‘You’ve got knuckles.’
‘And a propostion for you.’
‘Sleuthing?’ Hammett extracted his last cigarette and crumpled the empty pack. ‘Not interested, Vic.’
‘Sure not.’ Atkinson hitched his chair closer. ‘You remember a month, six weeks ago, the Bay Area collector of Internal Revenue made a couple of wisecracks at the Rotary Club about a local madam deducting her protection payoffs as a legitimate business expense?’
‘Sure. And the papers made it an open secret that the madam was Molly Farr, just down the street from my apartment. The guy also said that quite a few of San Francisco’s finest were going to start paying income tax as a result.’ Hammett lifted a lip in a faint sneer. ‘It sold a lot of newspapers but I didn’t see any mass resignations down at City Hall as a result of it. I imagine…’ He snapped his fingers and pointed at Atkinson across the table. ‘Don’t tell me. A reform committee.’
‘That’s it. A citizens’ group was formed to get financial pledges lined up so an outside investigator could be hired.’
Hammett looked up sharply. ‘Meaning you?’
‘Maybe. The committee meets Monday night to hear my proposals. If they like them…’ He shrugged. ‘Dan Laverty put my name in, we worked together a couple of times when I was a Pink and he was a detective-sergeant. He wants the department cleaned up-’
‘Throw out the chief with the dirty bathwater and take over his job?’
‘Something like that. But the Preacher’s as straight as they come.’
‘Good luck with it, Vic.’ Hammett tore cellophane from a new pack of Camels. ‘But I don’t see you getting anywhere no matter who recommends you.’
‘That’s why I want you in this with me, Dash. I’ll have damned good people coming up from LA, but only one of them knows the city. And none of them can analyze a situation the way you can.’
Hammett shook his head with genuine regret. ‘It would be like old times, but it’s no dice. Even if I was interested, your reform committee’s going to need the mayor and the DA and the chief of police behind them, and where’s their leverage? McKenna knows damned well the people of this burg elected him mayor so they’d have it wide open, and wide open is what he gives ’em. You’d better just hope that something happens before Monday night to give the reform committee more ammunition than they have right now.’
‘Something might,’ said Atkinson with stubborn optimism.
5
THREE BOYS FOUND IN VICE RESORT; MOLLY FARR JAILED
Police Trail Scions of S.F. Families to Hyde Street House After
Mothers Request Action
In a vice raid conducted at the request of mothers who suspected all was not right with their sons, police early yesterday struck to protect the morals of boys of high school age.
They trailed a group of three boys — members of well-known families — to the house of prostitution operated by the notorious Molly Farr at 555 Hyde Street. There, while scantily attired men and girls scurried in confusion, the raiders confronted the white-faced youngsters — they ranged in age from 15 to 17 — and rounded up and jailed the inmates of the lavishly furnished two-story vice-den.
Their parents, Captain of Inspectors Daniel J. Laverty said, requested that their names not be released to
Continued on Page 5, Col. 3
H ammett threw aside the bloated Sunday paper to sit up. He swung his feet over the edge of the bed and got his head into his hands in one practiced motion. Ohh-h-h. He explored the inside of his mouth with the dead mouse someone had given him in place of a tongue.
Goddamn all birthdays.
He tottered, bare-footed and bare-butted, into the bathroom. At least, this morning, he was thirty-four. He’d beat Christ.
Just after he’d tottered back into the living room, a terrible agony shot through his head.
The doorbell.
He found his bathrobe wadded under the bed and went down the hall putting it on. He opened the front door with his head militarily erect so he wouldn’t upchuck.
‘Wipe off that silly smile,’ he said. ‘Good men are dying all around you.’
Goodie looked radiant and fresh in street clothes, a hat shading her dancing golden ringlets.
‘I’ve just come back from church. Some people stop after their second drink. You’ve got a phone call.’
Hammett padded after her on bare feet to pick up the receiver from her davenport table.
‘DASH! SEEN THE NEWSPAPERS ABOUT-’
‘ Sweet Christ! ’ screamed Hammett. ‘ Whisper, man, whisper.’
‘Okay,’ said Vic Atkinson in a softer voice. ‘You seen in the newspapers about the raid on Molly Farr’s?’
‘I saw.’
‘It’s the wedge we need! This, on top of all the publicity she got out of that tax guy’s remark, makes her damned vulnerable. We lean on Molly, she tells us who pays who and why, in return for a promise of immunity. Then we-’
‘Not we, goddammit! I told you… Besides, you haven’t even been hired yet.’
‘Molly doesn’t know that. Her place. Half an hour. From the way you sound, it’ll take you that long to get there.’
Every Sunday morning Molly Farr, dressed to somber perfection, made the two-block pilgrimage to the weathered old stone building at 611 O’Farrell Street. She figured she owed it. Eleven years before, Molly — along with three hundred other ladies of the night — had descended on this same Central Methodist Church at her gaudiest, her cheap scent reeking and her ostrich plumes nodding, to protest the campaign against vice being waged by Reverend Pastor Paul Smith. She had been twenty-three at that time.
Reverend Smith had persisted in his crusade. The Barbary Coast had been shut down, the parlor houses, cribs, brothels, and bagnios had disappeared for the moment, and a thousand prostitutes had been thrown out of work. Molly had gone south still a whore; but she returned a few years later to become a madam.
Thus, every Sunday she went in somber splendor to the Central Methodist services, because here she had first been shown the true way: Become a businesswoman because there is no security in being a whore. Unfortunately, she’d never been able to thank Reverend Smith in person; during the intervening years he had renounced the cloth to become a used car salesman.
Molly, perspiring slightly from the walk, let herself into 555 Hyde Street, which had been discreetly shuttered since the Friday-night raid. She was a handsome woman, sternly beautiful rather than pretty: a face with the clarity of a cameo.
She passed under the foyer’s crystal chandelier, noted that the elevator brass needed polishing, and went upstairs to her small private landing, which overlooked the front entrance. She stopped. The door of her apartment was a foot open and two tall men were talking with her maid in the crowded sitting room.
One of them was very lean, the other built like a bull. Her maid, Crystal Tam, was a tiny Chinese girl who came barely to their chests. She had a breathtakingly lovely face framed in lustrous blue-black hair that flowed down across her shoulders to the middle of her back.
To break it up, Molly said, ‘Sorry, gents, we’re closed.’
‘Your maid was just telling us,’ said the heavyset one. ‘But we were asking her…’
Molly collapsed in the big flowered wing chair that dominated the cluttered room. She set aside her wide- bordered silk parasol and fanned herself with one hand.
‘Get me a beer, that’s a darling’
‘Of course, Miss Farr.’
Crystal wore a fancifully brocaded silk kimono; her arms were crossed on her breast so she could thrust her hands into the opposing scoop sleeves. Her steps were mincing, as if her feet had been bound in infancy. She was
