Free Hammett (Crime Masterworks) by Joe Gores

bragged.
    He looked closer. Empty. Must have been empty when he’d left the building. He stepped to the edge of the sidewalk and hurled the bottle, spinning, across the street like a Germanpotato-masher grenade. It just cleared the fabric top of a parked ‘27 Falcon Knight to burst against the face of Guaranteed Cleaning and Tailoring with a sullen thud.
    ‘Take that, you rotten Hun bastards!’ Hammett yelled.
    The rotten Hun bastards didn’t answer He had the street to himself. And he was out of booze.
That
, he remembered abruptly, was what he had come downstairs for. A man couldn’t prosify if he was out of
    Prosify. Word? Hell with it.
    Couldn’t revenge ol’ Vic without lubrication. All the working parts would seize up. Engine so worn the pistons changed valves every other stroke.
    How the hell did anyone get along without booze? The old man, never touching a drop of it. Didn’t like him drinking, didn’t even like him smoking – but Hammett’d always been the family wild one. Still just a kid, ten or eleven, he and Walt Polhaus sneaking down to the corner to buy cigarettes two for a penny. Polhaus always got . . . yeah, Piedmonts, that was it, while he always got Old Mills because they were supposed to be stronger.
    Walt Polhaus, where’d he ever get to? Use him in a book sometime. Now, though, where’d his booze go to? All gone. But he’d lobbed that bottle grenade like old Pop Daneri in the trenches at the Somme.
    Pop Daneri!
    Hell, yes, Pop always had a jar of shine around to get him through the long insomniac hours when the mustard gas he’d whiffed in France seemed to curl through his lungs again.
    Hammett started across the intersection. Maybe Pop’d have something a cut above his usual. A tin of turpentine, maybe, or a slug of paint thinner.
    Clem Daneri’s tousled white thatch was thrust out of the office door so his snapping black eyes could size up any prospective customer coming up the stairs of the Weller Hotel.
    ‘How’s it going, Pop?’
    ‘Settin’ up and taking nourishment,’ exclaimed the old man happily. ‘I thought you was off the sauce.’
    ‘What makes you think—’
    ‘Don’t I know you, Hammett?’ He shut the lower half of the Dutch door and belatedly the upper half behind the lean writer. A buzzer beside the door would announce any opening of the downstairs street door. ‘You only come around when you don’t have the price of a jar or can’t find anyplace to sell you one.’
    Hammett sat down all at once in a hardwood arm rocker that had the rockers attached to the posts in the old cleft style. ‘I fell down,’ he said. ‘I hit my head.’
    ‘Good it’s the head. That’s where it can’t hurt you none.’ The thick blue-veined gentle fingers explored the back of the scalp. ‘I’ll get the horse linament.’
    The old man went through the connecting door to the other room of the tiny suite that came with his manager’s job at the Weller. Hammett sat without moving, his head slightly lowered and his long-fingered narrow hands hanging laxly off the chair arms until Pop bounced back into the room with a dark bottle. Hammett uncorked it to sniff the contents.
    ‘I’d be
afraid
to rub a horse down with this stuff,’ he said.
    ‘Just apply internally.’
    Hammett’s Adam’s apple worked in his lean throat. Pop sank down into a worn mohair rocker.
    ‘Knew a feller killed himself like that.’
    ‘Sure you did. See in the papers where a nun choked to death taking communion?’ A mulish look on his face, he tipped up the bottle again for a second long slug and lowered it wet-eyed. ‘Whew! Jesus, that’s rotten.’
    ‘Just off the boat,’ said Pop absently.
    ‘Cattle boat.’
    ‘Okay, what’s chewing at you, Sam?’ demanded the old man harshly.
    A somber light entered Hammett’s eyes. ‘Vic Atkinson.’ He lowered his head and started to cry. His sobs had a harshnighttime sound in the little room. Pop watched him with bright speculative eyes.
    ‘So