upended wooden beer kegs. ‘What’s yours?’
‘Rye?’
‘Seven-year-old Canadian.’
Hammett leaned an elbow on the plank and looked around. There were a few straight-back chairs and two kitchen tables with chipped white enamel tops. One was empty, the other held a bottle and three glasses and six elbows.
The Italians who belonged to the elbows wore their overcoats buttoned and their fedoras precisely centered on their dark heads. None of them was speaking. The light laid down their shadows as thick as tar across the floor and up the walls.
‘Flip a lip over that,’ beamed the barkeep. He had a crooked nose and the eyes of a spaniel.
Hammett laid back the shot. His eyes popped wide open. ‘What’s a pint of this run?’
‘For you? Three fifty.’
‘And for everybody else?’
‘Three fifty. Listen, that stuff goes out of here at fifty-six bucks a case. My cousin, see, runs this fishing boat for Dom Pronzini, and part of his cut he takes in-’
‘Giusepp.’ One of the men with his elbows on the table swung the word at the barkeep like a sock full of sand. To Hammett, he said, ‘Now you have your bottle, now you get on your way dam’ quick.’
Hammett laid a five on the stick. The bartender replaced it with a pint. Hammett dropped the bottle into his overcoat pocket, picked up his buck change, and asked how to get to the game.
‘I’ll show you the way.’
Giuseppe led him through a small concrete area past a couple of battered garbage pails to steep exterior stairs. A dozen feet below, the yellowing grass of the hillside fell away to Sansome and Vallejo. Refuse, empty tins, and broken bottles lined the foot of the wall.
‘Top flat. Don’t bother the girls in the lower, y’know?’
Something in his voice made Hammett ask, ‘Blisters?’
‘Now, nothing like that. Dead swell dames. Ya want some of that I can maybe arrange it, but no just knockin’ on the door lemme in, see?’
‘Sure.’
One of the dead swell dames was outside her open back door. Her body, silhouetted through her filmy negligee, was full and lush and Mediterranean.
‘Blisters,’ she said scornfully to Hammett as she ground out a cigarette beneath the heel of her pastel French mule. ‘We’re no coffee-and hustlers, big boy.’
She swayed against him, turning so her breasts were cushioned against his chest and her strong whore’s thighs gripped his leg.
‘That’s the best you’ll ever get next to.’
‘Sorry, sister, my weakness is liquor.’ He clamped powerful fingers around the hand trying to slip the wallet off his hip. Her unabashed laughter followed him up the stairs.
Fingers’ back door opened on a bright kitchen. A short mustached walleyed man came in from the hall as Hammett was taking out his pint.
‘Pantry,’ said the man. He disappeared again.
Hammett could hear voices and chips. Stale smoke hung in the air. In the narrow white pantry he found a glass and opened the old-fashioned zinc-lined cooler. He chipped enough ice from one of the twin hundred-pound cakes for his drink, rammed the pick back into the wooden top of the waist-high cooler, and was dousing the ice with rye when the walleyed man popped back in.
‘Dining room,’ he said.
The dining room was paneled in blond wood; its plate rail held only empty bottles and mail-order junk. The massive oak table bore scores of burns and dozens of pale rings to mark its years of service for poker rather than dining. In the corner behind Fingers’ chair stood his loaded ten-gauge goose gun, outfitted with an extra heavy frame and breech.
LeGrand’s dolorous face swam up at Hammett through the haze of smoke like a carp surfacing in muddy water.
‘Table stakes with a pot limit. I’m the bank.’ He indicated whites, reds, blues. ‘Quarters, halves, dollars.’
Hammett bought twenty bucks’ worth of chips. Fingers started the first-name-only introductions.
‘Dash, you met See-See out in the kitchen…’
They nodded to each other. Hammett happened to know that the dapper little man with the reputation for looking in two directions at once was the best ‘soft-touch’ pickpocket in the game. In thirty years as a cannon he’d never taken a fall.
Directly to See-See’s left was a tough, handsome, loud-mouthed Irishman named Joey. Auto mechanic by his hands. He said it was his night off.
Finally there was a pudgy, middle-aged German named Dolf, whose last name Hammett knew to be Geltwasser. He peered myopically through spectacles thick as bottle glass and ran a pawnshop and was one of the city’s deadliest amateur poker players. He had killed two men that Hammett knew about.
Hammett also knew he was probably wasting his time there that night. There just weren’t enough players for the conversation to develop along the lines he needed. But now he was here, he may as well try; and what the hell, maybe he could pick up rent money in the process.
Fingers broke out a new deck, shuffled, and burned the top card. Despite deliberately erratic play, Hammett took two hours to lose the first of two double saw-bucks he had gotten from Jimmy Wright as an advance against expenses on the Atkinson Investigations fund. He ran a few bluffs as advertising, and two of them took good pots.
By the time he bought his second stack, he’d killed half his pint, and the group had loosened up a bit. All of them were punishing their bottles, especially Dolf Geltwasser. He drank prodigious amounts of whiskey; the eyes magnified by his thick glasses became only more kindly, and his play only more deadly.
Time to start. Hammett said, ‘Dolf, whatever happened to the Silver Fox?’
‘He went east, Oklahoma City, I heard, Joplin, Mo., maybe.’ The old German shook his head. ‘That Silver Fox, he would bet his lungs.’
‘When he was running that gambling hell on Pacific and Montgomery, wasn’t his landlord a cop?’
‘Sure,’ said Fingers. ‘Patrolman Paddy Quinlan. Rents that and the place next door to a couple of ’leggers now. Charges ’em fifty a month rent each, and receipts ’em for thirty.’
‘How does he get away pocketing the extra twenty?’ asked Joey in a belligerent voice.
‘Because they’re engaged in breaking the law,’ said Fingers.
‘I should have been a cop,’ said Hammett.
‘Heard the latest?’ asked See-See. ‘Tickets to the policemen’s ball. Some of the cops sell the same tickets over and over, and don’t turn in any of it. They arrest somebody, he gets off if he buys enough tickets.’
The talk drifted to a famous poker game that had run for two years at the Kingston Club, a fancy downtown place with liveried waiters and velvet settees and superb French cuisine. Nick the Greek and Titanic Thompson, playing partners, took over nine hundred thousand each out of the game.
‘And I heard Titanic went into it broke,’ said Hammett, shoving in chips. Out of the table talk he’d gotten only one name, Paddy Quinlan, to pass on to Jimmy Wright. ‘Let’s see who’s doing what on whom here.’
‘Whom, yet,’ said See-See. ‘You’re there when it comes to spreading the salve, Dash.’
‘I had a deprived youth.’
Fingers had two pair. ‘Mites and lice,’ he said sadly. ‘Hammett, I can’t do a thing with you.’
Joey lurched to his feet. ‘Deal me out, I gotta tap a kidney.’
The evening might have been a bust from the investigation point of view, thought Hammett, but he was coming out of it a heavy winner: He was up something well over a hundred bucks. Joey came back and sat down.
‘I hope that was a local phone call,’ said Fingers.
The burly Irishman looked sheepish. ‘South City, I didn’t think you’d mind. Girl down there, I figured maybe when this broke up…’
‘She got a friend?’ asked Hammett.
