‘He opened his eyes. He saw my face.’
Goddamn chloral hydrate. If only Dash had come with him, none of this would have…
‘I’ll need… something… to-’
‘In the closet,’ said Pronzini quickly. ‘I don’t want to know about it.’
‘Just so you get rid of it later,’ said the deliberately muffled voice.
Pronzini’s footsteps, going away. Door closing. Other footsteps to same door, key turning in lock, then footsteps to closet. In the closet. Coming at him.
Atkinson tried, despairing, to move. Couldn’t. God, so sick. Meet it.
With a supreme effort, Vic Atkinson raised his head three inches and opened his eyes.
The bulky man swung the baseball bat. The arc ended with a sickening abruptness on the bridge of the detective’s nose. As the home run exploded against Atkinson’s eyes and into his brain, his bladder and sphincter let loose. The killer leaped back with a little exclamation to avoid the mess. And the blood. Then he stepped back in to use the bat some more. As long as it had to be done, he might as well enjoy it.
8
It was coming right, now. Felix Weber, the ex-con, was gone. The Primrose Hotel was gone. Hammett’s typewriter clacked. The ashtray was overflowing; flecks of tobacco drifted on the top of black coffee long since gone cold.
He stopped, rubbed bloodshot eyes, tugged his mustache, considered. Aaronia Haldorn. Her husband Joseph. And instead of the run-down hotel, their exclusive Pacific Heights place, the Temple of the Holy Grail. Joseph would work as a character where Weber hadn’t.
He got up and started to pace. Hell, yes. Joseph would believe. That was it. Wield the knife himself. Sure. As for Aaronia…
Aaronia.
Hammett quit pacing to light himself a cigarette. Aaronia. He’d given her the name but not the physical description of his older sister, Reba. Of all his relatives, the only one he still wrote to. He chuckled. Aaronia Rebecca Hammett, as stiff-necked as he was. He’d send her a copy of The Dain Curse when Knopf published it. If he ever got the damned thing revised.
But still he stood, gripped by the past. Philadelphia. He’d been.. what? Two? Three? White house with a little wooden porch and initials carved penknife deep in the railing. Tagging along after Reba to the park to fetch drinking water. Must have been Fairmont Park. And the time the old man took them both — maybe even the baby, Dick, too — to the city dump. There’d been a billy goat with a long white beard and mad eyes, eating tin cans. Or at least the labels off them.
Circle of men around the goat, laughing. Every time one of them would toss a cigarette butt, quick as lightning the goat would piss on it and put it out. Every time. He’d never seen his father laugh so hard.
He became aware that knuckles had been rapping against the front door for some time. He rubbed a hand over his sandpaper jaw and called, ‘I’m asleep.’
‘Sam. It’s me. Goodie. You’ve got another phone call.’
Hammett went to the window and jerked at the bottom of the shade. It shot up to slap twice around the roller. Sunshine burst in to squint his eyes. He threw up the bottom half of the double-hung window and sucked in shocking dawn air. Where the hell had the night gone?
Goodie was dressed for work in a checked gingham apron frock with a collarless square neck and a midcalf hem that would turn no sufferer’s head in the doctor’s waiting room. Following her to her apartment, he talked at her back.
‘I’m going to give that damn Atkinson a blast he won’t forget, after that trick he pulled last night…’
He knelt on the couch, picked up the phone, clipped the receiver between the side of his neck and a raised shoulder so he could make drinking motions with his left hand to suggest coffee. Goodie nodded and disappeared into the kitchen.
‘Yeah, I know, Vic. The cops picked you up and-’
‘Dash? Jimmy Wright here.’
A well-remembered voice from his Pinkerton past, another operative who’d stayed on when Hammett had left.
‘Jimmy, how’s the boy, long time no see. You still with the Pinks?’
‘Not for a year. I quit to go with Vic down south. Why I called, they found him behind the Southern Pacific station this morning. Worked over with a baseball bat or something, then dumped there.’
I’m in danger, Dash! Strange men… Hope they beat… goddamn head in…
‘Dumped?’ he asked almost stupidly. The tips of his fingers had turned pale against the phone. ‘Dead?’
‘You never saw one deader.’
He was without movement for a full twenty seconds; then a long ripple that might have been a shiver ran through his lean body.
‘I’m on my way.’
Goodie came from the kitchen with a steaming cup of coffee half-extended. Hammett felt hollow. Hope they, beat… goddamn head …
‘Sam, what’s wrong? What-’
He was already heading for the door.
Hammett paid off the cab and started across Third toward the bulky colonnaded Mission Revival SP station, built of stucco phonied up like adobe. When he saw the craning knot of loungers at the far end of the long wooden baggage shed, he veered down Townsend instead. At the gate in the iron picket fence, a uniform bull was holding back the crowd. He let Hammett through.
Jimmy Wright, five feet eight and overweight, was at the foot of the wooden ramp leading up into the shedlike baggage building. They shook hands.
‘Who found it?’ asked Hammett.
‘Switchman.’
The meat wagon hadn’t arrived yet. Another knot of men, all official and dominated by O’Gar’s bullet head, was clustered in the five-foot-wide area between the side of the baggage shed and the closest of the tracks. The space was for brakemen servicing the rolling stock. Four of the men staggered toward the timbered loading dock at the foot of the ramp with a sagging army blanket. When they dropped it near Hammett’s feet, one corner flopped back. He had such an acute moment of deja vu that he felt dizzy. Words washed over him.
‘… stink?’
‘Shit his pants when he died…’
Baltimore. His first job, at thirteen, right out of Polytechnic Grammar School. The old man had gotten sick and Hammett had tried to pick up the pieces as messenger boy for the B amp;O line in their Charles and Baltimore Street office. He was late for work as usual, cutting across the tracks, when he’d stumbled on a brakeman who’d been killed by a switching engine.
A head just like Vic’s: still whole but oddly misshapen, almost soggy, no more interior structure than a beanbag. Same stink of excrement. A shabby way to die. He flipped the coarse brown wool back up with an apparently casual toe.
‘His money was on his hip,’ said Jimmy Wright. ‘No wallet.’ Working undercover, Hammett thought, there wouldn’t be. ‘Clerk from the hotel saw the excitement, came over, and recognized the clothes.’
‘Sure it wasn’t a switching engine?’
‘Brakeman was through twenty minutes before. No body. No trains moving on this track last night anyway. You see everything you want here?’
Hammett nodded. They went up Townsend to the side entrance of the depot arcade and walked under arched ceilings past the train gates. In the Depot Cafe at the far end of the station, they found a table and ordered coffee. Jimmy Wright also ordered ham and eggs. Watching the stocky two-hundred-pound op shovel in hashbrowns, Hammett felt a little ill. He drank scalding black coffee. He fumbled out a cigarette.
