Ragtime Cowboys (11 page)

A tense moment followed. Then Dillard grinned, straining the bulge of tobacco in his left cheek, and returned the sap to its pocket.

“It's a lucky man's got a friend he can count on in a pinch,” he said. “But the sun don't shine on the same dog's ass all day. He might not be around next time.”

“You like to pick your teeth with dynamite, that it?” said Siringo, when the sheriff was halfway back down the slope.

Hammett had his makings out, but his hand shook so badly the paper fluttered out from between thumb and forefinger. He looked down at the hand, laughing. “Whew!”

*   *   *

When Dillard left, with Abner Butterfield manacled in the Dodge's backseat, Charmian invited her guests to stay the night. Siringo shook his head. They were back in the parlor. Becky London had gone upstairs.

“Mr. Hammett can, if he wants. I'll be hanging around Frisco a couple of days.”

“Yeah?” Hammett's brows raised.

“If it's Becky and me you're worried about, shouldn't you stay here?”

“Your sheriff's dead wrong about his intentions, but I think the shooter got what he come for, even if it didn't go the way he had figured. I doubt he had anything to do with stealing horses. He, or the man he's working for, had something on, and a couple of private detectives sniffing around was bad for business, whatever it is. Like a lot of folks he thought if he put our only witness out of the way we'd lose interest. You got to snuff out that kind of thinking right at the source.

“Also I don't like being trailed. I want to get to the bottom of this eel business before I head home.”

“Who—or what—is the eel?” Charmian asked. “Gentlemen, I think by now you know I'm no shrinking violet. I demand to know why my house was put under assault.”

Hammett looked at his partner. Siringo rocked back and forth, pulled on his pipe, nodded. “Local character,” Hammett told Charmian. “He's affiliated with a man named Clanahan.”

“That scoundrel.” Her face was grim.

 

PART TWO

OPERATING UNDER THE INFLUENCE

In the early 1920s … Hammett was not a writer learning about private detectives, but a private detective learning about writing.

—Joe Gores

 

13

Samuel Dashiell Hammett was tall and gaunt, with a barbered moustache that made his expression unreadable as a cat's. His hair was pale rather than blond, and when he took off his hat it sprang up into a tall mane as if it had never been held down. His nose was straight and his chin cleft. He looked like a fair-haired Lucifer.

When his landlady called up to say he was wanted on the telephone downstairs, he bounded down the steps and picked up the receiver she'd left dangling from the black box. “Yes, angel?”

“Sam, darling. How did you know it was me?” Jose's mezzo tones crackled, broken up by a thousand miles of interconnecting cables.

“It's always you. No one else knows this number—or wants it. When are you coming out?”

“Just as soon as the doctor says it's safe for me to travel. You know, the first three months are the most crucial.”

“I thought it was the first three minutes.”

“Don't be coarse. Do you miss me?”

“Sure, but we better not go against doctor's orders.”

“You could try to sound disappointed.”

“You know I miss you.”

“You could come back to Montana.”

“I'm stuck here just now. Do you need money?”

“Did you sell something? Why didn't you tell me?”

“No such luck. I took a job.”

“What sort of job? A detective job? Sam!”

“It's almost wrapped up. I'll wire you a couple of hundred later today.”

“You told me you were done with all that.”

“I said if I never worked another case it'd be too soon. It got to be too soon.”

“Were you going to tell me?”

“I just did.”

“After I pried it out of you. Sam, are you taking care of yourself?”

“Sure.” He tucked the earpiece under the corner of his jaw and rolled a cigarette.

“Not smoking?”

“Promise.” He held the match without striking it.

“Drinking?”

“Not a drop.” He left the flask in his pocket.

“Are you writing?”

“I was, when the phone rang.”

“Don't be cross. How's it going?”

“I'm having a little trouble with the plot. I can't figure out what the villain's got in mind.”

“Well, you will. I know something the publishers don't.”

“What's that, how to answer your mail?”

“No, silly. I know you never quit.”

