“A permanent getaway,” O’Hara replied grimly. “He slipped and fell from the roof. Not a bad little trick, this window with the phoney bars. Now you see how he made that other getaway, earlier tonight.”
Driscoll shook his head. “White or yellow, Sarge, they don’t come any slicker than Tai Gat. Everything phoney — phoney parrots, phoney nephews, phoney suicides — yes, even a phoney limp. And the guy hooked us at the end, too. There’s Shao, dead as a doornail. That damn mafoo! Now we’ll never get those three words!”
O’Hara turned to young Chang with a wide gesture that took in the cash and jades and jewelry spread out on the table. “Well, Chang, there’s what’s left of your inheritance. And of course, you’ll have the house and the furnishings, so you won’t exactly starve.”
“Kan hsieh, Sah-jin,” young Chang said, with a grateful bow. “What remains is wealth far beyond my simple needs.”
“That’s the spirit,” O’Hara commended. “With the parrot dead, perhaps we’ll never find the rest of your uncle’s money.”
“Yes,” Driscoll agreed. “Parrot or no parrot, you can bet Tai Gat and his pal gave this house a Number One going over — and no dice.” He went over to the table and stood looking at the heaped up valuables.
“The way I figure it, Sarge, they got the jitters when the parrot escaped with Chang’s message and started packing up to take it on the lam. Then Tai Gat got the bright idea of bumping off his pal and letting the dead man take the rap.”
“I think it goes even deeper than that,” O’Hara put in. “I believe that this false nephew was only a stooge for Tai Gat’s scheming. I doubt if he knew anything about the parrot, or the hidden treasure.”
“But Chang Pao’s letter!” Driscoll exclaimed. “We found it in his pocket!”
“Yes, but don’t forget the smudge of China ink from Tai Gat’s fingers,” O’Hara replied. “I’ll never be able to prove it now, but I’d bet Tai Gat planted that letter after the murder, to make the job look even more complete. He’d still have the inside track, so long as he had the real Shao under cover.”
O’Hara opened out Chang Pao’s fateful letter, and stood staring at it for a moment. “I’m convinced that Tai Gat engineered this whole job, from start to finish. Very likely he got hold of this letter when Chang Pao had his second stroke, and started the ball rolling by stealing Yun Chee’s parrot as a stand-in for Shao.
“But the parrot wouldn’t talk, and old Chang was obviously on his deathbed, so he cooked up his scheme to install a false heir while he went on searching for the hidden treasure. However, his stooge got out of control — drinking and gambling and quarreling — throwing away the money too fast to suit Tai Gat, so when the parrot got away from Mandarin Lane with the message, he saw a chance to eliminate his partner.
“His first job was to get Shao back in his possession. With that done, he scurried back to Lantern Court, fixed up the phoney parrot with China ink and samshu, and then disposed of his pal — by treachery, no doubt. He put on the yellow robe to fool us, fired a volley, then dashed in here, bolted the door, put the yellow robe back on the dead man, and made his getaway over the roofs. That’s my line on what happened.”
“It sounds O.K. to me, Sarge,” Driscoll agreed. “That joss house alibi will turn out to be as phoney as Tai Gat’s limp... Phew! Smell the samshu, Sarge? I’m splashed all over from that damn jar. If I don’t get these clothes off quick I’ll get a drunk on just smellin’ the stuff.”
O’Hara pointed to the dripping stain on the wall where the blue jar had smashed. “You’re lucky Tai Gat didn’t aim a couple of inches lower, Driscoll, or you’d have been a gone goose... Hey, what’s this?”
O’Hara bent down and picked up a lustrous pink globule from the debris on the floor, and as he held it between thumb and forefinger his eyes lit with excitement.
“A pearl!” he exclaimed. “A big one — a beauty! And look, here’s another one, and another!”
By that time Driscoll and young Chang had joined the hunt, eagerly turning over the jagged fragments of the samshu jar. They found more pearls, many more, some rolling free, others imbedded in a kind of waxy tallow which still clung to the broken jar.
“Pearls! A fortune in pearls!” O’Hara exclaimed, when they had finished their searching and young Chang Loo’s hands held the gleaming heap of lustrous sea-gems. “Old Chang Pao dropped them into this samshu jar, then poured wax over them to seal them to the bottom. It’s his hidden treasure.”
“I’ll say it was hidden!” Driscoll put in. “Why, even if you poured out the liquor and looked inside the jar, you wouldn’t notice anything. Unless you smashed the jar, you’d never find ’em!”
And suddenly the solution to the strange riddle of the old silversmith’s parrot flashed into O’Hara’s mind. He turned excitedly to Chang Loo.
“Listen, Chang, the parrot’s name was Shao, wasn’t it? And Shao is the Chinese word for fire. But the parrot always squawked out its name three times — Shao! Shao! Shao! Get it? The three-word key to your uncle’s hidden treasure wasn’t three different words, as Tai Gat thought, but only one word, repeated three times — fire, fire, fire! Follow your uncle’s directions, make one word of the three, and what do you have? Three times fire — triple fire.”
“Hai!” young Chang exclaimed. “Triple fire — it is the name for samshu!”
“Exactly!” O’Hara said. “Samshu is a powerful liquor, distilled three times. It’s as clear as crystal, once you get on the right track. Perhaps the parrot always squawked its name three times, and that’s what gave your uncle the idea for hiding the pearls in a samshu bottle.”
“Well, I’ll be damned!” Driscoll exploded. “Think of that! Tai Gat prodding the parrot for its secret, and the bird screaming the answer at him all the time! And maybe the samshu he gave it was poured from this very jar!”
“Yes, it’s strange the way things work out sometimes,” O’Hara said thoughtfully. “You know, Driscoll, sometimes I almost believe those invisible Lords of Destiny the Chinks are always talking about do take a hand in things!”
The Shadowy Line
by J. Lane Linklater
“I figure on taking the other guy all down the line. So I don’t like to play with people I like,” says the gambler. But when the gal he likes knows everything’s a gamble and is willing to play the game—
She was sitting at a table near the kitchen door, eating. It was a little after eight in the evening and she was no doubt through work and eating before going home. She was new on the job, too. Morrie couldn’t put his finger on just why he knew that; she was acting composed and quiet yet he knew she was nervous underneath. A large purse lay on the tablecloth near her hand, a good leather purse but a little worn and shabby. There was nothing shabby about the girl. She was neat and trim and her straight-featured face showed a quiet pride and her brown hair was fine and clean-looking.
Morrie, his back to her, was watching her, in the long mirror behind the Diamond Grill’s counter.
The girl was almost through eating. She was wrapping something in a paper napkin, something from her plate. That was the second time Morrie had seen her do that. Whatever it was she had wrapped up was slipped into her purse.