The Essential Noir Bundle, page 154
“Did death honor our hovel yesterday?” Chang asked in English.
“No, Ta Jen,” the pock-marked one said.
“It was the nobleman who guided me here yesterday,” I explained, “not this son of an emperor.”
Chang imitated surprise.
“Who welcomed the King of Spies yesterday?” he asked the man at the door.
“I bring ’em, Ta Jen.”
I grinned at the pock-marked man, he grinned back, and Chang smiled benevolently.
“An excellent jest,” he said.
It was.
The pock-marked man bowed and started to duck back through the hangings. Loose shoes rattled on the boards behind him. He spun around. One of the big wrestlers I had seen the previous day loomed above him. The wrestler’s eyes were bright with excitement, and grunted Chinese syllables poured out of his mouth. The pock-marked one talked back. Chang Li Ching silenced them with a sharp command. All this was in Chinese—out of my reach.
“Will the Grand Duke of Manhunters permit his servant to depart for a moment to attend to his distressing domestic affairs?”
“Sure.”
Chang bowed with his hands together, and spoke to the wrestler.
“You will remain here to see that the great one is not disturbed and that any wishes he expresses are gratified.”
The wrestler bowed and stood aside for Chang to pass through the door with the pock-marked man. The hangings swung over the door behind them.
I didn’t waste any language on the man at the door, but got a cigarette going and waited for Chang to come back. The cigarette was half gone when a shot sounded in the building, not far away.
The giant at the door scowled.
Another shot sounded, and running feet thumped in the hall. The pock-marked man’s face came through the hangings. He poured grunts at the wrestler. The wrestler scowled at me and protested. The other insisted.
The wrestler scowled at me again, rumbled, “You wait,” and was gone with the other.
I finished my cigarette to the tune of muffled struggle-sounds that seemed to come from the floor below. There were two more shots, far apart. Feet ran past the door of the room I was in. Perhaps ten minutes had gone since I had been left alone.
I found I wasn’t alone.
Across the room from the door, the hangings that covered the wall were disturbed. The blue, green and silver velvet bulged out an inch and settled back in place.
The disturbance happened the second time perhaps ten feet farther along the wall. No movement for a while, and then a tremor in the far corner.
Somebody was creeping along between hangings and wall.
I let him creep, still slumping in my chair with idle hands. If the bulge meant trouble, action on my part would bring it that much quicker.
I traced the disturbance down the length of that wall and halfway across the other, to where I knew the door was. Then I lost it for some time. I had just decided that the creeper had gone through the door when the curtains opened and the creeper stepped out.
She wasn’t four and a half feet high—a living ornament from somebody’s shelf. Her face was a tiny oval of painted beauty, its perfection emphasized by the lacquer-black hair that was flat and glossy around her temples. Gold earrings swung beside her smooth cheeks, a jade butterfly was in her hair. A lavender jacket, glittering with white stones, covered her from under her chin to her knees. Lavender stockings showed under her short lavender trousers, and her bound-small feet were in slippers of the same color, shaped like kittens, with yellow stones for eyes and aigrettes for whiskers.
The point of all this our-young-ladies’-fashion stuff is that she was impossibly dainty. But there she was—neither a carving nor a painting, but a living small woman with fear in her black eyes and nervous, tiny fingers worrying the silk at her bosom.
Twice as she came toward me—hurrying with the awkward, quick step of the foot-bound Chinese woman—her head twisted around for a look at the hangings over the door.
I was on my feet by now, going to meet her.
Her English wasn’t much. Most of what she babbled at me I missed, though I thought “yung hel-lup” might have been meant for “You help?”
I nodded, catching her under the elbows as she stumbled against me.
She gave me some more language that didn’t make the situation any clearer—unless “sul-lay-vee gull” meant slave-girl and “tak-ka wah” meant take away.
“You want me to get you out of here?” I asked.
Her head, close under my chin, went up and down, and her red flower of a mouth shaped a smile that made all the other smiles I could remember look like leers.
