Shortly after eight o'clock, Holmes walked wearily into the Ellis Street grill to find Hammett looking even wearier, a half-full bottle on the table before him. Holmes accepted a glass of the raw whiskey without comment, and allowed the fire to warm his bones for a few minutes. When the waitress came to their table, Hammett ordered, and Holmes told her he'd have the same, although he couldn't have said what it was the man had ordered. Hammett sat back with his second drink, lit a cigarette, and exhaled.
“You look like your day's been as lucky as mine,” he told Holmes.
“What universal law, I wonder, determines that all potential witnesses be either missing, amnesiac, or comprehensively stupid?” Holmes reflected. “The retired milkman is off visiting his sister in San Jose; one of the Russells' old neighbours took an hour to decide that the ‘nice Jewish girl' he remembered was not actually Judith Russell but one of the good-time girls who moved into the park in early May; another of the neighbours insisted that I was a ‘Fuller Brush Man' and chased me down the street with a broom he had bought which had fallen apart, only stopping when his daughter caught up with him and told me that he'd been fixed against broom salesmen ever since his wife ran off with one in 1903; and the rabbi of the synagogue Judith Russell attended is a young man who will have to consult with the elders before he submits any names for my attention. The only thing I have accomplished of even marginal import all afternoon has been to arrange for a chimney sweep, so that one corner of the house might be inhabited without risk of a conflagration.”
Hammett was grinning like a greyhound. “The fast life of a private dick—ain't it great?”
“I hope to heaven that the stories you write don't glamorise the job as much as Watson's did. He was generally so occupied with his practice or his wife, he had no idea how many hours I put in while he wasn't there to see.”
“Nah, my stuff's a little harder edged than his. But you know, when you're putting together a story, sometimes you just have to skip over the boring bits.”
“I suppose necessity must. In any case, Hammett, what have you to show for the day?”
“Not a heck of a lot more than you.” Their food arrived as he was taking his note-book from his pocket, but he unfolded it on the table and reported in between bites. “The paper the Southern lady used is a bust, just too common to trace. Spent a couple hours on that, and decided it was a waste of my time and your greenbacks. I'll keep going if you want, but—”
“Let's abandon the lady's note-paper for now,” Holmes said. The chops on his plate were more mutton than lamb, but nicely grilled and he was hungry. Hammett went on.
“The rest of the day I spent with the cops. They've got nothing at all on your Chinese friend. You knew his parents were found murdered at that same address you gave me? It's still on the books, more or less—not exactly near the top of the pile. They did question him, but he said he was at school—training as a doctor, back in Chicago—and as soon as they got confirmation of that, he was cleared. The only funny thing in the file was, someone wondered how two Chinese servants could afford to buy a three-storey building in Chinatown. There wasn't a follow-up to that, probably decided the old folks ran an opium den on the side or something. Might be something to look into.”
“There's nothing there,” Holmes reassured him. “What about the others?”
Hammett's fork and knife paused while he studied the older man, then he shrugged. “If you say so. Auberon's name is Howard, he's got one charge of running a card game back when he was a teenager, but nothing since then.”
“Wait a minute, he must be in his late forties now. I thought all the records burnt in 1906?”
“Police records were saved, though they're in a hell of a mess. It was the City Hall stuff that went—births, property rights, you name it. If you own a house, you might have God's own time proving it, but an ancient arrest for drunkenness will follow along like a stink on your shoe. Anyway, talk is that your boy on the desk doesn't run anything too organised, but like any desk man, he can get you anything from a bottle to a companion, for the right bill.”
Auberon, then, was about as clean as could be expected.
“And as for your wife's old man, he was a positive paragon of virtue. He came from money, but then you'd know that. Picked up once when some of the boys he was with had a little too much to drink, broke some windows, that kind of thing. He spent the night in the jug, paid for the repairs, stayed clean after, at least in San Francisco.”
“When would this have been?”
“Oh, let's see. Yeah, here it is, 1891.”
Charles Russell would have been twenty-three years old, and fresh out of university; four years later he'd gone to Europe, there to meet and marry Judith Klein. “Did you get the names of his companions in drunkenness?”
By way of answer, Hammett reached for his note-book, tore out a page, and slid it across to Holmes:
Thomas Octavio Hodges (San Francisco)
Martin Sullivan (San Francisco)
Robert Greenfield (New York)
Laurence Goldberg (New York)
Calvin Francis O'Malley (San Francisco)
Holmes studied the names: The only one he might identify was that of Robert Greenfield, who could be the father of Russell's childhood friend Flo. “You know any of these men?”
“No, I only got the list about an hour ago. You want me to find out about them?”
“Let's leave that on our list of Things To Do. Before that, however, we need to look into this one.” He took from his pocket the piece of paper he'd copied at the hotel. “This woman was killed two weeks before the Longs were. That address is her home and her office as well. She was a psychiatrist. She was treating my wife.”
Hammett's eyes came up from the scrap of paper, meeting those of Holmes. “Your wife's doctor, your wife's family servants, your wife's parents. The same wife who got herself shot at the other day.”
“I want this settled before she gets back into town the day after tomorrow.” The grey eyes had gone cold and hard.
After a minute, Hammett looked away, and folded the page with the name into his note-book.
“Then I guess we'd better get to work.”
BOOK THREE
Russell
Chapter Seventeen
I stood on the roadway that bright and blustery Sunday morning, inches away from the continent's edge, and looked at the rocks that had taken my family. In ten years, some things had changed; others
