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it worked. He left it in. Thank God, John Huston, when he made the movie, got rid of the damned thing.

    W HICH VERSION OF IT is he dishing up now? The old Buddy Krinsky bullshit or the truth as he invents it on therun? I hope you’re smart enough to figure out why he made up that Krinsky cover story out of whole cloth. I called him on it the moment I saw it in an
Esquire
interview.
    I was in New York when I read it and phoned the apartment in L.A. He was there but wouldn’t pick up. I left a message three places at the studio for him to call me, which he did, three days later. God only knows how he filled those days. He swore he was crashing on a
Thin Man
script. Not possible, but I allowed myself to believe him. It didn’t matter at that point for me, my concern was the unadulterated crap he was telling people about the Flitcraft section. When he finally phoned back, I said, Why are you doing this? There is no Krinsky. You know there is no Krinsky and I know there is no Krinsky. He said, Lill, I swear to you there is. I said, I called Pinkerton. There is no Krinsky. There never was a Krinsky. Long pause. He said, I do not appreciate the people I care about not believing me. He was seething. And you never would have called Pinkerton.
    I told him he was right, that I hadn’t actually called Pinkerton. I told him I wanted to but finally didn’t. I loved him too much.
    I’ve desired many men over the years for a variety of reasons but mostly for the short term. Dash was for a lifetime, unfortunately
his
lifetime. He was still unusually handsome until well into his ruin, but even ruined he was beautiful. I was the only one of his women to have known him fully because we worked so closely for so long.
    Once, I remember, he read a book about sixteenth-century glassblowing in Bohemia—he collected esoterica like Lincoln pennies—and after we made love he talked so teasingly about how Cranberry glass was blown that we made love again. The Bohemians made many kinds of glass;
cranberry
, though, became our code word for sex. If we were at a bar and I asked for a little cranberry juice in my gin, Dash knew I had expectations for the evening. So, no, I wouldn’t have called Pinkerton about Krinsky; I didn’t have to. I knew.
    Ask yourself this question. Why would a writer, a fiction writer, invent a story attributing some of his very best work to some crude working stiff who does not even exist?
    What you had with Dash was, on the one hand, someone who accumulated knowledge like a coin collector but refused to ever show anyone his collection. And on the other hand, someone who absolutely humiliated himself in public with asinine pranks and fall-down drunkenness. Not to mention his insulting faithlessness. It took me a long while to see these were uncorrectable parts of the essential man. Extract them and there was no Dashiell Hammett left. Damn it.
    And, really, how could I help him when, let’s face it, back then I was often something of a drunk myself. But never, I don’t believe, out of shame.
    I’d always felt—and I told him this too often—that he suffered from a Goldilocks complex, couldn’t or wouldn’t find the bed or the chair or the porridge that was just right. The novels and screenplays were too easy for him—that’s whythey were pulps or bad movies. When I wanted to get him angry with himself, I used to pout and say, “Oh, I’m so sorry. I know you won’t forgive me. I—I’m sorry, sorry, sorry.” Except I used to say “sowwy.”
    Trust me, there was no fucking Buddy Krinsky. Flitcraft is pure Hammett, perhaps for the only time on paper. It’s Hammett lying next to me, his head on a pillow, smoking a Fatima, sharing a true, intimate thought. It’s great thinking and writing and in
Falcon
it’s two and a half pages. But, oh, how I do love it.
    Naturally, afterward, that craziness in him had to find a way to disclaim the good work, to disinherit it, invent another source, and then castigate anyone