She did some more talking. I got nothing out of it. Taking one of her elbows out of my hand, she pushed up her sleeve, baring a forearm that an artist had spent a lifetime carving out of ivory. On it were five finger-shaped bruises ending in cuts where the nails had punctured the flesh.
She let the sleeve fall over it again, and gave me more words. They didn’t mean anything to me, but they tinkled prettily.
“All right,” I said, sliding my gun out. “If you want to go, we’ll go.”
Both her hands went to the gun, pushing it down, and she talked excitedly into my face, winding up with a flicking of one hand across her collar—a pantomime of a throat being cut.
I shook my head from side to side and urged her toward the door.
She balked, fright large in her eyes.
One of her hands went to my watch-pocket. I let her take the watch out.
She put the tiny tip of one pointed finger over the twelve and then circled the dial three times. I thought I got that. Thirty-six hours from noon would be midnight of the following night—Thursday.
“Yes,” I said.
She shot a look at the door and led me to the table where the tea things were. With a finger dipped in cold tea she began to draw on the table’s inlaid top. Two parallel lines I took for a street. Another pair crossed them. The third pair crossed the second and paralleled the first.
“Waverly Place?” I guessed.
Her face bobbed up and down, delightedly.
On what I took for the east side of Waverly Place, she drew a square—perhaps a house. In the square she set what could have been a rose. I frowned at that. She erased the rose and in its place put a crooked circle, adding dots. I thought I had it. The rose had been a cabbage. This thing was a potato. The square represented the grocery store I had noticed on Waverly Place. I nodded.
Her finger crossed the street and put a square on the other side, and her face turned up to mine, begging me to understand her.
“The house across the street from the grocer’s,” I said slowly, and then, as she tapped my watch-pocket, I added, “at midnight tomorrow.”
I don’t know how much of it she caught, but she nodded her little head until her earrings were swinging like crazy pendulums.
With a quick diving motion, she caught my right hand, kissed it, and with a tottering, hoppy run vanished behind the velvet curtains.
I used my handkerchief to wipe the map off the table and was smoking in my chair when Chang Li Ching returned some twenty minutes later.
I left shortly after that, as soon as we had traded a few dizzy compliments. The pock-marked man ushered me out.
At the office there was nothing new for me. Foley hadn’t been able to shadow The Whistler the night before.
I went home for the sleep I had not got last night.
At ten minutes after ten the next morning Lillian Shan and I arrived at the front door of Fong Yick’s employment agency on Washington Street.
“Give me just two minutes,” I told her as I climbed out. “Then come in.”
“Better keep your steam up,” I suggested to the driver. “We might have to slide away in a hurry.”
In Fong Yick’s, a lanky, gray-haired man who I thought was the Old Man’s Frank Paul was talking around a chewed cigar to half a dozen Chinese. Across the battered counter a fat Chinese was watching them boredly through immense steel-rimmed spectacles.
I looked at the half-dozen. The third from me had a crooked nose—a short, squat man.
I pushed aside the others and reached for him.
I don’t know what the stuff he tried on me was—jiu jitsu, maybe, or its Chinese equivalent. Anyhow, he crouched and moved his stiffly open hands trickily.
I took hold of him here and there, and presently had him by the nape of the neck, with one of his arms bent up behind him.
Another Chinese piled on my back. The lean, gray-haired man did something to his face, and the Chinese went over in a corner and stayed there.
That was the situation when Lillian Shan came in.
I shook the flat-nosed boy at her.
“Yin Hung!” she exclaimed.
“Hoo Lun isn’t one of the others?” I asked, pointing to the spectators.
She shook her head emphatically and began jabbering Chinese at my prisoner. He jabbered back, meeting her gaze.
“What are you going to do with him?” she asked me in a voice that wasn’t quite right.
“Turn him over to the police to hold for the San Mateo sheriff. Can you get anything out of him?”
“No.”
I began to push him toward the door. The steel-spectacled Chinese blocked the way, one hand behind him.
