“Hoo Lun is an old man, quite white-haired and thin and stooped. He did the housework. Yin Hung, who was my chauffeur and gardener, is younger, about thirty years old, I think. He is quite short, even for a Cantonese, but sturdy. His nose has been broken at some time and not set properly. It is very flat, with a pronounced bend in the bridge.”
“Do you think this pair could have killed the women?”
“I do not think they did.”
“The young Chinese — the stranger who let you in the house — what did he look like?”
“He was quite slender, and not more than twenty or twenty-one years old, with large gold fillings in his front teeth.”
“Will you tell me exactly why you are dissatisfied with what the sheriff is doing, Miss Shan?”
“In the first place, I am not sure they are competent. The ones I saw certainly did not impress me.”
“And in the second place?”
For a moment she hung fire. Then: “I don’t think they are looking in very likely places. They seem to spend the greater part of their time in the vicinity of the house. It is absurd to think the murderers are going to return.”
I turned that over in my mind.
“Miss Shan,” I asked, “don’t you think they suspect you?”
“Preposterous!”
“That isn’t the point,” I insisted. “Do they?”
“I am not able to penetrate the police mind,” she came back. “Do you?”
“I don’t know anything about this job but what I’ve read and what you’ve just told me. I need more foundation than that to suspect anybody. But I can understand why the sheriff’s office would be a little doubtful. You left in a hurry. They’ve got your word for why you went and why you came back, and your word is all. The woman found in the cellar could have been killed just before you left as well as just after. Wang Ma, who could have told things, is dead. The other servants are missing. Nothing was stolen. That’s plenty to make the sheriff think about you!”
“Do you suspect me?” she asked again.
“No,” I said truthfully. “But that proves nothing.”
She spoke to the Old Man, with a chin-tilting motion, as if she were talking over my head.
“Do you wish to undertake this work for me?”
“We shall be very glad to do what we can,” he said, and then to me, after they had talked terms and while she was writing a check, “you handle it. Use what men you need.”
“I want to go out to the house first and look the place over,” I said.
Lillian Shan was putting away her check-book.
“Very well. I am returning home now. I will drive you down.”
It was a restful ride. Neither the girl nor I wasted energy on conversation. My client and I didn’t seem to like each other very much.
The Shan house was a big brown-stone affair, set among sodded lawns. The place was hedged shoulder-high on three sides. The fourth boundary was the ocean, where it came in to make a notch in the shore-line between two small rocky points.
The house was full of hangings, rugs, pictures, and so on — a mixture of things American, European and Asiatic. I didn’t spend much time inside. After a look at the linen-closet, at the still open cellar grave, and at the pale, thick-featured Danish woman who was taking care of the house until Lillian Shan could get a new corps of servants, I went outdoors again. I poked around the lawns for a few minutes, stuck my head in the garage, where two cars, besides the one in which we had come from town, stood, and then went off to waste the rest of the afternoon talking to the girl’s neighbors. None of them knew anything.
By twilight I was back in the city, going into the apartment building in which I lived during my first year in San Francisco. I found the lad I wanted in his cubby-hole room, getting his small body into a cerise silk shirt that was something to look at. Cipriano was the bright-faced Filipino boy who looked after the building’s front door in the daytime. At night, like all the Filipinos in San Francisco, he could be found down on Kearny Street, just below Chinatown, except when he was in a Chinese gambling-house passing his money over to the yellow brothers.
I had once, half-joking, promised to give the lad a fling at gum-shoeing if the opportunity ever came. I thought I could use him now.
“Come in, sir!”
He was dragging a chair out of a corner for me, bowing and smiling.
“What’s doing in Chinatown these days?” I asked.
He gave me a white-toothed smile.
“I take eleven bucks out of bean-game last night.”
“And you’re getting ready to take it back tonight?”
“Not all of ’em, sir! Five bucks I spend for this shirt.”
“That’s the stuff,” I applauded his wisdom in investing part of his fan-tan profits. “What else is doing down there?”
“Nothing unusual, sir. You want to find something?”
“Yeah. Hear any talk about the killings down the country last week? The two Chinese women?”
“No, sir. Chinaboy don’t talk much about things like that. Not like us Americans. I read about those things in newspapers, but I have not heard.”
“Many strangers in Chinatown nowadays?”
“All the time there’s strangers, sir. But I guess maybe some new Chinaboys are there. Maybe not, though.”
“How would you like to do a little work for me?”
“Yes, sir! Yes, sir! Yes, sir!” He said it oftener than that, but that will give you the idea.
“Here’s what I want. Two of the servants ducked out of the house down there.” I described Yin Hung and Hoo Lun. “I want to find them. I want to find what anybody in Chinatown knows about the killings. I want to find who the dead women’s friends and relatives are, where they came from, and the same thing for the two men. I want to know about those strange Chinese — where they hang out, where they sleep, what they’re up to.
“Now, don’t try to get all this in a night. You’ll be doing fine if you get any of it in a week. Here’s twenty dollars. Five of it is your night’s pay. You can use the other to carry you around. Don’t be foolish and poke your nose into a lot of grief. Take it easy and see what you can turn up for me. I’ll drop in tomorrow.”
From the Filipino’s room I went to the office. Everybody except Fiske, the night man, was gone, but Fiske thought the Old Man would drop in for a few minutes later in the night.
I smoked, pretended to listen to Fiske’s report on all the jokes that were at the Orpheum that week, and grouched over my job. I was too well known to get anything on the quiet in Chinatown. I wasn’t sure Cipriano was going to be much help. I needed somebody who was in right down there.
This line of thinking brought me around to “Dummy” Uhl. Uhl was a dummerer who had lost his store. Five years before, he had been sitting on the world. Any day on which his sad face, his package of pins, and his I am deaf and dumb sign didn’t take twenty dollars out of the office buildings along his route was a rotten day. His big card was his ability to play the statue when skeptical people yelled or made sudden noises behind him. When the Dummy was right, a gun off beside his ear wouldn’t make him twitch an eye-lid. But too much heroin broke his nerves until a whisper was enough to make him jump. He put away his pins and his sign — another man whose social life had ruined him.
Since then Dummy had become an errand boy for whoever would stake him to the price of his necessary nose-candy. He slept somewhere in Chinatown, and he didn’t care especially how he played the game. I had used him to get me some information on a window-smashing six months before. I decided to try him again.
I called “Loop” Pigatti’s place — a dive down on Pacific Street, where Chinatown fringes into the Latin Quarter. Loop is a tough citizen, who runs a tough hole, and who minds his own business, which is making his dive show a profit. Everybody looks alike to Loop. Whether you’re a yegg, stool-pigeon, detective, or settlement worker, you get an even break out of Loop and nothing else.