Hammett (Crime Masterworks) by Joe Gores Page A

cushioned against his chest and her strong whore’s thighs gripped his leg.
    ‘That’s the best you’ll ever get next to.’
    ‘Sorry, sister, my weakness is liquor.’ He clamped powerful fingers around the hand trying to slip the wallet off his hip. Her unabashed laughter followed him up the stairs.
    Fingers’ back door opened on a bright kitchen. A short mustached walleyed man came in from the hall as Hammett was taking out his pint.
    ‘Pantry,’ said the man. He disappeared again.
    Hammett could hear voices and chips. Stale smoke hung in the air. In the narrow white pantry he found a glass and opened the old-fashioned zinc-lined cooler. He chipped enough ice from one of the twin hundred-pound cakes for his drink, rammed the pick back into the wooden top of the waist-high cooler, and was dousing the ice with rye when the walleyed man popped back in.
    ‘Dining room,’ he said.
    The dining room was paneled in blond wood; its plate rail held only empty bottles and mail-order junk. The massive oak table bore scores of burns and dozens of pale rings to mark its years of service for poker rather than dining. In the corner behind Fingers’ chair stood his loaded ten-gauge goose gun, outfitted with an extra heavy frame and breech.
    LeGrand’s dolorous face swam up at Hammett through the haze of smoke like a carp surfacing in muddy water.
    ‘Table stakes with a pot limit. I’m the bank.’ He indicated whites, reds, blues. ‘Quarters, halves, dollars.’
    Hammett bought twenty bucks’ worth of chips. Fingers started the first-name-only introductions.
    ‘Dash, you met See-See out in the kitchen . . .’
    They nodded to each other. Hammett happened to know that the dapper little man with the reputation for looking in two directions at once was the best ‘soft-touch’ pickpocket in the game. In thirty years as a cannon he’d never taken a fall.
    Directly to See-See’s left was a tough, handsome, loud-mouthed Irishman named Joey. Auto mechanic by his hands. He said it was his night off.
    Finally there was a pudgy, middle-aged German named Dolf, whose last name Hammett knew to be Geltwasser. He peered myopically through spectacles thick as bottle glass and ran a pawnshop and was one of the city’s deadliest amateur poker players. He had killed two men that Hammett knew about.
    Hammett also knew he was probably wasting his time there that night. There just weren’t enough players for the conversation to develop along the lines he needed. But now he was here, he may as well try; and what the hell, maybe he could pick up rent money in the process.
    Fingers broke out a new deck, shuffled, and burned the top card. Despite deliberately erratic play, Hammett took two hours to lose the first of two double saw-bucks he had gotten from Jimmy Wright as an advance against expenses on the
Atkinson Investigations
fund. He ran a few bluffs as advertising, and two of them took good pots.
    By the time he bought his second stack, he’d killed half his pint, and the group had loosened up a bit. All of them were punishing their bottles, especially Dolf Geltwasser. He drank prodigious amounts of whiskey; the eyes magnified by his thick glasses became only more kindly, and his play only more deadly.
    Time to start. Hammett said, ‘Dolf, whatever happened to the Silver Fox?’
    ‘He went east, Oklahoma City, I heard, Joplin, Mo., maybe.’ The old German shook his head. ‘That Silver Fox, he would bet his lungs.’
    ‘When he was running that gambling hell on Pacific and Montgomery, wasn’t his landlord a cop?’
    ‘Sure,’ said Fingers. ‘Patrolman Paddy Quinlan. Rents that and the place next door to a couple of ’leggers now. Charges ’em fifty a month rent each, and receipts ’em for thirty.’
    ‘How does he get away pocketing the extra twenty?’ asked Joey in a belligerent voice.
    ‘Because they’re engaged in breaking the law,’ said Fingers.
    ‘I should have been a cop,’ said Hammett.
    ‘Heard the latest?’