San Francisco Noir 2: The Classics Read online

  “Blackjack Jerome is looking for you. He asked me to reel you in.” One statement of fact and one lie. The shakes were starting work in The Fin’s hands. “But maybe you’re in on a better business these days. Is it good? Anything in it for me?”

  The Fin didn’t know what to say, so I took his arm and led him toward the Fairmont, away from the wreckage and the attention that could not be much longer in arriving. It took him three entire blocks before he started to calm down.

  “San Francisco is a city of opportunity, you know,” he blurted out.

  “Yeah, I’ve heard that.”

  “We’re in a new century now,” he looked searchingly into my face. “The twentieth century.”

  “Fin, I know what year it is. How about we do this? Allow me to take you to your new partners in opportunity. If there’s something in it for me, swell. If not, I’ll go tell Blackjack that he’s lost a good man to a better deal.”

  What few brains the kid had were shaken up enough so that he agreed to the proposition, though no doubt he had little native objection to having someone along with thick forearms. The way The Fin’s intellect worked, though, it probably had not yet occurred to him that it didn’t look likely that he’d live out this night.

  We flagged a taxi and dropped off Nob Hill to the Palace Hotel. In the ornate lobby, parked at an angle good for observing the bank of elevators, I saw one of the agents I’d sent to relieve young Arney. Lagging a step behind The Fin, I gave my fellow op the sign for first up, meaning he was to take the first shadow assigned, Riordan, if this dance broke apart suddenly.

  The Palace was the largest hotel in town, a city within a city. Definitely a good place to hide yourself for a time if that was what interested you. The Fin took us to a room on the seventh floor.

  Riordan came to the door and let us in. Another man came out of the bath, pulling on a freshly laundered shirt. The woman sat on a couch near the windows. Our youthful operative had been correct enough—she was a tightly wrapped little package and the fuse was lit.

  The man in the shirt asked, “Who’ve you got with you, Elisha?”

  The kid said, “This is Mr. Hunt.”

  The Fin had never known my real name, nor much else. He figured me for just another skull-breaker, because that’s the way Blackjack and I thought that card should be played.

  I stepped forward with my palm out, grinning, and pretended to correct his memory, “Make that Hunter.” It or a variant thereof was a favorite alias.

  “You can call me Mac,” the man said, ignoring my hand. He pointed a thumb at Riordan. “That’s Johnson.” He glanced toward the couch. “And she’s Irene.”

  It was going to be a fun little party.

  “So,” he said, finishing his last button and tucking the shirttails in, “what do you want?”

  I decided to try fitting some pieces of the puzzle together. “Okay, it’s like this. I’m guessing you might need some local muscle for your operation. Now that Helland is out of the picture.”

  “You know Helland?”

  “Sure. When he used to be alive.”

  Riordan froze like a statue and I didn’t hear any oxygen passing through The Fin. The man who called himself Mac gazed upon me more closely, and I saw where young Arney got the impression he wasn’t the convivial sort. But it was the woman who spoke, spitting out the words, “Just kill that fat little fuck.”

  Well, change my name from Michael to Dennis! I didn’t know exactly who this dame was, but she was going to get someone else boxed up, and fast, if she had her way.

  “I guess I’m not your brand of medicine,” I said, taking a quick look into those pale icy blue eyes. I glanced at her companions. “You like to keep long lean monkeys on your leash.”

  Figuring he was used to it, I tugged my rod out of a pocket and stepped quickly to the left, bringing it smashing into the side of Riordan’s head and tumbling him to the carpet. Three steps back enabled me to catch The Fin around the throat with an elbow and hold him in front of me, gun arm stretched across his shoulder. Mac had a knife in his hand by this time, but I cautioned him against unnecessary movements by thumbing back the hammer on my .38 Special. I wasn’t some sitting duck in a coupé for him to practice tricks on.

  Silvery eyes ablaze, the woman sat forward on the edge of the couch, breathing hard, legs parted, taking every detail in. I admit it was all very thrilling, but I’ve seen more excitement in my time.