“No can do,” he said.
I slammed Yin Hung into him. He went back against the wall.
“Get out!” I yelled at the girl.
The gray-haired man stopped two Chinese who dashed for the door, sent them the other way—back hard against the wall.
We left the place.
There was no excitement in the street. We climbed into the taxicab and drove the block and a half to the Hall of Justice, where I yanked my prisoner out. The rancher Paul said he wouldn’t go in, that he had enjoyed the party, but now had some of his own business to look after. He went on up Kearny Street afoot.
Half out of the taxicab, Lillian Shan changed her mind.
“Unless it’s necessary,” she said, “I’d rather not go in either. I’ll wait here for you.”
“Righto,” and I pushed my captive across the sidewalk and up the steps.
Inside, an interesting situation developed.
The San Francisco police weren’t especially interested in Yin Hung, though willing enough, of course, to hold him for the sheriff of San Mateo County.
Yin Hung pretended he didn’t know any English, and I was curious to know what sort of story he had to tell, so I hunted around in the detectives’ assembly room until I found Bill Thode of the Chinatown detail, who talks the language some.
He and Yin Hung jabbered at each other for some time.
Then Bill looked at me, laughed, bit off the end of a cigar, and leaned back in his chair.
“According to the way he tells it,” Bill said, “that Wan Lan woman and Lillian Shan had a row. The next day Wan Lan’s not anywheres around. The Shan girl and Wang Ma, her maid, say Wan Lan has left, but Hoo Lun tells this fellow he saw Wang Ma burning some of Wan Lan’s clothes.
“So Hoo Lun and this fellow think something’s wrong and the next day they’re damned sure of it, because this fellow misses a spade from his garden tools. He finds it again that night, and it’s still wet with damp dirt, and he says no dirt was dug up anywheres around the place—not outside of the house anyways. So him and Hoo Lun put their heads together, didn’t like the result, and decided they’d better dust out before they went wherever Wan Lan had gone. That’s the message.”
“Where is Hoo Lun now?”
“He says he don’t know.”
“So Lillian Shan and Wang Ma were still in the house when this pair left?” I asked. “They hadn’t started for the East yet?”
“So he says.”
“Has he got any idea why Wan Lan was killed?”
“Not that I’ve been able to get out of him.”
“Thanks, Bill! You’ll notify the sheriff that you’re holding him?”
“Sure.”
Of course Lillian Shan and the taxicab were gone when I came out of the Hall of Justice door.
I went back into the lobby and used one of the booths to phone the office. Still no report from Dick Foley—nothing of any value—and none from the operative who was trying to shadow Jack Garthorne. A wire had come from the Richmond branch. It was to the effect that the Garthornes were a wealthy and well-known local family, that young Jack was usually in trouble, that he had slugged a Prohibition agent during a café raid a few months ago, that his father had taken him out of his will and chased him from the house, but that his mother was believed to be sending him money.
That fit in with what the girl had told me.
A streetcar carried me to the garage where I had stuck the roadster I had borrowed from the girl’s garage the previous morning. I drove around to Cipriano’s apartment building. He had no news of any importance for me. He had spent the night hanging around Chinatown, but had picked up nothing.
I was a little inclined toward grouchiness as I turned the roadster west, driving out through Golden Gate Park to the Ocean Boulevard. The job wasn’t getting along as snappily as I wanted it to.
I let the roadster slide down the boulevard at a good clip, and the salt air blew some of my kinks away.
A bony-faced man with pinkish mustache opened the door when I rang Lillian Shan’s bell. I knew him—Tucker, a deputy sheriff.
“Hullo,” he said. “What d’you want?”
“I’m hunting for her too.”
“Keep on hunting,” he grinned. “Don’t let me stop you.”
“Not here, huh?”
“Nope. The Swede woman that works for her says she was in and out half an hour before I got here, and I’ve been here about ten minutes now.”
“Got a warrant for her?” I asked.