“I quit the Agency. I quit my tomcat ways when I met you. A guy can get used to this quitting business with an angel to help him out.”

“Banana oil. Are you sure you can spare two hundred? What will you live on?”

“Love, sweetheart. Like the song says.”

“I'm serious. You're not eating, I can tell. You even sound skinny.”

“I'm fat as a slug. The client's loaded, don't worry.”

“Who is it?”

“You know I never talk about that.”

“Is it a woman?”

“Sure. Swell dame. She looks like Theda Bara and dances like Nazimova.”

“I'm serious. If you won't tell me, I'll burn up every penny of that money on this call.”

“Okay. It's Wyatt Earp.”

“So you really won't tell me.”

“Someone else wants to use the phone. I'll call you in a couple of days.”

“Who's waiting, Jesse James?”

“Crazy about you, Jose.”

“Promise me you'll take care of yourself.”

He promised, and hung up the receiver just in time for a coughing jag.

He walked to the States Hof Brau and ordered pickled pig's feet and a bottle of near beer. Charlie Siringo entered just as he dug in.

The old detective stood just inside the door, glancing around while his eyes adjusted to the dim light, then spotted Hammett and came over. He was slight, with a few black hairs in his silver moustache trimmed at right angles like a carpenter's square. He wore parts of different suits, gray trousers with a striped vest and black coat, but they were carefully brushed and a green cravat added a touch of color. His face was dinged all over from pox and he limped slightly from some old injury.

He took off his hat when he reached Hammett's table. His hair was thin at the temples, bald at the crown, and parted in the middle. “Eat the rest of that hog while you was waiting?”

“Take a load off. Try the Wiener schnitzel. It's the best in town.”

“Can I get a steak?” He drew out a chair and sat down, frowned at the holes in his hat, and set it at his elbow.

“Big John!”

A great rolling zeppelin of a man came their way, draped in acres of gray worsted. A yard of gold watch-chain hammocked his belly. “
Ja,
Sam.” The counterweight of his muttonchop whiskers added resonance to his Prussian accent.

Hammett asked Siringo how he took his steak.

“Any way it comes, so long as it's quick.”

“Make it bloody, John. And squeeze out two more bottles from the moose in back.” He pointed at his beer.

John squinted at Siringo. “Prohibition agent?”

“Pinkerton,” Hammett said. “Retired, like yours truly. What's in back?”

The big man leaned over the table and lowered his voice. “I just took delivery on a case of Canadian.”

“Who's on the seal, Pancho Villa?”

“It's good schnapps, Sam. Come on into the back room and sniff the sawdust. Lodgepole pine from Alberta.”

“I'll have a beer,” Siringo said. “And throw in a mess of grits. I missed breakfast.”

“
Was ist
‘grits'?”

“If he doesn't know it, he doesn't have it,” Hammett said. “Give him fried potatoes and onions. Beer for me, too. But hang onto a bottle of that Alberta, will you?”

“Sure thing, Sam.”

“That's the biggest man I ever saw,” said Siringo, when they were alone.

“Wait till you meet Paddy Clanahan.” Hammett ate. “What kept you from breakfast?”

“You hit on it when you said Clanahan.”

*   *   *

They'd left the ranch late. Charmian had told them her experience of Sean Patrick Clanahan, boss of San Francisco.

“Jack was short on cash, a chronic condition,” she'd said. “His books and stories weren't selling as well as they used to, and to be frank, he was—”

“A spendthrift,” Hammett had offered.

“Extravagant.
Profligate
would not be too strong a word; yet there are extenuating circumstances. He came from nothing, gentlemen: born out of wedlock, forced to scrounge a living on the wharves of San Francisco at fourteen, working all day in a cannery and robbing oyster beds at night to support his mother and older sister. He stoked coal aboard tramp steamers, sweated in laundries, nearly perished of scurvy in the Yukon, where he hoped to find gold and an end to his labors. That failed, and when he came home hoping to sell his experiences to the popular press, he was rejected a hundred and sixty times in the first year. Surely you can sympathize with that, Mr. Hammett.”

