He answered the phone himself.
“Can you get hold of Dummy Uhl for me?” I asked after I had told him who I was. “I’d like to see him tonight.”
“You got nothin’ on him?”
“No, Loop, and I don’t expect to. I want him to get something for me.”
“All right. Where d’you want him?”
“Send him up to my joint. I’ll wait.”
“If he’ll come,” Loop promised and hung up.
I left word with Fiske to have the Old Man call me up when he came in, and then I went up to my rooms to wait for my informant.
He came in a little after ten — a short, stocky, pasty-faced man of forty or so, with mouse-colored hair streaked with yellow-white.
“Loop says y’got sumpin’ f’r me.”
“Yes,” I said, waving him to a chair, and closing the door. “I’m buying news.”
“What kind o’ news? I don’t know nothin’.”
I was puzzled. The Dummy’s yellowish eyes should have showed the pin-point pupils of the heroin addict. They didn’t. The pupils were normal. That didn’t mean he was off the stuff — he had put cocaine into them to distend them to normal. The puzzle was — why? He wasn’t usually particular enough about his appearance to go to that trouble.
“Did you hear about the Chinese killings down the shore last week?” I asked him.
“No.”
“Well,” I said, paying no attention to the denial, “I’m hunting for the pair of yellow men who ducked out — Hoo Lun and Yin Hung. It’s worth a couple of hundred dollars to you to find either of them for me. It’s worth another couple hundred to find out about the killings for me. It’s worth another to find the slim Chinese youngster with gold teeth who opened the door for the Shan girl and her maid.”
“I don’t know nothin’ about them things,” he said.
But he said it automatically while his mind was busy counting up the hundreds I had dangled before him. I suppose his dope-addled brains made the total somewhere in the thousands. He jumped up.
“I’ll see what I c’n do. S’pose you slip me a hundred now, on account.”
I didn’t see that.
“You get it when you deliver.”
We had to argue that point, but finally he went off grumbling and growling to get me my news.
I went back to the office. The Old Man hadn’t come in yet. It was nearly midnight when he arrived.
“I’m using Dummy Uhl again,” I told him, “and I’ve put a Filipino boy down there too. I’ve got another scheme, but I don’t know anybody to handle it. I think if we offered the missing chauffeur and house-man jobs in some out-of-the-way place up in the country, perhaps they’d fall for it. Do you know anybody who could pull it for us?”
“Exactly what have you in mind?”
“It must be somebody who has a house out in the country, the farther the better, the more secluded the better. They would phone one of the Chinese employment offices that they needed three servants — cook, houseman, and chauffeur. We throw in the cook for good measure, to cover the game. It’s got to be air-tight on the other end, and, if we’re going to catch our fish, we have to give ’em time to investigate. So whoever does it must have some servants, and must put up a bluff — I mean in his own neighborhood — that they are leaving, and the servants must be in on it. And we’ve got to wait a couple of days, so our friends here will have time to investigate. I think we’d better use Fong Yick’s employment agency, on Washington Street.
“Whoever does it could phone Fong Yick tomorrow morning, and say he’d be in Thursday morning to look the applicants over. This is Monday — that’ll be long enough. Our helper gets at the employment office at ten Thursday morning. Miss Shan and I arrive in a taxicab ten minutes later, when he’ll be in the middle of questioning the applicants. I’ll slide out of the taxi into Fong Yick’s, grab anybody that looks like one of our missing servants. Miss Shan will come in a minute or two behind me and check me up — so there won’t be any false-arrest mixups.”
The Old Man nodded approval.
“Very well,” he said. “I think I can arrange it.”
I went home to bed. Thus ended the first day.
At nine the next morning, Tuesday, I was talking to Cipriano in the lobby of the apartment building that employs him. His eyes were black drops of ink in white saucers. He thought he had got something.
“Yes, sir! Strange China boys are in town, some of them. They sleep in a house on Waverly Place — on the western side, four houses from the house of Jair Quon, where I sometimes play dice. And there is more — I talk to a white man who knows they are hatchet-men from Portland and Eureka and Sacramento. They are Hip Sing men — a tong war starts — pretty soon, maybe.”
“Do these birds look like gunmen?”
Cipriano scratched his head.
“No, sir, maybe not. But a fellow can shoot sometimes if he don’t look like it. This man tells me they are Hip Sing men.”
“Who was this white man?”
“I don’t know the name, but he lives there. A short man — snowbird.”
“Grey hair, yellowish eves?”
“Yes, sir.”
That, as likely as not, would be Dummy Uhl. One of my men was stringing the other. The tong stuff hadn’t sounded right to me anyhow. Once in a while they mix things, but usually they are blamed for somebody else’s crimes. Most wholesale killings in Chinatown are the result of family or clan feuds — such as the ones the “Four Brothers” used to stage.
“This house where you think the strangers are living — know anything about it?”
“No, sir. But maybe you could go through there to the house of Chang Li Ching on other street — Spofford Alley.”
“So? And who is this Chang Li Ching?”
“I don’t know, sir. But he is there. Nobody sees him, but all Chinaboys say he is great man.”
“So? And his house is in Spofford Alley?”
“Yes, sir, a house with red door and red steps. You find it easy, but better not fool with Chang Li Ching.”
“A big gun, huh?” I probed.
But my Filipino didn’t really know anything about this Chang Li Ching. He was basing his opinion of the Chinese’s greatness on the attitude of his fellow countrymen when they mentioned him.
“Learn anything about the two Chinese men?” I asked.
“No, sir, but I will — you bet!”
I praised him for what he had done, told him to try it again that night, and went back to my rooms to wait for Dummy Uhl, who had promised to come there at ten-thirty. It was not quite ten when I got there, so I used some of my spare time to call up the office. The Old Man said Dick Foley — our shadow ace — was idle, so I borrowed him. Then I fixed my gun and sat down to wait for my stool-pigeon.
He rang the bell at eleven o’clock. He came in frowning tremendously.
“I don’t know what t’hell to make of it, kid,” he spoke importantly over the cigarette he was rolling. “There’s sumpin’ makin’ down there, an’ that’s a fact. Things ain’t been anyways quiet since the Japs began buyin’ stores in the Chink streets, an’ maybe that’s got sumpin’ to do with it. But there ain’t no strange Chinks in town — not a damn one! I got a hunch your men have gone down to L. A., but I expec’t’ know f’r certain tonight. I got a Chink ribbed up t’ get the dope; ’f I was you, I’d put a watch on the boats at San Pedro. Maybe those fellas’ll swap papers wit’ a coupla Chink sailors that’d like t’ stay here.”
“And there are no strangers in town?”
“Not any.”
“Dummy,” I said bitterly, “you’re a liar, and you’re a boob, and I’ve been playing you for a sucker. You were in on that killing, and so were your friends, and I’m going to throw you in the can, and your friends on top of you!”