and raised. Lonergan worked left-handed, keeping the tire iron cocked in his right fist. The tow truck grumbled acrid exhaust fumes.
‘I don’t know why they want you,’ said Lonergan. ‘But I think we’ll stick your head in that exhaust while I make a phone call.’
‘I’ll tell you why they want me,’ said Hammett. ‘They’re afraid of me. That’s why they wanted me taken out last night. I represent some of the boys back east. The BIG boys back east. We’re moving in, taking over this town. It’s just a matter of time. We figure that you’re small-fry, but you’re a place to start. So why don’t you get smart and tell me who you called to get those three gorillas who were supposed to beat me up?’
Lonergan had been staring at him, slightly slackfaced, as he had been speaking. He hesitated for a moment, then crinkled up his rugged, handsome features and laughed out loud. He leaned against the doorpost with the clipboards on it.
‘What you been smoking, Hammett? Whoever’s behind you, it ain’t gonna work. We got the cops behind us in this burg. No outsiders are gonna-’
‘Before you left Five Points, you ever hear of a big Irishman named Babe?’
‘Should I have?’
‘Might have been after you left,’ Hammett muttered thoughtfully. ‘The Babe was an expert with a tire iron and made the mistake of trying to use one on a fat little killer out of Baltimore named Garlic.’
Lonergan slapped the tire iron against his open left hand. ‘This ain’t Baltimore, bo.’
‘Garlic blew away both the Babe’s kneecaps with a matched pair of. 45’s. They had to take his legs off just below the hips because he got gangrene from the garlic on the bullets. These days he rides around on a little board with casters on it, selling pencils around Forty-second and Times Square…’
Lonergan chuckled and tightened his grip on the tire iron. ‘I think you want to get petted with this thing, bim-’
He shot forward across the room to crash headfirst into the far wall. He whirled off it with tire iron upraised and lips drawn back from tobacco-stained teeth.
‘I like to burn ’em when they’re comin’ at me,’ grated Jimmy Wright. The lumpy. 45 automatics in his fists stared at Dead Rabbit with unwinking eyes.
The tire iron clattered to the floor. Dead Rabbit’s hands shot up, shaking. His face was pinched and tired around the eyes as if he had developed a sudden head cold.
Hammett hadn’t moved during the flurry of action. He said: ‘Garlic, why don’t you walk this bird over to the edge of the basement well so he can tell us what he knows? If he don’t tell us in thirty seconds, he jumps off. Twenty-nine… twenty-eight…’
‘Jesus, man, that’s twenty feet down!’ cried Dead Rabbit. Wetness was mooning out from beneath his arms. ‘I’ll get all busted up.’
Hammett watched the big terrified Irishman. ‘When you can’t crawl up the ramp anymore, he puts one. 45 in each of your ears and pulls the triggers at the same time.’
Hammett and the op walked away from Lonergan’s Garage.
‘Once he gets his nerve back, he’s going to call ’em up and tell ’em we were here,’ said Jimmy Wright thoughtfully.
‘I want him to. I want them to start knowing I’m around. My God, is that crude, Jimmy! A phone call from Shuman after he left the reform committee meeting Thursday night. And that second phone number he gave us — that’s Boyd Mulligan’s home phone!’
‘Crude is right. A direct line to the Mulligans. But I guess they never expected anyone to be around asking questions.’ Then the operative started laughing. ‘Without anybody laying a glove on him! They should call him Scared Rabbit.’
17
Hammett went up the sloping walk between carefully trimmed privet to the rambling two-story pseudo- Elizabethan in the exclusive Parkside District. When he rang the bell, the inset door was opened by a young pretty colored maid much like his own Minnie Hershey in The Dain Curse.
‘Mr Hammett? Come right in, sir.’
The living room was two-storied under a cathedral arch, the furniture heavy, leather, of a scale to match the room.
‘Right in here, sir.’
Two of the solarium walls were floor-to-ceiling glass that framed a staggering sweep of Pacific beyond the rolling miles of dunes.
Evelyn Brewster, seated on the cretonne cushions of the cane sofa, did not rise when Hammett entered. Her eyes were frosty.
‘I should have thought I’d made my feelings about you clear on Thursday night.’
Hammett bowed wordlessly, then said, ‘But I’m sure you would wish me to carry out the committee’s objectives properly.’
An unexpected smile touched her lips and she leaned forward with sudden animation. ‘I know I must seem inflexible to a man of your.. background, Mr Hammett. But the work of the committee is all-important to me. The punishment of the guilty must take precedence over merely personal considerations, so if you have come here to plead special circumstances for some friend whose activities-’
‘Quite the contrary, Mrs Brewster.’ He fell easily into her stilted cadences. ‘A prominent San Franciscan to whom I need an introduction might inadvertently have information vital to my investigation.’
She looked intrigued. ‘The name?’
‘George F. Biltmore.’
‘My God!’ She was genuinely shocked. ‘You can’t suggest that Captain Biltmore could possibly-’
‘Not for a moment, ma’am. But…’ He lowered his voice confidentially. ‘A man in Captain Biltmore’s position can open doors..’
She nodded wisely. ‘I’ll call him at his office.’
As Evelyn Brewster picked up her phone in Parkside, Boyd Mulligan was spinning his swivel chair to answer the phone in his Kearny Street bailbond office.
‘Mulligan Bros,’ he snapped self-importantly as he unforked the receiver.
It was the muffled voice that over the years he had come to recognize if not know. ‘Get him.’
‘Oh… uh, yeah, sure.’
Mulligan laid the receiver on the desk and went down the narrow room to the doorway of the inner, private office. He was short and strutting, his shoulders were narrow and his posture just slightly swaybacked, so he always walked as if he were about to start tap dancing.
‘Uncle Griff, it’s… uh… him.’
He returned to his desk and hung up the phone noisily. All three of them knew he wasn’t bright enough to know things he wasn’t bright enough to know.
Griff Mulligan was a white-haired banty rooster with a lilting Irish tenor as light as a Shannon mist. He wore a faded comfortable flannel shirt and old-fashioned armbands that matched his garters and galluses.
‘A pleasant good morning to ye.’
‘It isn’t,’ grated the no-longer disguised voice.
‘And what might the trouble be with it?’
‘I just heard about that stupid attempt to scare off Hammett.’
‘I’d not heard of it meself,’ said Mulligan with a sideways gleam of his faded blue eyes toward the doorway beyond which his nephew sat. ‘But I suppose that Boyd thought-’
‘That would be a first. Hammett learned it was Joey Lonergan who fingered him for the strong-arms, and last night he and his right bower, Jimmy Wright, paid a visit to Lonergan’s Garage. Lonergan opened the bag for them.’
Mulligan’s voice remained as mild and melodious as before.