  I pulled The Fin’s head tight against my cheek, forcing a strangled gasp out of his pipes. With his ear at my lips and my face hidden by his, I whispered, “You want out?”

  “Tell Blackjack,” he said hoarsely, “I’m busy,” but then I caught the ghostly words Second and Howard before he gave out with a cough. I took him rearward with me to the door, found the handle and slipped out, shoving him back inside the suite.

  IV.

  The Fin was taking more of a risk than I’d have thought prudent, but he had his cover story about Blackjack to lurk behind. And he was just dumb enough to believe he might be able to come out of this business in sole possession of the latest cache of stolen jewels. Maybe he dreamed of taking that beautiful woman along, too, eloping from this city of plenty, wealthy at last. A hopeful sap.

  The clue he’d piped out was clear enough, though. One of the places we gathered before heading to the docks was a warehouse Blackjack rented near Second and Howard, only a couple of blocks from the Palace. If the kid still had a key or knew a way in, that would be a dandy hideout for the loot. Nothing at hand to pin the crime on them if the cops got wise, and safe as safe until they chose to grab the bundle and flee the town.

  I knew this turf well enough, and wanted to insure recovery on the stolen property. A fiasco like Oak Park wouldn’t do on my watch. The Fin might or might not be able to tell us where the stash was, but The Fin might be knifed already. If I got spotted following any of them on the street, the game would play out longer, perhaps a lot longer, so I bounded out of the stairwell into the lobby with a freshly baked plan.

  “Come here, you,” I said to the first bellhop I saw, grabbing him by an arm and slipping a silver dollar into his mitt. “Use your key to get me over to the gin mill. And make speed.”

  Clutching his prize in a tight fist, he plunged ahead of me to the basement, then through the connecting tunnel that led from the Palace to the neighborhood still. Frank Dorr’s restaurant did business upstairs in 35 New Montgomery, right across the street from the main lobby entrance, but the gin operation downstairs was the big moneymaker. They vented the fumes into the parking garage in back of the eatery, but anyone who knew anything had it marked as the place in that part of town for a thirsty man to buy a pint. Demand from the hotel denizens was met via shipping bellboys to and fro underneath the street.

  The bellhop unlocked the gate that connected the walkway from the Palace and pulled to a stop before the bootleggers’ solid door. He started to make the two-three knock at the latched eyehole to attract their attention, but I nixed him. “No hooch tonight, sonny. You can scurry back to work.”

  My destination lay over a block south and another east through passages that honeycombed this part of town below the sidewalks. I knew of another set of tunnels around Eighth and Folsom, and had heard that they connected to this network. I was going to have to check into that someday, because obviously the knowledge might come in handy.

  The tunnels had been dug years ago as storage depots for unloading supplies into the various buildings, but now provided a greased pipeline for moving gin about in quantities large or small. For that reason, I didn’t expect any of the massive fire doors I might encounter to be locked. The keys the bellboys used were merely a formality, part of their racket.

  Occasional bulbs of light dangled from ceilings, and dim rays filtered through grates up at street level, brighter when the headlamps on machines swung past. I stopped under a cone of illumination and took out my gun, thumbing the cylinder open. I usually carried five slugs loaded and left
one chamber empty beneath the hammer, but dug out a folded piece of waxed paper from an inner jacket pocket, where I toted extra pills. Four were wrapped in the paper. I took one out and put it into service. Looking over, I saw a couple of Chinese labourers sitting on their haunches in the shadows, watching my movements with unflinching black eyes. I snapped the cylinder back into place and put the gun away as I moved off into the dark.

  These tunnels were wide and high, but this march nonetheless reminded me of the war and running at night along the trenches. Since then dark narrow holes had little appeal for me. For a moment I almost heard the rattle of the Huns’ machine-guns, but maybe it was only a truck rumbling by overhead on Howard.

  I eased a thick firewall aside on its slides and stepped through into a section I calculated must belong to Blackjack. More lights burned here, and crates were piled all over. The Fin ambled out of a door, entering from a basement.

  “What the—!” he yelled when he saw me.

