The Lost Detective (7 page)

It was no wonder that Hammett chose to make the most of his time between relapses. “His illness caused him to conclude that it was useless to take good care of yourself,” wrote his daughter Jo. “He told me that the guys in the army hospital who followed the doctor’s orders, got lots of rest and good nights’ sleep, did worse than those like himself who sneaked out to town and smoked, drank, and helled around when they could. He believed that the disease respected toughness, a quality that my father admired greatly.”
⁷
Hammett made very few decisions in favor of his health, smoking and drinking when he was strong enough, feeling, as many “lungers” understandably did, that his present life was borrowed and his future short and deadly.

During his time away, Hammett’s parents had moved nearby to a house on West Lexington Street. Although he appears in the city directory at this address only as “salesman,” he probably did part-time work for Pinkerton’s, as his strength permitted, to supplement his pension. In December 1919 his health again worsened, army doctors pronounced him 50 percent disabled, and his pension was raised to forty dollars per month. Over the first few months of the New Year came another ebbing of his symptoms, and by May his tuberculosis had receded enough that he seized the chance to set out on his own.

He headed all the way to Spokane, Washington, a fast-growing northern rail center whose population had just passed one hundred thousand, earning it a new outpost of Pinkerton’s
National Detective Agency—a promise of work if Hammett’s body held out. The wet cold of the Pacific Northwest wasn’t necessarily better for Hammett’s lungs, but over the few months before his health crashed again he collected a number of detecting adventures he would later exploit—in the mining country, on the ranches, in small towns in Washington, in Oregon, or in Montana, where he transported a prisoner outside a dying gold mining town:

Taking a prisoner from a ranch near Gilt Edge, Mont., to Lewiston one night, my machine broke down and we had to sit there until daylight. The prisoner, who stoutly affirmed his innocence, was clothed only in overalls and shirt. After shivering all night on the front seat his morale was low, and I had no difficulty in getting a complete confession from him while walking to the nearest ranch early the following morning.
⁸

From early on, Hammett knew how to make his sketches more believable with a mix of street knowledge and self-deprecation, an approach that gained him the benefit of the reader’s doubt, whether the story was about his achieving a confession from a chilled prisoner in a broken-down car or going undercover as a member of the Civic Purity League.

After his months in Spokane and Seattle, the operative’s life again proved too much, and by October 1920, when his weight had dropped from around 150 pounds to 132, he was complaining once more of weakness and a shortness of breath. He was again hospitalized for “pulminary tuberculosis.”
⁹
Until then, each breakdown in his health had taken something
away—his livelihood as a full-time Pinkerton, his army career—but with his transfer to a new sanitarium outside Tacoma, his awful disease would finally add something wonderful to his existence.

Some day I may partially forget you, and be able to enjoy another woman, but there’s nothing to show that it’ll be soon. If anything, I’m a damnder fool now than I ever was.

—S
AM
H
AMMETT TO
J
OSEPHINE
A
NNIS
D
OLAN
, 1921

There was nothing uncommon about a patient taking an interest in one of the young women in white pinafores cheerfully coming in and out of his room. Their visits were the high point of any recovering serviceman’s routine, and the women were all too used to the male attention; a certain amount of flirty banter even helped move the day along. Thousands of men had fallen for their nurses during the war, and while the more experienced ones had learned to deflect the romantic chatter, occasionally a soldier’s persistence kindled more than sympathy. Even without the disease that altered his life, Hammett still might have later tried his hand at writing, but he certainly would never have met Josephine Annis Dolan,
an army nurse with a second lieutenant’s rank, who caught the eye of every young man whose life she enriched on her rounds.

The place where the two came together was a converted Indian trade school on the outskirts of Tacoma that had chiefly served the Puyallup tribe. Before its conversion, the fifty-year-old Cushman Indian Trades School had already been on the decline when it was hit hard by the influenza epidemic in 1919, went bankrupt, and was closed. By the fall of 1920, Hammett was among the healthier of the two hundred patients at the repurposed facility, the Cushman Institute: “[T]he Veterans Administration hadn’t any hospitals of its own in those days,” he wrote in
Tulip
, “so the United States Public Health Service took care of us in its hospitals. In this one about half of us were lungers, the other half what was then called shell shock victims, segregated as far as sleeping quarters and eating were concerned.”

