Locked rooms - Laurie R. King [70]
“Why'd you take those two business cards from my wallet?” he asked suddenly.
Holmes reached into his pocket and laid the scraps of pasteboard on the table, pushing them slightly apart with a long finger. “Because they're yours. The others are fakes.” He looked into Hammett's eyes, and smiled. “You're an investigator, of some kind. The Pinkerton's card was real because no sane investigator would disguise himself as an investigator. Of the others, all of them provided you with a front for asking questions—insurance, municipal water company, local newspaper, voting registry—except for the jeweller's. Therefore, that is real, too.”
“Yeah,” Hammett told him. “I write ad copy for them, sometimes. Pays the rent.”
He looked at the cards for a moment, then his right hand clenched into a fist and beat gently once on the table-top, the gesture of a judge's gavel, before the fingers spread out to brace his weight as he rose.
“Come on, I need to show you what I got.”
Holmes did not hesitate: Russell would simply have to look after herself. Outside the bar, Hammett threw up a hand to hail a passing taxi, giving an address on Eddy Street. Hammett knew the driver by name, and during the brief ride the two residents tossed around speculations concerning “the Babe's” homers this season (Babe, Holmes eventually decided, being the name of a sports figure and neither an affectionate term for a female nor a mythic blue ox; from his earlier time living in Chicago he knew that “homer” referred not to a Greek philosopher but a baseball play—the home run); Harry Wills's chances against Dempsey in the September fight that had just been announced (Wills and Dempsey apparently being professional boxers, not street thugs); the ludicrous conversation the driver had overheard recently between two passengers concerning the bridging of the Golden Gate, which both he and Hammett agreed would provide a huge opportunity for graft and never so much as a jungle foot-bridge to show for it; and the ever more lamentable state of the city's traffic. Holmes contributed nothing but sat absorbing local vocabulary with his ears while his eyes studied the passing streets. He also noted Hammett's careful survey of his surroundings before he climbed out of the cab, as well as the fact that the house number he had given the driver was down the street from the one they eventually entered.
He'd have been one of the better Pinkerton operatives Holmes had seen—if he'd been a Pinkerton.
The Eddy address was an apartment house. Just inside the door, the air was thick with the smell of alcohol.
“Boot-leggers,” Hammett explained. “It's not usually this bad, but they dropped a box last night.”
Upstairs, the Hammett residence proved to be a small, worn, scrupulously clean space with aggressively fresh air overcoming the reek of alcohol. Hammett left his coat on but dropped his grey hat onto the stand before he led his guest into the front room, closing its door quietly and crossing over to close the wide-open windows. “My wife's a nurse,” he said. “Fresh air's a religion to her. It'll warm up in a minute.”
He took a half-full bottle from a cluttered table set against the wall, poured two glasses, and brought them to the chairs in the front window, picking up a limp rag-doll from one. He brushed its skirt straight and set it on the sofa, where it made a miniature third party to their discussion, then took the other chair and pulled a tobacco pouch and papers from his pocket. With the windows closed, a faint trace of ammonia did battle with the boot-legger's accident: a child's nappies.
Holmes took one sip of his drink, to demonstrate that the declared truce still held, then set the glass down firmly on the little side-table.
“Mr Hammett, you may at one time have