Hammett (Crime Masterworks) Read Online Free PDF Page B

got a phone call.’
    Hammett padded after her on bare feet to pick up the receiver from her davenport table.
    ‘DASH! SEEN THE NEWSPAPERS ABOUT—’
    ‘
Sweet Christ!
’ screamed Hammett. ‘
Whisper
, man, whisper.’
    ‘Okay,’ said Vic Atkinson in a softer voice. ‘You seen in the newspapers about the raid on Molly Farr’s?’
    ‘I saw.’
    ‘It’s the wedge we need! This, on top of all the publicity she got out of that tax guy’s remark, makes her damned vulnerable. We lean on Molly, she tells us who pays who and why, in return for a promise of immunity. Then we—’
    ‘Not
we
, goddammit! I told you . . . Besides, you haven’t even been hired yet.’
    ‘Molly doesn’t know that. Her place. Half an hour. From the way you sound, it’ll take you that long to get there.’
    Every Sunday morning Molly Farr, dressed to somber perfection, made the two-block pilgrimage to the weathered old stone building at 611 O’Farrell Street. She figured she owed it. Eleven years before, Molly – along with three hundred other ladies ofthe night – had descended on this same Central Methodist Church at her gaudiest, her cheap scent reeking and her ostrich plumes nodding, to protest the campaign against vice being waged by Reverend Pastor Paul Smith. She had been twenty-three at that time.
    Reverend Smith had persisted in his crusade. The Barbary Coast had been shut down, the parlor houses, cribs, brothels, and bagnios had disappeared for the moment, and a thousand prostitutes had been thrown out of work. Molly had gone south still a whore; but she returned a few years later to become a madam.
    Thus, every Sunday she went in somber splendor to the Central Methodist services, because here she had first been shown the true way: Become a businesswoman because there is no security in being a whore. Unfortunately, she’d never been able to thank Reverend Smith in person; during the intervening years he had renounced the cloth to become a used car salesman.
    Molly, perspiring slightly from the walk, let herself into 555 Hyde Street, which had been discreetly shuttered since the Friday-night raid. She was a handsome woman, sternly beautiful rather than pretty: a face with the clarity of a cameo.
    She passed under the foyer’s crystal chandelier, noted that the elevator brass needed polishing, and went upstairs to her small private landing, which overlooked the front entrance. She stopped. The door of her apartment was a foot open and two tall men were talking with her maid in the crowded sitting room.
    One of them was very lean, the other built like a bull. Her maid, Crystal Tam, was a tiny Chinese girl who came barely to their chests. She had a breathtakingly lovely face framed in lustrous blue-black hair that flowed down across her shoulders to the middle of her back.
    To break it up, Molly said, ‘Sorry, gents, we’re closed.’
    ‘Your maid was just telling us,’ said the heavyset one. ‘But we were asking her . . .’
    Molly collapsed in the big flowered wing chair that dominated the cluttered room. She set aside her wide-bordered silk parasol and fanned herself with one hand.
    ‘Get me a beer, that’s a darling’
    ‘Of course, Miss Farr.’
    Crystal wore a fancifully brocaded silk kimono; her arms were crossed on her breast so she could thrust her hands into the opposing scoop sleeves. Her steps were mincing, as if her feet had been bound in infancy. She was only fifteen, but was already much more than a maid to Molly. She was
confidante
, even adviser. It was Crystal who had suggested taking off the police graft as a business expense. It had been a swell idea until that stupid bastard with Internal Revenue had made the joke about it at the Rotary luncheon.
    ‘All right, gents, what were you asking her?’
    ‘How to cure a ten-year-old dog,’ said Atkinson.
    ‘What’d she tell you?’
    ‘To pee in a shallow dish and dip my thing in it before it got cold. Three times a day for a week.’
    Molly threw back