Free Hammett (Crime Masterworks) by Joe Gores Page B

darkness of a thousand waxings of wood-paneled walls. But there it had finally become destructive: the drinking and the cold-faced scenes, and she hadn’t covered her ears anymore when the cursing started.
    ‘We were going in different directions,’ he said aloud.
    ‘Where are Josie and the girls now, Sam?’
    ‘Down south. Up in Montana.
¿Quién sabe?
’ He staggered to his feet. ‘Don’t ever need me for anything, Pop.’
    ‘Go to hell,’ said the old man without heat.
    ‘Yeah, sure,’ said Hammett. ‘I’ll take this with me.’ He waved the bottle, lurched, straightened. ‘Vic Atkinson counted on me, and where’s he now?’
    He weaved to the door, opened it, and rammed his head into the upper half that hadn’t opened. He cursed and fumbled at the latch. Pop Daneri could hear him carom off walls to muttered comments on his progress down the hall.
    When the sounds had faded, Pop went over and shut the door. From below, faintly, came the careless slam of the front door. He reached in under the scalloped green shade of the floor lamp to pull the chain and plunge the room into darkness.
    Pop threw the window up so he could lean on the sill and stick his head out. Hammett was cutting across the deserted intersection, weaving, bottle in hand.
    As he slid the window back down, Pop shivered as with a chill. God help whoever had killed Vic Atkinson.

10
    I t was shortly after nine o’clock on Thursday evening. Hammett, his pace firm, his clean-shaven face pale but his eyes clear of any trace of dissipation, crossed the floor of the echoing rotunda at City Hall. His steps rang on marble so highly polished it gave the illusion of being soft underfoot. As he passed each claw-footed, ridiculously ornate brass light standard, his elongated shadow wheeled across the floor. He skirted the central staircase and moved between pillars supporting the vast domed ceiling five stories above.
    In front of a half-ton brass mailbox facing the locked Van Ness Avenue entrance, he shook hands with the larger of two dark waiting shapes. Preacher Laverty hadn’t changed much with the years. Same heavy features, same pinkish hair just now beginning to frost with age. They were nearly of a height, although Hammett was seventy pounds lighter.
    ‘So you want to go after the murdering bastards, now that it’s too late for Vic.’ Laverty’s soft south-of-Market brogue made it sound very slightly like ‘murthering.’
    ‘Will you back me or not?’
    Laverty rasped a heavy hand down over that morning’s shave. ‘Vic thought a lot of you as a detective, and Jimmy here tells me you can’t be bought.’
    ‘We’ve already spent the last hour up there arguing for you,’ said the fat little op.
    Hammett went up the marble staircase. As he skirted the mezzanine above the rotunda, his eyes were caught, as always, by the slogan McKenna had caused to be incised above the ornate arch:
SAN FRANCISCO
O GLORIOUS CITY OF OUR HEARTS THAT
HAST BEEN TRIED AND NOT FOUND WANTING
GOTHOU WITH LIKE SPIRIT TO MAKE
THE FUTURE THINE .
    He paused for a moment before the darkly varnished door with THE MAYOR chisled into the granite coping above it, marshaling what Jimmy Wright had told him of the members of the reform committee. Then he pushed on through it.
    Evelyn Brewster was a slim handsome woman just shy of forty. Her chestnut hair was short and finger-waved in the latest style. She wore a white sleeveless frock with a tailored collar and a white jacket in heavy crêpe de Chine, the ensemble set off by a bright silk scarf around her slender throat. She smelled pleasantly of eau de cologne.
    She cast a covertly furious glance at her husband, Dalton. He was lounged in his chair with one knee braced against the edge of the oak conference table. He’d come to the mayor’s office, she was sure, only because their son had been one of those apprehended in
that woman’s
place, not from any sense of moral urgency.
    Which meant it was up to her to make sure