“Said Boston, because England might not be the safest place for a while. Looking back, I'd say your father-in- law was a clever man.”
It was true: In the summer of 1914, most of the world had thought the war would be over by Christmas, and most men would not have hesitated to send an English wife home to her family.
The waitress decided that her customer had eaten as much of his dinner as he was going to, and without being asked she set two thick white mugs of coffee on the table, removing the half-eaten dinner with a shake of her head. Hammett wiped his fingers on his table napkin, took a swallow of the coffee, and picked up something from the seat of the chair beside him, laying it on the table between them.
“You know what this is?” he asked.
“This” was a pair of bent and rusted steel rods, although it did not take a very close examination to see that they had originally been two parts of a still-longer whole. The longer of these two sections, about eighteen inches from the still-attached ball joint to its broken end, was pitted from long exposure to the elements; grains of sand still nestled in the rough surface. Holmes fingered its uneven end: not merely broken, but half sawed through, then twisted hard to shattering.
The other piece was slightly shorter, just over a foot long, and although it, too, was rusted, its lack of pitting and sand indicated that it had spent its life in a slightly more protected environment. One end was a twin with that of the longer piece—half sawed, half wrenched apart. Its other end, however, was neatly, and freshly, sawed through.
Hammett gestured at the tidy end of the shorter piece. “I didn't think we really needed to haul the whole thing around, so I just cut off the hunk we needed. Seemed to me the two ends said it all.”
Holmes laid the two pieces of rod on the table, the broken end of the rusted one resting against the broken end of the cleaner.
“I have long feared it might be something of this order. Yes, Mr Hammett, I know what this is. I spent some time as a garage mechanic in Chicago, just before the war broke out. A little case for His Majesty. That's a brake rod, or rather the better half of a brake rod, and I agree, you were right to cut it off—as far as evidence is concerned, there's no need to drag around a piece of steel half the length of a motorcar. Which side of the motor was it from?”
“The left.”
“So whoever did it knew they would be travelling south on that road.”
“I . . . Yes, I suppose they would have.”
“No supposition involved. Failure of the left-side brake rod under pressure would cause the motor to swerve to the right, and with that hill-top turn it didn't even require an on-coming motor to break the rod.” Russell's father would have braked hard at that spot in any event—without the other motor, without two squabbling children in the back. Mary Russell's disagreeable behaviour had nothing to do with it.
“Whoever did it was clever,” Hammett agreed. “And according to my guy, if it'd been cut all the way through, your Mr Russell would never have made it as far as the top of that hill without crashing.”
“Although I'd have thought he'd had to have been a remarkably cautious man to drive all the way from San Francisco with brakes in that condition.”
Hammett's starved-looking face relaxed into a satisfied grin. “They stopped for lunch in Serra Beach. That little town about a mile before the hill.”
“Parking the motor out of sight?”
“Actually, he left the car at the garage while they ate, to be filled up and to have a slow leak in one tyre repaired. The man took the wheel off and fixed it, and once I'd jogged his memory it all came back to him, because when he'd first heard about the accident, the day it happened, he'd been scared to death—thought maybe he'd failed to tighten the rim bolts enough. He even went out to see, and was hugely relieved to see the burnt-out shell, turned turtle, with all four wheels safely in place.”
“And this cleaner half of the brake rod was in his possession?” Holmes nudged the stub with one finger.
“Yeah. A week or so after the accident, he and his older brother, who ran the garage, took a pair of draught horses up and hauled the wreck off the rocks. Because it had landed upside-down, the fire had just erupted into open air
“The man doesn't remember anyone interfering with the machine, while it waited?”
“Nope. Wheel off, patch it up, wheel on, then fill 'er up and shift the car around to the side.”
“Was it common practice, for the Russell family to pause there on their way south?”
“I don't know, but it would've made sense to stop there halfway along, let the kiddies stretch their legs.”
“A thing anyone might have anticipated.”
“Yeah.” Hammett's eyes came down to the twisted lengths of rod, and he shook his head. “Killing a woman and a kid in that way. I'd sure like to help you solve this case.”
Until the man had come up with these two lengths of rusted steel, Holmes thought, there hadn't been a case to solve. He owed him a great deal, already. Too, he could not see that a man working for the other side would have given him the only hard evidence the case had yet generated. This new lieutenant of his threatened to have as much independence as Russell, and he lacked the physical stamina of Russell or Watson, but Holmes found himself warming to the man. He'd trust him a little further.
“Do you have any reliable contacts among the police?”
Hammett laughed. “You haven't been here long enough to hear about our cops. They're the best money can buy.”
“I see. Any you can trust to take your money and not sell you as well?”
“One or two. What do you want?”
Holmes took out his bill-fold and removed a piece of paper with some writing on it, putting it in front of Hammett. “I'd like to know a little more about these three men. Charles Russell was my wife's father, killed in that accident. That's his home address, and I think he had an office in the Flood Building. I picked up a rumour that he was involved in some what you might call ‘shady' activity during the fire in 1906, thought it would be good to make sure he was clean.”
“What sort of deal?”
“That's all I know.”
“Okay, I'll see what I can come up with.”
“The other two, it's just to be certain that the help they offer is not in fact a hindrance. The first, Auberon, is the manager at the St Francis; I don't know his Christian name or his home address. The last is a Chinese bookseller who goes by the name of Tom Long; his Chinese name could be almost anything. The address is for his store, just off Grant in Chinatown.”
“Auberon and Long, got you.”
“Shall we meet here tomorrow night, at say, eight o'clock?”
“That's fine.”
“And Hammett? Don't try to do anything else tonight. Get some sleep.”
“Right you are,” he said. He put some money down next to his mug, waved two fingers at the waitress, put on his hat at a rakish angle, and walked off into the fog of the evening, shambling bones in a dapper brown suit.
With the satisfaction of two lengths of old steel rod nestled in the sock-drawer across the room, Holmes slept the sleep of the just.
He was up early on Monday morning, fed and brushed and out of the hotel before eight o'clock, taking the lengths of brake rod with him. He found a photographer's studio nearby, where he left Miss Adderley's picture with instructions. When he left the shop, he walked a route sure to reveal anyone on his tail, but he reached the telegraphist's office without detecting anyone. The man, rather curtly, told him that he'd barely opened his doors and that nothing had come in, try again later. So Holmes went looking for a bank.
When he found one that was open, he went in and hired a safe-deposit box, giving the name “Jack Watson.”
