The Lost Detective (8 page)

“I … brought my still-frayed lungs to San Francisco,” he remembered, “and returned to sleuthing.” In the Crawford Apartments, the couple would start their family life and Hammett, frayed lungs or not, would have a few more detecting adventures before he was invalided out.

*
Like “Joe’s.”

**
Some errors about Josephine’s family history were clearly introduced by Hammett himself while hurriedly filling out the marriage certificate, making the same mistake (“Josephine Anna” instead of “Annis”) he had made in his love letters and mixing up her father’s and mother’s origins.

“Jerry Young,” she repeated, as if to herself. “That’s a nice name. And you are the bootlegger?”

“Not
the
,” I corrected. “Just
a
. This is San Francisco.”

—“T
HE
W
HOSIS
K
ID
”

Up on the roof, where the couple liked to take pictures with a box camera and where Jose would later bring their young children to play in the sun, they could look out across the rooftops at the beautiful city, so much of it built new since the desolation of the great quake and fire in 1906. Out there Hammett would set many of his bank heists, blackmail killings, and wandering-daughter cases in a wide swath that curled around the couple’s new home on Eddy Street, a furnished three-room affair arranged along a skinny hallway. Their landlady bootlegged on the side, as many now did, and downstairs they heard patrons come and go in the night.

Four blocks away was the San Francisco public library, a handy walk when Hammett’s health behaved, an institution
filled with the raw materials for his continuing education in German criminology or medieval history, animal husbandry or the novels of Henry James, as well as its racks of pulp adventure magazines, whose daring sleuths often drew his professional contempt. The main reading room, with its high windows and long wooden tables, was a place of sanctuary away from the detectives’ room or the happy noise of his family apartment.

For all its attractions, it is hard to imagine him getting around this hillside city he somehow learned to draw so surely, despite his bad lungs, climbing Telegraph Hill or walking over to the Latin Quarter or the ferry terminal and Embarcadero; riding the California cable line down into Chinatown, searching its alleys and “dark corners” behind the chop suey houses.

Eight long blocks from home was the James Flood Building, where he went to work again for Pinkerton’s part time in the fall of 1921. A slight improvement in his health had gotten his disability pension halved to forty dollars per month, five dollars short of the couple’s rent, and with a child due in October he returned to the familiar work of an operative, while petitioning the Veteran’s Bureau to send him to secretarial school to learn typing and shorthand for some kind of writing. The risks of returning to detecting were considerable: of the 914 TB patients discharged from the San Francisco Tuberculosis Hospital from 1918 to 1921, according to a report, some 247 of them died after attempting to “resume their normal occupations before they had gained sufficient strength.”
¹

The Flood Building was a twelve-story, sandstone-faced structure downtown on Market Street, beside the cable car turntable on Powell. An appealingly solid survivor of the earthquake and fire, its offices followed a central oblong courtyard.
In room 314, Pinkerton’s made an exotic presence among the building’s dental and medical tenants. If you walk the Flood’s marble hallways today, long after the agency’s departure, the clatter of stone underfoot and the sunlit frosted glass of each office doorway evoke films from the Sam Spade era. Hammett’s time as a working sleuth in San Francisco may have been no more than six or eight vivid months, due to the cycles of his illness, but in these halls he formed our idea of what a private detective’s office should look like.

The branch manager was Phil Geauque (pronounced JEE-ack), Hammett’s final boss as a Pinkerton. Unlike “Jimmy Wright,” the name Hammett gave for his first supervisor in Baltimore, Geauque undeniably existed, turning up in the press from time to time and going on to a later career with the U.S. Secret Service.
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Short, fortyish, balding, and a heavy smoker, he was not a desk type but kept a hand in working the field. Physically he resembled Hammett’s Continental Op and had many experiences worthy of detective fiction: The con man who staged a car wreck, and then faked amnesia in order to hide from police inside a Stockton asylum. Or the Yellow Cab
cashier who filched twenty-two thousand dollars in Chicago, and then increased it gambling his way to the El Paso boardinghouse where he was arrested. Or the Menlo Park family taken hostage by liquor thieves stealing dozens of cases of the estate’s collection; a neighbor was finally alerted when a nanny tossed a note from an upstairs window.
²

Discussing these days in later years, Hammett packed an impressive caseload into his months as an operative in San Francisco. Some of the jobs, such as working the docks for the strikebreaker Blackjack Jerome or climbing a smokestack to search for missing gold, seem physically ambitious feats for a tubercular man whose weight fluctuated during this time between 132 and 126 pounds,
³
nearly 20 pounds below his healthy weight. He was especially too weak for this kind of work on first arrival in San Francisco, when the army judged him 100 percent disabled.