“Sure. I know the feeling.”

“And surely, Mr. Siringo, you must understand his reaction when suddenly his books and stories began to sell, in numbers no one could have predicted. He married, had children, showered his family with gifts. After the union ended in divorce, Bess couldn't understand when his fortunes turned and he couldn't provide for her and his daughters as he had in the past, and drenched him in guilt and scorn. His work brought him less money, so he slaved to replace what he'd lost—a thousand words a day, gentlemen, no matter where he was, here in the cottage or sailing to Japan or touring the country on the lecture circuit. When the
Snark
sank, when Wolf House burned to the ground, he went deep into debt just trying to hold on to what he had, what he'd built.

“Since his death, Clanahan has been buying up all his notes for pennies on the dollar, scheming to gain ownership of the ranch. Some of Jack's creditors have remained sympathetic, and have promised to hold off on selling until I can gather the capital to redeem the notes, but they can't wait forever. They have bills to pay and mouths to feed too. I'm negotiating with Jack's publishers, hoping to persuade them to bring out new editions of all his works, and advance money against royalties; but with pirated copies floating all over and now the moving-picture people hijacking the property of his imagination and labor, it's a slow process, and Clanahan works swiftly.”

“What's his object in getting hold of the ranch?” Siringo had asked. “Beg pardon, ma'am, but it don't look prosperous.”

“Only because Jack was foursquare against pressing his grapes into wine for commercial uses. He supported Prohibition since before it had a name. I can see you're skeptical, gentlemen; Jack was a bibulous man, and made no secret of it. But if you've read
John Barleycorn,
you know how much that habit cost him and how hard he tried to cure himself. He kept drinking until nearly the end, when his kidneys failed. But he was determined to do what he could to prevent others from following his example, before they started, while they could still be saved. Just before he died, he made me promise I would never permit the fruits of Beauty Ranch to appear on the market in the form of wine. The same holds true for the beer we brew. Our small store of spirits is for personal consumption only.”

She leaned forward. “Needless to say, Clanahan doesn't feel bound by that vow. He intends to flood the bootleg market with Jack's private label and make millions corrupting the future of a generation.”

She got up and left the room, to return carrying a bottle of red wine. “From our private stock.” She showed them the device on the label, a pen-and-ink rendering of a wolf's head staring balefully face out.

“He'll drag that symbol, Jack's personal totem, through every dive, gin mill, and blind pig in the country, and with it the good name of Jack London. Gentlemen, can you stop him? I promise you, you will not find the estate ungrateful.”

*   *   *

“I been to the library, improving my mind,” Siringo told Hammett. “Went through every newspaper in San Francisco going back six months. Couldn't find hide nor hair of this Clanahan. Even checked the funny pages.”

“I could've saved you the trouble. He doesn't hold any political office, and what he does is only news if you still haven't got the dope on Santa Claus.”

“There's got to be one reporter with a backbone in this town.”

“Not if he wants to keep it in one piece. The last one who tried to get an interview wound up in traction.”

“Who put him there?”

“The man himself. He does his own strong-arm work. He saves the eel for serious errands.”

“I thought all that Barbary Coast business was finished.”

“It did. Back then everything was out in the open, like the gimcrackery on all the buildings. The ones built since the Big Shake are smooth as a steel rail and so's the grafting.”

A waiter came with Siringo's meal and their beers. Siringo tucked his napkin under his collar and cut into his steak. Blood ran out. “I could save this cow with a tourniquet.”

“You said you wanted it quick.”

“I wasn't complaining.” He forked a piece into his mouth and chewed. “Buying up London's debts is an underhanded way of taking over his spread, but it ain't illegal. I can't figure why he bothered with us.”

“Clanahan's got all the money one man can ever use. When he sets out to make more, it's for seed. Whatever it is he wants to finance—
that's
why he wanted us to stop turning over rocks in Sonoma County.”