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Mulligan paying for Phineas Epstein as her attorney? He would cost plenty and was dead straight besides. He was at no man’s command. That meant DA Matt Brady
did
plan to forget his friends and go for Contributing. Fifteen goddamn years, maybe – while on the strength of it Brady leapfrogged into the mayor’s seat.
    Crystal came into the room lugging her cardboard suitcase. It looked heavy. She had on street clothes and a coat.
    ‘Hey! Where the hell are you—’
    ‘I must leave now, Miss Farr.’
    ‘Those detectives? They can’t—’
    ‘Not them.’ Despair glinted in the tilted eyes. ‘Just . . .’
    ‘For God’s sake, kid, what is it? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’
    ‘I have seen my death.’ She moved a hand to indicate her newspaper, crumpled open to the news page.
    ‘Is it the trouble from back east?’
    ‘Yes.’
    Molly wished she knew what the trouble back east really was. ‘Here? In San Francisco?’
    The girl did not respond.
    ‘Okay, kid,’ said Molly, ‘tomorrow you go see Brass Mouth Epstein with me. If he tells you to disappear, we’ll drop out of sight together where nobody’ll find us. Now, you go in and pack Molly’s things like a good girl, just in case.’
    Crystal hesitated, then disappeared to the rear of the apartment with her cheap cardboard suitcase and a fatalistic shrug.
    Molly paced up and down. Hell, she was in as much trouble as her goddamn maid. She knew where the goddamn bodies were buried. If some of them were dug up because of her arrest, the Mulligans would want another in their place.
    Hers.

6
    H ammett entered his apartment carrying the Tuesday morning
Chronicle
, his meager mail, and a long loaf of French bread. At the far end of the hall he gave the loaf a left-handed toss around the doorframe into the tiny kitchen. He stopped dead at sight of the massive figure sprawled in the living room’s only upholstered chair.
    ‘You’ve got a lousy lock, Hammett.’ Atkinson made bluish swirls of smoke with his stogie. ‘Ought to get a rim latch with a dead bolt. I blew this one open with a breath.’
    Hammett dropped his newspaper and mail on the unmade wall bed and sat down.
    ‘It’s not your breath, it’s those goddamn cigars.’
    Atkinson lit another of the nickel monstrosities from the ruins of the old. ‘You thought over my proposition any more since we had all that good clean fun shoving Molly around the other day?’
    ‘Still not interested. How’d it go with the reform committee last night?’
    ‘I’m hired. Given the green light by His Honor personally.’
    Hammett’s voice showed surprise. ‘Brendan Brian McKenna himself? What the hell was he doing there? Slumming?’
    ‘Acting as chairman. He showed up unexpectedly, and they—’
    Hammett slapped his hands together and crowed, ‘They form a committee to clean up San Francisco, and as chairman they take the man who’s been running it as an open town for sixteen years.’ He lit a cigarette, and feathered smoke through distended nostrils. ‘He’ll hamstring you, son.’
    ‘Maybe. But I was damned careful to get that personal secretary of his, Owen Lynch, to spell out what I was being hired to do – which I’ll grant you ain’t exactly a moral crusade.
Atkinson Investigations
is to probe alleged graft within the police department. Period. But within that framework, no limitations. Lynch is damned enthusiastic.’
    Hammett was thoughtful. ‘Your charter makes sense.’
    ‘Yeah. And McKenna suggested my closing report go to the grand jury, not just the committee. In case there might be criminal indictments.’
    Hammett paced the narrow littered room with quick, light strides as if it were a cage. When he wasn’t drinking, like now, he found the litter distasteful.
    ‘Too damned much sense to be coming from McKenna.’
    ‘You don’t really think he’s behind the police department corruption, do you, Dash?’
    ‘“Plain Bren McKenna from the Mission,”’ mused Hammett.