But the versions he spun for interviewers bore the hallmarks of his splendid storytelling, what the Ellery Queen writer Frederic Dannay called the “skin of realism,” which helped sell them. His claim of going undercover in the San Francisco jail, emerging only with a case of lice, may or may not be true, but it certainly has a grubby plausibility; his story of being hospitalized for months as a Pinkerton befriending a suspect in an adjoining bed, however, is less likely than that he was simply bedridden for one of his TB attacks. But even the half-experiences he had had as a Pinkerton he later learned to parlay vividly in stories and interviews, a method described best by his own Continental Op in “Zigzags of Treachery”:

I talked about myself with the evasiveness that would have been natural to a crook in my situation; and made one or two
carefully planned slips that would lead him to believe that I had been tied up with the “Jimmy the Riveter” hold-up mob, most of whom were doing long hitches at Walla Walla then.

The Jimmy the Riveter mob was in fact apprehended by the Pinkertons near Seattle in the fall of 1921, during Hammett’s last months on the job. It’s possible he was even there, despite his bad health and the impending birth of his first child, Mary, who arrived on October 16, since it made enough of an impression on him that he later traced two of his characters to the gang (Babe McCloor and Hymie the Riveter). But he didn’t have to be a witness to exploit an incident for his writing, as he did with his account of staking out the Minnesota jewel thief Gloomy Gus Schaefer in Vallejo, California in 1921: “While trying to peer into the upper story of a roadhouse in northern California one night—and the man I was looking for was in Seattle at the time—part of the porch roof crumbled under me and I fell, spraining an ankle. The proprietor of the roadhouse gave me water to bathe it in.”

He’s not claiming he caught him, just that he watched his house, which fell down. That’s good storytelling, whether it happened or not. The anecdotes he fed to reporters can feel like “carefully planned slips” by the ex-detective. “This is what you wanted to hear, wasn’t it?” he asked the
Brooklyn Eagle
’s Helen Herbert Foster in 1929. “All reporters want to hear such experiences from detectives. And these are authentic enough, goodness knows.”

* * *

By the early 1970s, sadly little proof remained of Hammett’s employment as a Pinkerton beyond the word of his family.
David Fechheimer would change that. While working out of the very same Pinkerton branch, he had become increasingly interested in the history of the man whom no one at the businesslike Flood Building seemed to remember.

When people meet Fechheimer today, his stealthy profession doesn’t seem at first to jibe with his trim white beard and rimless glasses, which might suggest a professor of American studies, perhaps, or constitutional law, instead of a detective. When he arrived in San Francisco in the early sixties, it was still “Hammett’s city. Men wore hats, everybody drank.”
⁴
But by 1965 the city was entering its countercultural bloom; Fechheimer was a “budding flower child” and poet on his way to a literature degree at San Francisco State when he encountered the books that got him off his academic track.

“We all lived hand-to-mouth then,” he says, and all were looking for work; after admiring the collection of Hammett’s other jobs listed on the backs of his novels, Fechheimer called up Pinkerton’s San Francisco branch and began his own detecting career where the writer had finished his. He learned all the skills of sleuthing and, later, under his longtime boss Hal Lipset, quite a few tricks unknown to Hammett, before eventually going into practice himself as a San Francisco private eye. Like Hammett, he began to learn the city around him right down to its bones.

