The dead Chinese girl was sprawled face down across the obelisk. One arm was folded under the body so the childishly small hand formed a cup. Blood from the shattered head had arteried the curved marble to run into the cup. The other arm was outflung. Hammett recognized the tweed knickers and argyle socks and leatherette sport jacket. The legs were apart enough so he could see the crotch of the knickers was stained.
Hammett squatted over the body. He touched his fingers to the crotch of the knickers and sniffed them. Urine. Bladder voided in death. Raped? No way to tell yet. He realized with an abrupt touch of nausea that the girl’s limbs unnaturally fit themselves to the contours of the unyielding stone beneath her. He put a hand on the body.
‘Hey!’ One of the Homicide dicks took his hands out of his pockets. ‘The medical boys ain’t seen her yet.’
‘Seeing her isn’t going to make her any less dead,’ said Jimmy Wright.
Hammett removed his hand and wrapped his forearms around his knees and remained squatting with his chin on a kneecap, his face brooding. Without looking up, he said, ‘Worked over with a baseball bat. No wonder she was screaming.’
He shifted the body enough to get a look at the face hidden by the shimmering ebony hair.
He sighed and stood up and wiped his hand idly on his topcoat, then rested it on the upright gravestone. The marble was icy to his fingers. The Homicide cops had gotten still and intense when he had looked at where the girl’s face had been. It was gone right to the hairline, leaving only splintered bone and red meat.
‘Instant leprosy,’ he said with studied indifference. The dicks lost their expectant look when he didn’t throw up or even turn pale. He said: ‘Her name was Crystal Tam or Lillian Fong, depending on when you knew her. She has parents named Fong in Chinatown who’ll need notifying.’
When Hammett and Jimmy Wright reached the place where the path split the two cypresses, both men stopped and looked back. The girl was a rag doll, hurled carelessly against the fallen marble monuments. A gray dripping dawn had harried the fog up enough to show, beyond the cemetery fence, the gentle slope of Lone Mountain and the simple white cross that topped it. The cross was nearly invisible against the leaden morning sky.
‘A lousy way to die,’ said the op.
‘Tell me one that isn’t.’
He needed a drink. He needed a lot of drinks. Vic Atkinson. Crystal Tam. And Hammett at home playing author, instead of being out in the streets where he belonged as a detective. He’d thought he had it pretty well figured out until her death. But now…
Jesus! Unless the… But that was unutterably evil If…
He needed a lot of drinks.
‘You lousy bastard,’ said Hammett distinctly.
‘Sam, please-’
He tipped up the bottle, then let his arm drop limply. The bottom of the half-empty quart thudded on the carpet.
Goodie tried again. ‘Sam, you mustn’t blame yourself for-’
He looked up at her, heavy-ridded. He tried to laugh. His lips wouldn’t work right. They were blue, as if with cold.
‘Mustn’t blame ’self. Then who?’
‘If she herself called up the man who did it-’
‘Shouldda known she’d call ’im.’ His eyelids dropped; he popped them open to stare owlishly at her. ‘Caught you at it, okay?’
‘Sam, you’re not making any sense. I’ll get you some coffee.’
‘No coffee. Hootch. Know where ’at comes from? The Hoochinoo Indians in Alaska who distill liquor just like ’shine. Was in a hospital once with a guy f’om Alaska. Whitey…’
When she returned two minutes later with the steaming black coffee, Hammett was snoring. She shook him awake and got him to his feet, where he performed a rubber-legged adagio dance with her until he fell face-forward across the bed and pulled her down on top of him in a swirl of silken thighs. He started to snore.
She stood looking down at him, pity and anger and infatuation playing across her face.
‘Oh, Sam!’ she wailed softly. ‘Why?’
He turned his head enough to open an eye at her. ‘Why? She read ’bout dead Chinese girl in Tokzek’s car, that’s why. Read that, knew she had ’im. Tell lie to Molly, go safe hideout, make contact. Had ’im. Only he got her, instead.’
‘Sam, shouldn’t you get some sleep?’
‘Shleep. Remember, dead Chinese girl in car is key. Key to whole thing. Raped. Get it?’
He started to snore again.
Voices beside the bed were talking around him as if he didn’t exist. Around him and over him and through him, as parents did when you were little. As if you couldn’t hear or understand or reason because you were little.
Or drunk.
Or sick.
Starchy white uniforms. Smell of ether and disinfectant, this won’t hurt much, just an ouch Jesus Christ what’re you doing, good-looking redhead from Butte, Montana, marry that girl sometime. Josie. Ah, shit. Josie. Screwed it up, all up.
Talking around him and over him and through him with the doctor.
Next day, doctor’s office. Desert heat shimmering through the open window, baking out the impurities.
— I got only one year to live, Doc?
— ahem. Never sure with consumption, Sergeant Hammett, but the indications — then I’m leaving the hospital.
— but without proper care… as the disease advances through the lungs…
— I don’t mind dying, Doc. I just mind dying here.
He opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling above the bed. The streetlight outside the window cast curtain-patterns across the plaster. The Chinese girl was dead. Vic Atkinson was dead. Unspeakable evil?
‘Where’s that bottle?’
‘Sam, please…’
‘Gimme the bottle, goddammit, I know what I’m doing.’
Jimmy Wright’s voice sneered, ‘Give him his goddamn bottle. Sucking on it is what he’s good for.’
Hammett struggled to a sitting position. He looked at the square-bodied little detective. The op looked back. Goodie shoved the bottle into Hammett’s hand.
The op said, ‘How long’s he been like this?’
‘Since this afternoon. He was the same way after Vic Atkinson was killed.’
Beat the drum slowly and play the pipes lowly. Play the dead march as they carry him along. He set the bottle to his lips.
‘Yeah, he’s a sweetheart,’ said the op.
Hammett removed the bottle. ‘Fuck you, Jimmy Wright,’ he said distinctly.
‘That solves something?’
He’d show them. Both of them. As he used to show Josie when she was always at him. He drank in long swallows.
His belly tried to reject it, vomit it back up, but he stopped only when he started to strangle, even as the girl cried out in anguish, ‘Oh my God, Sam, you’ll kill yourself!’
‘Don’t worry ’bout me, sister.’ He giggled. ‘You got old goat with lotsa money, I got wife an’ two kids to worry ’bout me. Josie. Josie’s a woman…’
He stopped because Goodie was staring at him with wide terrified eyes. She turned to Jimmy Wright.
‘Is… is that true? A wife? A… a wife and children?’
Wright was silent.
Her face turned white. ‘But… Sam. Last night I… didn’t. Because I… you… I thought…’
She ran blindly from the room, hitting the doorway instead of the wall only by instinct; her eyes were squeezed tight shut.