“You bet you! Her chauffeur squawked.”
“Yes, I heard him,” I said. “I’m the bright boy who gathered him in.”
I spent five or ten minutes more talking to Tucker and then climbed in the roadster again.
“Will you give the Agency a ring when you nab her?” I asked as I closed the door.
“You bet you.”
I pointed the roadster at San Francisco again.
Just outside of Daly City a taxicab passed me, going south. Jack Garthorne’s face looked through the window.
I snapped on the brakes and waved my arm. The taxicab turned and came back to me. Garthorne opened the door, but did not get out.
I got down into the road and went over to him.
“There’s a deputy sheriff waiting in Miss Shan’s house, if that’s where you’re headed.”
His blue eyes jumped wide, and then narrowed as he looked suspiciously at me.
“Let’s go over to the side of the road and have a little talk,” I invited.
He got out of the taxicab and we crossed to a couple of comfortable-looking boulders on the other side.
“Where is Lil—Miss Shan?” he asked.
“Ask The Whistler,” I suggested.
This blond kid wasn’t so good. It took him a long time to get his gun out. I let him go through with it.
“What do you mean?” he demanded.
I hadn’t meant anything. I had just wanted to see how the remark would hit him. I kept quiet.
“Has The Whistler got her?”
“I don’t think so,” I admitted, though I hated to do it. “But the point is that she has had to go in hiding to keep from being hanged for the murders The Whistler framed.”
“Hanged?”
“Uh-huh. The deputy waiting in her house has a warrant for her—for murder.”
He put away his gun and made gurgling noises in his throat.
“I’ll go there! I’ll tell everything I know!”
He started for the taxicab.
“Wait!” I called. “Maybe you’d better tell me what you know first. I’m working for her, you know.”
He spun around and came back.
“Yes, that’s right. You’ll know what to do.”
“Now what do you really know, if anything?” I asked when he was standing in front of me.
“I know the whole thing!” he cried. “About the deaths and the booze and—”
“Easy! Easy! There’s no use wasting all that knowledge on the chauffeur.”
He quieted down, and I began to pump him. I spent nearly an hour getting all of it.
The history of his young life, as he told it to me, began with his departure from home after falling into disgrace through slugging the Prohi. He had come to San Francisco to wait until his father cooled off. Meanwhile his mother kept him in funds, but she didn’t send him all the money a young fellow in a wild city could use.
That was the situation when he ran into The Whistler, who suggested that a chap with Garthorne’s front could pick up some easy money in the rum-running game if he did what he was told to do. Garthorne was willing enough. He didn’t like Prohibition—it had caused most of his troubles. Rum-running sounded romantic to him—shots in the dark, signal lights off the starboard bow, and so on.
The Whistler, it seemed, had boats and booze and waiting customers, but his landing arrangements were out of whack. He had his eye on a little cove down the shoreline that was an ideal spot to land hooch. It was neither too close nor too far from San Francisco. It was sheltered on either side by rocky points, and screened from the road by a large house and high hedges. Given the use of that house, his troubles would be over. He could land his hooch in the cove, run it into the house, repack it innocently there, put it through the front door into his automobiles, and shoot it to the thirsty city.
The house, he told Garthorne, belonged to a Chinese girl named Lillian Shan, who would neither sell nor rent it. Garthorne was to make her acquaintance—The Whistler was already supplied with a letter of introduction written by a former classmate of the girl’s, a classmate who had fallen a lot since university days—and try to work himself in with her to a degree of intimacy that would permit him to make her an offer for the use of the house. That is, he was to find out if she was the sort of person who could be approached with a more or less frank offer of a share in the profits of The Whistler’s game.
Garthorne had gone through with his part, or the first of it, and had become fairly intimate with the girl, when she suddenly left for the East, sending him a note saying she would be gone several months. That was fine for the rum-runners. Garthorne, calling at the house the next day, had learned that Wang Ma had gone with her mistress, and that the three other servants had been left in charge of the house.