As an investigator, Fechheimer noticed things: While waiting for the M car on the traffic island opposite the House of Lucky Wedding Rings, he met Albert Samuels Jr. who was out sweeping the sidewalk and whose father had once employed Hammett to write jewelry ads. Fechheimer got his hair cut by an old barber named Bill Sibilia, who remembered trimming
Hammett’s graying pompadour and that he was a good tipper. Fechheimer also located a woman Hammett had written poems for in San Francisco; she talked to him in whispers outside her house, having never told her husband about her admirer. He next found and interviewed Mrs. Hammett, long presumed dead by scholars at the time. Then, hoping to find any of his hero’s old colleagues, he used the same method that had drawn Hammett into the agency to begin with: he placed a simple newspaper ad.

Two old men answered his query: Jack Knight had been a well-traveled Pinkerton in the early twenties who never worked directly with Hammett but who knew of his reputation as one of the “fellows with particular ability.” The other, Phil Haultain, said he had learned to shadow from “Sam” Hammett himself, and was his partner in the last months of Hammett’s career as an operative. Fechheimer went to meet Haultain in the office of his conveyor belt company in Emeryville, California, in early September 1975. Their conversation remains the only eyewitness testimony about Hammett as a detective.
⁵

Shaking the old operative’s hand, Fechheimer must have felt, in the words of A. J. Liebling, “joined onto the past like a man’s arm to his shoulder.” Haultain, at eighty years old, looked paunchy but stockily powerful at his desk. He wore a buff-colored Stetson, dark plaid shirt, flower-pattern tie, and thin white mustache. “I was telling my wife today,” he said, “Sam Hammett made me a good shadow man.” Haultain recalled his Pinkerton mentor as “tall, thin, smart as a steel trap. He knew his business. He wasn’t a drinking man in those days, not that I know of. But he used to smoke like hell. Rolled his own cigarettes.” Their supervisor, Phil Geauque, was “an exciting
guy to work for. He was sharp, and I think that’s probably why he liked Hammett.”
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According to Haultain, Hammett schooled him in shadowing that fall of 1921, when Pinkerton’s was hired by the defense in the first manslaughter trial of the film comedian Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle. The two men were tailing a couple from Los Angeles who were likely witnesses for the prosecution, and Haultain remembered “we circled round them, and even with this hat [of mine], they didn’t get wise. He was a wonderful investigator.”

They were tailing potential witnesses because of what had happened at the St. Francis Hotel on September 5, 1921, when a wild Labor Day party took over three suites on that hotel’s top floor. The partiers had traveled from Hollywood to honor the star of
The Butcher Boy
,
Crazy to Marry
, and
Good Night, Nurse
, Fatty Arbuckle, who had recently signed a new million-dollar studio contract. The Arbuckle group had come to the wide-open “City That Knows How” for a bash featuring plenty of bathtub gin, but the party, reported in newspapers to have been like a Roman orgy, turned as disastrous as it was debauched, leaving one woman dead and Arbuckle accused.

Far from the funny man the public knew, Arbuckle suddenly became a rapacious symbol of dark Hollywood; in forcing himself on a young actress and party girl named Virginia Rappe,
he had, prosecutors claimed, crushed her beneath his 260-pound body and ruptured her bladder. (She died several days later, in another room of the hotel.) Other theories explaining Rappe’s death—that she was suffering from the clap or was injured from a recent illegal abortion—could not compete with the more sensational charges made by an alleged witness, an older woman who swore she had seen Arbuckle emerge from the crime scene room in his pajamas; her background as a madam and extortionist kept her off the stand but not out of the papers.

If he had appeared in a Hammett story, Arbuckle would probably have been villainous, too, like a number of the writer’s sinister hefty characters, culminating in
The Maltese Falcon
’s Casper Gutman, with his “bulbous pink cheeks and chins and neck” and “great soft egg of a belly … and pendant cones for arms and legs.” Hammett felt instead that Arbuckle had been the victim of a “frame-up” by a careerist district attorney and a fervent gang of newsmen. As he set it down in an unpublished piece:

I sat in the lobby of the Plaza, in San Francisco. It was the day before the opening of the second absurd attempt to convict Roscoe Arbuckle of something. He came into the lobby. He looked at me and I at him. His eyes were the eyes of a man who expected to be regarded as a monster but was not yet inured to it. I made my gaze as contemptuous as I could. He glared at me, went on to the elevator still glaring. It was amusing. I was working for his attorneys at the time, gathering information for his defence.
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