Hammett (Crime Masterworks) by Joe Gores Page B

asked See-See. ‘Tickets to the policemen’s ball. Some of the cops sell the same tickets over and over, and don’t turn in any of it. They arrest somebody, he gets off if he buys enough tickets.’
    The talk drifted to a famous poker game that had run for two years at the Kingston Club, a fancy downtown place with liveried waiters and velvet settees and superb French cuisine. Nick the Greek and Titanic Thompson, playing partners, took over nine hundred thousand each out of the game.
    ‘And I heard Titanic went into it broke,’ said Hammett, shoving in chips. Out of the table talk he’d gotten only one name, Paddy Quinlan, to pass on to Jimmy Wright. ‘Let’s see who’s doing what on whom here.’
    ‘Whom, yet,’ said See-See. ‘You’re there when it comes to spreading the salve, Dash.’
    ‘I had a deprived youth.’
    Fingers had two pair. ‘Mites and lice,’ he said sadly. ‘Hammett, I can’t do a thing with you.’
    Joey lurched to his feet. ‘Deal me out, I gotta tap a kidney.’
    The evening might have been a bust from the investigation point of view, thought Hammett, but he was coming out of it a heavy winner: He was up something well over a hundred bucks. Joey came back and sat down.
    ‘I hope that was a local phone call,’ said Fingers.
    The burly Irishman looked sheepish. ‘South City, I didn’t think you’d mind. Girl down there, I figured maybe when this broke up . . .’
    ‘She got a friend?’ asked Hammett.
    ‘She’s busy herself, dammit.’
    ‘Let’s play cards,’ suggested Geltwasser softly. His eyes twinkled at Hammett across the table. ‘I think I have you figured out now, Mr Dash.’
    He did indeed. An hour later the lean detective was broke. Drunk or sober, nothing wrong with the old German’s nerve. It had been an education in bluffing. He remembered a story about three drunken patriots during the war who’d decided to show their hatred for the Hun by messing up Geltwasser and his hockshop. One had died, one had fled, and now, ten years later, the third still walked with a limp.
    Hammett shook his head at the new stack Fingers had begun to shove across to him. ‘I’m tapped out.’ He jingled the change in his pocket. ‘And I’m already into my bookie. Pleasure, gents.’
    The outside air was like wine. He buttoned up his overcoat as he went down the terrazzo steps. A fine damp fog was in to soak up the misty gaslight at the alley’s mouth.
    Hammett stopped dead. Three silhouetted figures were coming through the fog toward him. They were spread across the alley so he would have to pass between them to get out to Vallejo.
    Hammett fished out smokes and matches and leaned backagainst the rough stucco of a housefront as they came abreast of him. The closest one checked his stride.
    ‘Got a match, buddy?’
    The one in the middle had stopped directly in front of Hammett, the third a yard beyond. They had him neatly boxed in.
    ‘A match? Sure.’
    It scraped, flared at the end of Hammett’s cigarette. The other man leaned just enough forward, as if to share the flame, so that Hammett would have to take his back from the wall and thus bare the nape of his neck to a rabbit punch.
    But Hammett drove off the wall with the toe of his right shoe snapping into the man’s left kneecap. Pivoting on his left foot, he rammed his cigarette into the second man’s eye while the first was still yelling.
    That left the third, coming in hard to cut off his break for the mouth of the alley. Instead, Hammett met his charge. He smashed the top of his head against the attacker’s face and through his mashed fedora felt teeth give inward. He sprinted for the concealing shadow at the far end of the cul-de-sac.
    ‘We’ve got the bastard!’ yelled one of them.
    But Hammett had once questioned a witness in Prescott Court and he knew that the blank red brick rear of Broadway’s Washington Irving Grammar School was not completely flush with the final house on either side of the alley. The