Tall, clean, charming, and neatly dressed, Hammett even made his own bed, all of which was noticed by his admiring young nurse. Of all the guests there, “he seemed to stand out,” she recalled. “He always dressed so beautifully, and the area where he slept was very neat. He wasn’t very sick then, and he helped the other patients.” Josephine, called Jose,
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was soon so taken with the handsome newcomer that she chose not to believe Hammett had tuberculosis, which she knew could be fatal as well as contagious, but had merely been sent to recover from the influenza. Soon the two were sneaking out together, onto the bridge, to the parks, out for a ferry ride or a long dinner in Tacoma at the Peerless Grill. She was a nurse like his
mother, but unlike Annie Hammett, who was largely housebound, she had been on her own since she was fifteen. Soon the Pinkerton shadow man was following after his nurse on her rounds, making himself useful.

In later years, Hammett attempted to write about an appealing young nurse and her patient, but he could not set down his full feelings as he did in his early letters to Jose.
¹
These reflect a young man in love, perhaps for the first time, unburdening himself in a way later made impossible by the hard-boiled style he would perfect. He came to write to her as the man he hoped to be—calling her Dear Nurse, Little Chap, Dear Lady, Little Fellow, Josephine Anna, “dearest small person in the world,” Dear Boss, Little Handful, and Dearest Woman, and signing off as Sam, S.D.H., Daddy L.L., or Hammett.

When Hammett first saw her, Josephine was three years his junior, twenty-three, pretty, petite, and good at her job. She had been born in Basin, Montana and had the kind of childhood in which perhaps the nicest thing that had happened was her leaving the orphanage as a young girl. Unlike her handsome patient, she had clearly been in Butte and Anaconda during the labor violence of 1917, the great mine explosion, and the lynching of Frank Little, and as a second lieutenant in the army nursing corps, she outranked him. She had also been on her own longer, spending much of her life taking care of anyone who seemed small and vulnerable.

Jose’s own parents had come to the rough mining country of the American West from other hardscrabble places: her father from the West Virginia coal country and her mother traveling from Ireland as a girl of sixteen. The couple had three children before Jose’s mother, Maggie, died when Jose was
three and a half. By the time Hubert Dolan, a hard-drinking miner, also passed on three years later, his youngest, a baby boy, had died before him. Josephine and her younger brother Walter entered a Catholic orphanage in Helena.

There she stayed for a year, protecting her little brother as best she could among the institution’s harsh nuns, before her father’s married sister in Anaconda, Alice Kelly, suffered a crisis of conscience in the form of a guilty dream. Josephine’s dead mother, Maggie, appeared to Alice and pleaded with her to free her daughter from the orphanage, which she did, despite already having a very crowded houseful of her own children. (Walter was not rescued along with Jose, though he did survive.)

Jose was about seven when she came to live with her cousins the Kellys in Anaconda. “Captain” William Kelly was an executive in the Anaconda Copper Mining Company, and his house made an interesting vantage point for the local labor wars. She attended school through the eighth grade (just one grade less than Hammett) and entered nursing training at a Catholic hospital in Butte, where she endured a second round with strict nuns at fifteen. When America entered the war, she enlisted with a friend and saw some of the world beyond Montana, landing finally at the new sanitarium near Tacoma.

Remembering his months at Cushman years later, Hammett stressed the rowdy pastimes of the men, their late-night card games and dark pranks such as tossing metal trays clanging over the barrier to frighten the shell-shocked patients. Jose recalled instead the well-mannered man who liked to read when he wasn’t following her around the grounds. In February 1921, after almost four months together, Hammett was transferred to another U.S. Public Health Service hospital, a stricter one at
Camp Kearney, outside San Diego, whose climate was thought better for respiratory cases. “Which lunger are you taking out now and dragging into town when he should be sleeping?” he wrote his favorite nurse on February 27. “Or are you storing up a little sleep before you start off again?”

