He had to start all over again, refamiliarize himself with it. Death. Cessation of consciousness. Sleep, to never wake. He hated it.

Of course. You hated death because you were involved with life. Life was. And dammit, life
would
be, when you weren’t. That’s why you hated death. Its unfairness.

Never again, the exquisite moment of sliding into a woman.

And never again the joy of a page dragged up dripping from your guts. Never again realizing that there were ten pages of fresh manuscript stacked beside the typewriter that hadn’t been there before.

Never again the special, little-understood joys of manhunting. The blood-sport of beating the man who was trying to beat you. Most special when the stakes were high, when what you were trying to take from him was something he valued deeply, often his liberty and sometimes his life.

Cessation. Waste, of everything: sensed, learned, read, remembered. All wasted.

You should never regret the
was
. But you could regret the never-was. And the never-to-be.

Jesus, for a cigarette.

Regret. Because the tomorrow had come. The tomorrow that was the today and the yesterday and the forever and the never. The last, the only, the never-again.

Because he’d become an amateur. He’d played with his typewriter while he’d become a nonprofessional. No longer a
real manhunter. He’d known, when he’d crouched over that devastated body in the cemetery, that Crystal was still alive. He’d
known
it. The old detective instincts. But he’d rejected what they told him. Played the writer’s game of walking around evil, drank himself insensate. Because the writer hadn’t wanted to know what the manhunter had known intuitively about the evil in one slight fifteen-year-old girl.