  “Softly, Fin. You gave me an opportunity, and I took it. So, are the jewels from today’s robbery here?”

  “Wha—, what—?”

  “And stop stuttering. Yeah, I may want a piece. Include me and you can bump the two men out of the play and be a whole share ahead. Then you can figure out for yourself what to do with the dame.” I looked into his eyes and said confidentially, “I don’t think she goes for me.”

  The youngster took on an odd expression as another grand conception forced its way into his thoughts. “Yeah. Yeah. Irene’s that kind of woman. She can give you anything you want.”

  “You mean she can cook?” I asked.

  He stared at me in puzzlement, as I brought a fist to the point of his jaw and dropped him. I grabbed his shirtfront with the other hand and eased The Fin to the cement floor. Then I dragged his body by an arm and stuffed him behind some boxes. If Blackjack wanted the kid, I’d give him a fair chance. Maybe the cops wouldn’t tumble, in which case justice could be served by The Fin encountering whatever perils Jerome set before him. If you asked me for an honest opinion, however, I suspected this one would make a better tool if he got honed by a few more years behind bars.

  I knew I was going to have company soon. No way in this world would Mac or even some fall-guy like Riordan have sent The Fin out to retrieve the loot on his own, no matter how they instructed him. The lights cut out before I emerged from behind the packing crates. I didn’t hear the knife coming, only the thunk and hum of the blade when it bit into some wood close by.

  Hunkering down, I felt my way backward along the tunnel, treading lightly on my gumshoes, fingers running over the rims of the stacks. I noticed the luminous dial on my wristwatch and quickly slipped it off and stuffed it into my pants. I pulled my coat close and buttoned it over my white shirt, and removed my hat and held it at an angle in front of my face, almost as pallid a target as the shirtfront in this murk.

  The .38 felt good in my other paw. Give me a few yards and some kind of light drifting down from a grate, and I had more than an even chance. The Fin was right about one thing. It was a new century, and in these modern times efficient killing utilized bullets.

  Illumination of some kind, narrow like a penlight, appeared behind some crates. I figured it must be Mac, by himself—I’d tried to give Riordan a concussion that would last for a while and was confident I had succeeded. But why ruin his night vision by snapping on the torch? Maybe he needed that thrown knife. My odds were getting better every moment.

  The light moving among the stacks snapped out. Most people feared a blade pointed their way more than a gun, but I’ve been cut and shot enough times to know better. I started to advance, to take advantage of the moments it would take for his eyes to adjust, when I heard the distant rat-tat-rat-tat of machine-guns approaching and sensed more than saw a halo of diffused light appear behind me as a truck bounced along the cobblestone street overhead.

  I swung to one side and felt the knife whiz by my ear. The next one caught the hat in my outstretched hand, nailing it to my flesh. Goddam! This bastard was like lightning. I flung the ruined fedora away from me and must have heard the blade clatter on the floor, but my ears strained to gauge that machine-gun rattle as it receded in the distance beyond my enemy. He’d had a second or two. Now I had my turn.

  Down the tunnel spectral light drifted in from a grate as the truck rumbled past. A silhouette shaped like a man seemed to appear. In the war, when you’d catch impressions of the Germans tossing themselves over mounded earth in the flashes made by exploding shells, you’d shoot fast for the heart. I did that.

  The powder flash from my rod blinded me and the report in this tunnel was like the thunder of big artillery. Keeping my hand as steady as I could, I fired another round unseeing, then hurled myself to the side against a wall of crates.

  I couldn’t see or hear, but then neither could Mac. The hand hit by the knife was numb and dripping blood. I waited.

  Minutes passed. Out of the darkness, I thought I heard moaning. Maybe I’d plugged him. Or maybe he was just trying to lure me into range. He must have had a last knife, for hand-to-hand, and might have had another to toss. I had four pills left, without risking reloading in the dark.

  As the ringing in my ears lessened, the moaning grew clear. I couldn’t sit here all night and drip to death. I pushed my .38 into my pants belt and dug around one-handed in pockets until I felt a book of matches I’d picked up in the States Restaurant. I thumbed one to life and pushed it in among its brothers, then flung the blazing packet toward the sound.

