One private dick's search for the real thin man
by Jack Neely
I found myself in Fountain City, as I often do when something's bugging me. The air seems cleaner there, and a stroll around the park makes everything seem simpler.
But this time it didn't work. Everybody I saw was younger and happier than I was. Ladies were laughing at Litton's, boys were playing ball in the park. I felt like a goose in the duck pond. I nodded to the old salts fishing along the shore. Then I turned up Hotel Avenue, saw the neon coffee cup in the window, and pushed into the only place for me. The only cafe in Fountain City that could deal with my mood. The Cafe Noir. I sat at a little table with a rubberized tablecloth underneath the big framed picture of Humphrey Bogart, daring you to say he doesn't look like the real Sam Spade. Dusty Springfield was on the record player. I ordered my regular, the dill chicken salad on croissant, with extra almonds. "Easy on the paprika, Cookie," I said. She knew how to take care of me.
My problem was a tough one, and I knew it. It was tougher than the Rachmaninoff case or the Corbusier job. How to prove Dashiell Hammett ever had anything to do with Knoxville.
Don't ask me why that was important to me. Sure, plenty big shots have been here before. But you can have your Amelia Earhart, your Jean-Paul Sartre, your Jim Nabors. It just didn't seem like a real city to me unless Hammett had been here. The problem was that the guy spent most of his life in the northeast and on the West Coast.
OK, I know what you're thinking. North Knoxville's own Helen Mundy, who was a silent film star for about a week and a half in the late '20s, dated William Powell, who later played Nick Charles in The Thin Man, the movie based on the book which Hammett wrote. Hammett knew Powell. Maybe he knew Mundy, too. For some people maybe that's enough. Not for me. I had to see Hammett himself, in a fedora, stretching his long spider legs on these sidewalks.
Then I got my break. Engrossed in my latte, I hardly noticed the thin man come in through the back door, from the alley. The lady behind the counter didn't say a thing as the thin man ambled through, pulled a coffee cup off the wall and poured himself a Guatemalan Antigua. There were other tables in the joint, but he sat down at mine. He cocked back his fedora. He had a big mustache like that of the late humorist S.J. Perelman.
"I thought you were dead," I said.
"I am," he said. "You're reading my book." I looked down. He was right. It was Perelman's collection of essays, The Last Laugh. "And I think you've had one too many lattes."
He explained it to me. First about the lattes and what they can do to your central nervous system. Then about Hammett.
Perelman and Hammett had been pals, see, and Hammett once told him a funny story about one long trip down South. Back in the '20s, before The Maltese Falcon, Hammett was a private eye himself, working for the Pinkerton agency. Most of his cases were out West. But once he was hired to shadow a suspected jewel thief, a slippery character with a name right out of a Hammett story. Finsterwald was posing as a salesman for a New York jewelry store, and was off on a trip south, with two cases of sample jewels. His employer figured he was up to no good. They called Pinkerton. Pinkerton called Hammett and told him to tail Finsterwald.
It might have seemed odd to put Hammett on a low-profile surveillance gig. "Conspicuous for his height, emaciation, and snow-white thatch, Hammett was an unlikely choice for the job," admitted Perelman. "But, as it happened, all the other operatives were out breaking strikes or retrieving gold falcons or whatever gumshoes of that era busied themselves with."
From Philadelphia Hammett followed Finsterwald as he ran into the South with two cases of sample jewels. Hammett followed him from Hagerstown, Maryland, to Richmond, to Raleigh, North Carolina, always staying in a room near the suspect, never letting him leave his sight. "No-where in his zigzag pattern was Finsterwald ever out of Hammett's sight for a moment during waking hours, nor did he call on a single prospect." Then he followed Finsterwald to Knoxville, Tennessee.
Hammett apparently stayed here overnight. He didn't tell Perelman exactly what he did here, or whether he stayed at the Farragut or the Atkin or the St. James, or whether he sat at the counter at Regas Brothers. It just says that he shadowed Finsterwald as he carried the jewels from city to city, without making any sales calls at all. Then Finsterwald got back on the train and went farther south, to Macon, then Savannah. Hammett followed him. In a park in Savannah, Hammett was surprised when Finsterwald sat down beside him. "You look familiar," Finsterwald said. Hammett played dumb. But because he looked familiar, Finsterwald figured him for a pal. He proposed a complicated scheme by which they would fence the jewels in Zanesville, Ohio. Hammett said sure, but as soon as they parted he called the cops. Finsterwald never knew what hit him.
I had it figured. Case closed.
"Neely, there's one thing I don't understand," Perelman said.
"What's that?" I said.
"You're interested in Hammett. You wanted Hammett here, now you've got him. So how come you're talking like some Joe in a Raymond Chandler novel?"
July 18, 2002 * Vol. 12, No. 29
© 2002 Metro Pulse
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