On paper, it is a one-sided courtship. Hammett purged or eventually lost Jose’s letters to him, the very ones he clearly suffered waiting for, but her coy, romantic confidence is implied in his answers: “What I would like to write would be a letter of the most passionate sort—one that would knock you off your chair—but I remember you saying that you were going to cut one bird off your list because his (your traveling man) letters were too loving; so I think [I]’ll play safe.”

Remembering Cushman, he wrote her in early March while awaiting her next letter:

The worst part of the day is when the clock shows 740 P.M., and I know that I should be down in front of the office, in the rain, waiting for Josephine Anna. Six O’Clock worries me, also—occasionally, when I figure it’s time for your afternoon off and I should be standing on the People’s Store corner, still in the rain, cursing you because you are fifteen minutes late and haven’t shown up yet. I’ll never awake at eleven, or I reckon I’d be thinking we ought to be out on the bridge—in the rain, of course—staging our customary friendly, but now and then a bit rough, dispute over the relative merits of “Yes” and “no.”
²

This dispute clearly went back and forth, at least sometimes leaning toward yes. After hinting in several letters that she did
not feel well, Jose left Cushman for an unexplained visit home to her family in Anaconda. Following his hospital discharge, on June 2, 1921, Hammett wrote her from Spokane to explain his own plans. He was healthier but nearly broke, and the “fat heads” in charge of Camp Kearney had offered “a ticket to Spokane or nothing.” He inquired innocently about the timetable for Jose’s “vacation,” and sometime later in June learned the truth behind her leaving her job. She was pregnant. The letter in which he discovered he would be a father is missing; nor does Jose seem to have saved his answer, in which he presumably offered to marry her. Perhaps she wasn’t proud of the circumstances around her marriage, or simply didn’t want to help her children figure out the math behind the proposal’s timing. “I haven’t any plans for the future,” he wrote her that June, “but I reckon things will work out in some manner.”
³

From Spokane he went to Seattle for about a week, and then, if the Hammett-like narrator of his novel fragment
Tulip
is to be believed, he planned to visit San Francisco for perhaps two months “before going home to Baltimore.” But he would never move back, staying on in San Francisco, a wide-open port town whose hills ran spectacularly down to the sea and whose people were taking the recent Volstead Act in easy stride in its wine flats and speakeasies. The town was run, in the grateful words of the city’s most successful madame, by “municipal swashbucklers.” This was probably the most beautiful place Hammett had ever been, a “sunpainted” town when the mists burned away, where he could find weekly fights at the Mission Armory, and trolleys and cable cars made it easier to do without an automobile.

“You’re from San Francisco?” a character asks in one of his Op stories. “I remember the funny little streetcars, and the fog,
and the salad right after the soup, and Coffee Dan’s,” a downstairs speakeasy that guests entered by a slide and could beat the tables with wooden mallets if they liked the show. There was nothing like that in Spokane, Tacoma, Seattle, or Butte.

Hammett was thoroughly charmed by San Francisco, despite its being a steep city on foot, prone to a fog that was “thin, clammy, and penetrant,” and not ideal for his recovery. But beyond its hillsides and mournful ferry horns it was home to a criminal class that was growing with Prohibition—rumrunners, racketeers, and high-living politicians—a range of characters irresistible to a man trained in the cultivation of crooks. The city’s profitably lenient mayor, “Sunny Jim” Rolph, was a far cry from the dour preachers Hammett encountered elsewhere around the country. The combination made the town heady and attractive, if he could find any money for a family and his lungs improved. With nothing saved and having been in the hospital again since his discharge from Camp Kearney, Hammett asked Jose to join him in San Francisco and start their life together.

She came out by train from Montana the first week of July, and for chaste appearances he put up his pregnant fiancée in a hotel off Union Square, the Golden West (now Hotel Union Square), while they waited to get married. Hammett himself stayed in rooms across Ellis Street from Jose’s hotel. The wedding ceremony occurred on July 7 at St. Mary’s Cathedral,
^**
in the rectory rather than the nave because Hammett was not
only undevout (“I haven’t any God except Josephine,” he’d written her) but also vague about whether he had been baptized (in fact, he had). Then the couple moved into a ten-year-old apartment building in the Tenderloin district, at 620 Eddy Street, the Crawford Apartments.