Corkscrew and Other Stories (15 page)

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.

VIII

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, grey-haired man whom 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 his neck, with one of his arms bent up behind him.

Another Chinese piled on my back. The lean, grey-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 grey-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 Kearney 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 cafe 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 street car 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 his 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.

IX

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 shore line 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.

That was all Garthorne knew first-hand. He had not taken part in the landing of the booze, though he would have liked to. But The Whistler had ordered him to stay away, so that he could continue his original part when the girl returned.

The Whistler told Garthorne he had bought the help of the three Chinese servants, but that the woman, Wan Lan, had been killed by the two men in a fight over their shares of the money. Booze had been run through the house once during Lillian Shan's absence. Her unexpected return gummed things. The house still held some of the booze. They had to grab her and Wang Ma and stick them in a closet until they got the stuff away. The strangling of Wang Ma had been accidental—a rope tied too tight.

The worst complication, however, was that another cargo was scheduled to land in the cove the following Tuesday night, and there was no way of getting word out to the boat that the place was closed. The Whistler sent for our hero and ordered him to get the girl out of the way and keep her out of the way until at least two o'clock Wednesday morning.

Garthorne had invited her to drive down to Half Moon with him for dinner that night. She had accepted. He had faked engine trouble, and had kept her away from the house until two-thirty, and The Whistler had told him later that everything had gone through without a hitch.

After this I had to guess at what Garthorne was driving at—he stuttered and stammered and let his ideas rattle looser than ever. I think it added up to this: he hadn't thought much about the ethics of his play with the girl. She had no attraction for him—too severe and serious to seem really feminine. And he had not pretended—hadn't carried on what could possibly be called a flirtation with her. Then he suddenly woke up to the fact that she wasn't as indifferent as he. That had been a shock to him—one he couldn't stand. He had seen things straight for the first time. He had thought of it before as simply a wit-matching game. Affection made it different—even though the affection was all on one side.