‘Well, now, faith, it’s not that Joey knows the devil of a lot. A couple of phone numbers without any names to-’
‘It’s given Hammett a connection. He’s tough and he’s smart…’
‘So was Atkinson.’
‘Whoever killed Atkinson did us no favor,’ snapped the other man quickly. ‘Remember that.’ His voice became elaborately casual. ‘I want Hammett left alone, but I don’t want him getting hold of Molly. Where do you have her stashed away?’
‘Faith, I don’t know meself. I’ve let Boydie handle that.’ He lowered the receiver. ‘Boyd! Where is it that you have Molly holed up then?’
‘Ask her little kike attorney. He wouldn’t tell me.’
To the phone, Mulligan said in an ominously calm voice, ‘Boyd seems to have lost sight of her for the moment, but Molly won’t sing-’
‘TelI him to find her. Now.’
‘Right ye are,’ said Mulligan in his lilt.
‘And be careful on that phone after Monday.’
‘Right ye are,’ he lilted again.
He hung up and went down the office, cat-quiet, to stop behind his nephew’s chair. With a great deal of relish he swung his right arm to explode his fist against the side of Boyd’s head. The younger Mulligan was knocked sprawling out of his chair, the scalp under the oily hair split by his uncle’s ring. He sat on the floor with a hand to his head.
‘Ye stupid git!’ snarled Griff Mulligan. ‘Who told ye to go after Hammett?’
‘But… but I thought… Shuman said…’
‘Now get y’rself out o’ here and find where Molly is, before Hammett finds her for us.’
The private office was heavy with the smells of leather and saddle soap. It was just across California Street from the new Robert Dollar building. George F. Biltmore stood up behind a huge rolltop with innumerable pigeonholes lined in green felt. His white walrus mustache was ragged and yellowed at the edges from being chewed on; snarled thickets of white brow bristled above his deep-set eyes.
‘Going to clean up this town, are you?’
‘So they say.’
‘So Evelyn Brewster says.’
Hammett matched the power of Biltmore’s massive hand with his own wiry strength. Biltmore sat down in his deep leather chair with a surprised look on his face. He had captained his own five-masters around the Horn and in later years had made his fortune from shipping and marine insurance.
‘She’s a fine woman,’ he said. ‘Fine woman. You’re a close friend of hers?’ When Hammett didn’t respond, he added challengingly, ‘Hey?’
Hammett, remembering everything he’d heard of this tough old man, said, ‘She hates my guts.’
‘Then why’d she ask if I’d see you? Hey?’
‘She thinks I’m going to smite the wicked.’
‘But you ain’t.’ He made it a statement.
‘I’m going to find a murderer and smite him.’
‘Murderer, hey? Humph.’ He drew the tangled white thickets down over piercing blue eyes that had never seen the need for eyeglasses, and burst out, ‘Clean up San Francisco! I remember when that husband of hers was fifteen, his father Derry — God rest his soul! — and I took the boy to Diamond Jessie Hayman’s parlor house on Ellis Street to start the lad out right. Then he marries that whey-faced ninny! Reform committee, had the gall to ask me to be on it! Why…’ He jerked his head around toward Hammett. ‘What do you want from me? Hey?’
‘You have a houseguest in Mill Valley-’
‘I have a lot of houseguests at various times.’ He got to his feet and went to the window. There was no fat on his seventy-year-old frame, no sag of age. ‘I’ve been a seafaring man, I remember my friends.’
‘This houseguest is a woman, a client of Phineas Epstein’s.’
‘A gentlewoman from back east,’ he boomed. ‘Tragic personal loss-’
‘Molly Farr,’ said Hammett. ‘The missing madam.’
Biltmore returned to his desk to select a cigar from his humidor. He raised shaggy eyebrows at Hammett and, when he was rebuffed, clipped the cigar and lit it with a wooden match. He watched Hammett sideways through clouds of aromatic smoke.
‘I’ve got dogs on the estate, son. Hounds, a whole pack of ’em. The sheriff in those parts, I own a good piece of him, too. Not because I’ve tried to, but because it’s the natural order of things, power being what it is…’
‘Sure,’ said Hammett readily. His voice was thin; he hitched his shoulders unconsciously. If he read the old man’s temperament wrong, he wouldn’t get to Molly. He said: ‘When I was a Pink, I worked for a lot of men like you, Mr Biltmore. Men having labor trouble at the mine or the factory who needed somebody to bust heads and put the workers back in line. You’re big and old and tough and mean, and you think you’re never going to die. So you take what you want and do what you want, and worry about the consequences afterward.’
Biltmore seemed unangered by this appraisal. ‘You’ve drawn your full ration of gall, son, I’ll give you that. But tell me: Why was I supposed to be hiding out this Molly Farr?’
‘Because you get a hell of a kick out of it. Or because Epstein has something on you that even your money and influence can’t-’
‘Nodody’s got anything on me, son,’ he snapped. ‘I came up rough and I came up hard, but I came up clean. I don’t have to look behind me on dark streets…’
‘“I’ve picked up my fun where I found it,”’ quoted Hammett. ‘Only Evelyn Brewster wouldn’t call it fun. She takes her sin seriously.’
‘Mmph. How’d you find out I was hiding Molly?’
‘Epstein got so clever he got careless.’
The big ex-seaman stared at him from eyes that were blue chips of ice. ‘What d’ya want her for? Hey?’
‘Talk, that’s all. The man who got killed talked with her the day before she lammed. I think one reason she lammed was because she didn’t want to talk with him again. I don’t intend to put her on any witness stand and I don’t intend to turn her over to the DA, but I have to know if she has anything that would help me find my friend’s killer.’
Biltmore brooded a moment more, then slapped the desk in sudden vast delight.
‘Yes! All right, goddammit! Tomorrow afternoon. If you know a presentable lady friend, bring her for a social afternoon. Then you just slip away — Molly spends her time in one of the guest cottages, you can go talk to her there and no one else the wiser.’
They shook hands. At the door, Hammett paused. ‘Why are you hiding her out? And why are you letting me see her?’
‘I like Molly. Within her own limits, she’s an honest woman. As for you…’ Biltmore’s expression became that of a gleeful schoolboy. ‘I’ve been waiting for years for somebody to come along who could stick a thumb into Brass Mouth Epstein’s eye.’
18
Chinatown wore a new aspect at night, especially with the sea fog drifting through its narrow alleys and steep side streets. The hurrying pedestrians were mere undetailed forms in the swirling mists. Only the sound of heels on concrete betrayed their passage.
Hammett turned up Jackson past a group of tourists huddled under a streetlamp, ingesting their guide’s lies about the labyrinths six and seven stories below Chinatown streets. Hammett knew you could work your way down the hill from cellar to cellar, but you were never more than one flight below the pavement.
In Ross Alley — known as Old Spanish Alley before the Chinese pushed the Mexicans out — he went down a shallow set of stairs from street level into deep gloom. At the foot of the steps was a small concrete alcove holding a pair of battered stinking garbage pails. Hammett slapped his hand with a measured beat on the naking red door
