Locked rooms - Laurie R. King [73]
“Very well, Mr Hammett. How would you like to work for me instead?”
“Turncoating has never had much appeal, Mr Holmes.”
“Have you spent any of the lady's money?”
“I told you I hadn't.”
“Has she given you a means of getting into contact with her?”
“That note was it. The boy brought it with the money, stuck it in my hand, and left. When I phoned my buddy to ask what the hell it all meant, he hadn't a clue, didn't know who it was, just some woman who needed a job done that he couldn't take on right away.”
“Then you've done no more than keep the lady's money safe for a few days until you might return it with your regrets. Is that not so?”
Hammett sat in thought, not caring for the situation, torn between the implied but undeclared contract represented by the money in the folder and the undeniable pull of curiosity. And another thing: “You think this has something to do with the person who took a shot at your wife?”
“Pacific Heights is an unlikely venue for a random madman with a gun,” Holmes pointed out grimly.
“Yeah, you're right. Okay, Mr Holmes, I'll take your job, so long as it doesn't involve outright betrayal. If it turns out that coming to me is what opens that lady up for a fall, I'm telling you now that I'm going to stand back and take my hands off both sides of it.”
“Your rigid sense of ethics, Mr Hammett, will have done you no good in the world of the Pinkertons. But I agree.”
The two men shook hands, and Hammett reached for the bottle again to seal the agreement.
“So, where do you want me to start?”
“First, you need to know what might be called ‘the full picture,'” Holmes said, rapping his pipe out into the ash-tray and pulling out his pouch. “It would appear to have its beginnings a number of years ago, when my wife's family died on a road south of the city.”
Hammett scrabbled through the débris on the table and came up with a note-book and a pen, which he uncapped and shook into life. His cigarette dangled unnoticed from between the fingers of his left hand as he hunched over the note-book on his knee, listening. After a few minutes, however, his occasional notes stopped, and his back slowly straightened against the chair-back, until finally he put up a hand.
“Whoa,” he said. “Sounds to me like you're laying pretty much everything out in front of me.”
“More or less,” Holmes agreed mildly.
“Her father's job, the falling balcony in Egypt—”
“Aden,” Holmes corrected.
“Aden. Do you honestly think all that's got anything to do with what's going on here?”
“Do I think so? There is not sufficient evidence one way or the other. But the balcony was a recent and unexplained event, and the possibility of its being linked should not be ignored.”
“If you say so. But really, are you sure you want me to know all this?”
“If you do not know the past, how can you know what of the present is of importance?”
“I just mean—”
“You mean that, seeing as our initial meeting was adversarial, I ought not to trust you too wholeheartedly.”
“Yeah, I guess I do.”
“Mr Hammett, are you trustworthy?”
The thin man opened his mouth to answer, closed it again, and then began to chuckle. “There's no answer I can give to that—‘yes' would probably mean ‘no,' and ‘no' would mean I'm a complete boob, and ‘I don't know' means you'd be a damned fool to trust me with so much as a butter-knife.”
Holmes was smiling in response. “Precisely.”
“So what you're saying is, ‘It's my look-out, shut up and listen'?”
“Mr Hammett, you have a way with the American vernacular that bodes well for your future as a writer of popular fiction.”
“Okay, it is your look-out. So I'll shut up and listen.”
And he did, attentively, his dark eyes alive in that gaunt face. His occasional grunt and question told Holmes all he needed to know about the man's brains, and he told Hammett even more than he had originally intended. Very nearly everything.
It was late when they finished,