  In the fitful illumination from the flaring matchbook, I saw my target leaning back against an uneven stack of wooden boxes, like he was tacked there. A dark patch marked the shirt below his throat. He moved his head slightly. Hard to tell if the wound was fatal.

  I moved clear of the boxes, raised my gun and shot him dead center.

  V.

  Later, I regretted killing Dewey Mains. While behind the crates, he’d pulled a blade across The Fin’s throat and ended all Blackjack’s ambitions for that dull tool. Paddy Helland he’d eliminated already, and we found the corpses of Shaky Squires and B. P. Indick, the safecracker Helland had imported from Hackensack, in a cheap flop in Eddy Street the next day. They liked to tidy up as they went along, this little gang.

  Which left us with only Daniel Riordan and Mabel Stearns. The wires soon were humming with messages from the Chicago office, where the banker Hobart Stearns was frantic to find his missing offspring. She’d disappeared within weeks of the robbery, which had inconvenienced her big sister on the brink of her wedding. Stearns had hired our rivals, once again, to work this wandering daughter job, but we were the ones who had her.

  As pieces of the puzzle fell together, Stearns and his attorneys looked upon it as a case where Riordan had abducted young Mabel against her will. From what I had seen, I felt it was just as likely that young Mabel had conceived the plan herself and pulled that Irish fool in on it. We assembled other glimpses of their life as they spent the money from the fenced jewels, living in a fashion more in the style of a rich man’s daughter than a fellow who was only an agency detective at the height of his ambition. Another heist may have been theirs before they met Mains, but two or three more could be wiped off the books after that. Still, the lawyers made the argument that she had been nothing more than a white slave, with one of the men always on guard. Stearns could afford to settle with the wronged parties, to remove them from the contest.

  If we’d had The Fin or Dewey Mains or someone else to pit against Riordan, maybe we’d have gotten somewhere in breaking that story. As it was, all we had was my word against hers and her father’s money. Riordan wouldn’t give her up, and stood by that fairy tale all the way to the gallows, where they hanged him.

  Well, he wasn’t the first man to take the drop because of his taste in women.

  Mabel returned with Daddy to the Oak Park mansion, to life as she used to live it, although I suspect family gatherings may be more rowdy than old man S
tearns would admit publicly, with that wild one sat down among the lambs at the dinner table. I have hopes that her taste for the more exciting existence some of us live may bring her back into my sphere someday, where I can have a shot at putting that fine head on the wall.

  I think about that trophy more than some others because when they sewed up my hand they missed the point of the knife, which had broken off in the heel of my thumb. I can see it now, buried deep. Cold and gray. Like her eyes.

  PART III

  ISLE OF BROKEN DREAMS

  DECEPTIONS

  BY MARCIA MULLER

  Golden Gate Bridge

  (Originally published in 1987)

  San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge is deceptively fragile-looking, especially when fog swirls across its high span. But from where I was standing, almost underneath it at the south end, even the mist couldn’t disguise the massiveness of its concrete piers and the taut strength of its cables. I tipped my head back and looked up the tower to where it disappeared into the drifting grayness, thinking about the other ways the bridge is deceptive.

  For one thing, the color isn’t gold, but rust red, reminiscent of dried blood. And though the bridge is a marvel of engineering, it is also plagued by maintenance problems that keep the Bridge District in constant danger of financial collapse. For a reputedly romantic structure, it has seen more than its fair share of tragedy: Some eight hundred–odd lost souls have jumped to their deaths from its deck.

  Today I was there to try to find out if that figure should be raised by one. So far I’d met with little success.

  I was standing next to my car in the parking lot of Fort Point, a historic fortification at the mouth of San Francisco Bay. Where the pavement stopped, the land fell away to jagged black rocks; waves smashed against them, sending up geysers of salty spray. Beyond the rocks the water was choppy, and Angel Island and Alcatraz were mere humpbacked shapes in the mist. I shivered, wishing I’d worn something heavier than my poplin jacket, and started toward the fort.