I cut loose in the bucket again, and had another idea. Two fingers of my left hand in my mouth, I whistled as shrill as I could while I emptied the gun.
It was a sweet racket!
When my gun had run out of bullets and my lungs out of air, I was alone. I was glad to be alone. I knew why men go off and live in caves by themselves. And I didn’t blame them!
Sitting there alone in the dark, I reloaded my gun.
On hands and knees I found my way to the open kitchen door, and peeped out into the blackness that told me nothing. The surf made guzzling sounds in the cove. From the other side of the house came the noise of cars. I hoped it was my friends going away.
I shut the door, locked it, and turned on the kitchen light.
The place wasn’t as badly upset as I had expected. Some pans and dishes were down and a chair had been broken, and the place smelled of unwashed bodies. But that was all — except a blue cotton sleeve in the middle of the floor, a straw sandal near the passageway door, and a handful of short black hairs, a bit blood-smeared, beside the sandal.
In the cellar I did not find the man I had sent down there. An open door showed how he had left me. His flashlight was there, and my own, and some of his blood.
Upstairs again, I went through the front of the house. The front door was open. Rugs had been rumpled. A blue vase was broken on the floor. A table was pushed out of place, and a couple of chairs had been upset. I found an old and greasy brown felt hat that had neither sweat-band nor hat-band and a grimy photograph of President Coolidge — apparently cut from a Chinese newspaper.
I found nothing upstairs to show that any of my guests had gone up there.
It was half past two in the morning when I heard a car drive up to the front door. I peeped out of Lillian Shan’s bedroom window, on the second floor. She was saying good-night to Jack Garthorne.
I went back to the library to wait for her.
“Nothing happened?” were her first words, and they sounded more like a prayer than anything else.
“It did,” I told her, “and I suppose you had your breakdown.”
For a moment I thought she was going to lie to me, but she nodded, and dropped into a chair.
“I had a lot of company,” I said, “but I can’t say I found out much. The fact is, I bit off more than I could chew, and had to be satisfied with chasing them out.”
“You didn’t call the sheriff’s office?” There was something strange about the tone in which she put the question.
“No — I don’t want Garthorne arrested yet.”
That shook the dejection out of her. She was up, tall and straight in front of me, and cold.
“I’d rather not go into that again,” she said.
That was all right with me, but:
“You didn’t say anything to him, I hope.”
“Say anything to him?” She seemed amazed. “Do you think I would insult him by repeating your guesses — your absurd guesses?”
“That’s fine,” I applauded her silence if not her opinion of my theories. “Now, I’m going to stay here tonight. There isn’t a chance in a hundred of anything happening, but I’ll play it safe.”
She didn’t seem very enthusiastic about that, but she finally went off to bed.
Nothing happened between then and sun-up, of course. I left the house as soon as daylight came and gave the grounds the once over. Footprints were all over the place, from water’s edge to driveway. Along the driveway some of the sod was cut where machines had been turned carelessly.
Borrowing one of the cars from the garage, I was back in San Francisco before the morning was far gone.
In the office, I asked the Old Man to put an operative behind Jack Garthorne; to have the old hat, flashlight, sandal and the rest of my souvenirs put under the microscope and searched for fingerprints, footprints, tooth-prints or what have you; and to have our Richmond branch look up the Garthornes. Then I went up to see my Filipino assistant.
He was gloomy.
“What’s the matter?” I asked. “Somebody knock you over?”
“Oh, no, sir!” he protested. “But maybe I am not so good a detective. I try to follow one fella, and he turns a corner and he is gone.”
“Who was he, and what was he up to?”
“I do not know, sir. There is four automobiles with men getting out of them into that cellar of which I tell you the strange Chinese live. After they are gone in, one man comes out. He wears his hat down over bandage on his upper face, and he walks away rapidly. I try to follow him, but he turns that corner, and where is he?”
My visitors, no doubt, and the man Cipriano had tried to shadow could have been the one I swatted. The Filipino hadn’t thought to get the license numbers of the automobiles. He didn’t know whether they had been driven by white men or Chinese, or even what make cars they were.
“You’ve done fine,” I assured him. “Try it again tonight.”
From him I went to a telephone and called the Hall of Justice. Dummy Uhl’s death had not been reported, I learned.
Twenty minutes later I was skinning my knuckles on Chang Li Ching’s front door.
The little old Chinese with the rope neck didn’t open for me this time. Instead, a young Chinese with a smallpox-pitted face and a wide grin.
“You wanna see Chang Li Ching,” he said before I could speak, and stepped back for me to enter.
I went in and waited while he replaced all the bars and locks. We went to Chang by a shorter route than before, but it was still far from direct.
The velvet-hung room was empty when my guide showed me in, bowed, grinned, and left me. I sat down in a chair near the table and waited.
Chang Li Ching didn’t put on the theatricals for me by materializing silently, or anything of the sort. I heard his soft slippers on the floor before he parted the hangings and came in. He was alone, his white whiskers ruffled in a smile that was grandfatherly.
“The Scatterer of Hordes honors my poor residence again,” he greeted me, and went on at great length with the same sort of nonsense that I’d had to listen to on my first visit.
The Scatterer of Hordes part was cool enough — if it was a reference to last night’s doings.
“Not knowing who he was until too late, I beaned one of your servants last night,” I said when he had run out of flowers for the time. “I know there’s nothing I can do to square myself for such a terrible act, but I hope you’ll let me cut my throat and bleed to death in one of your garbage cans as a sort of apology.”
A little sighing noise that could have been a smothered chuckle disturbed the old man’s lips.
“The Disperser of Marauders knows all things,” he murmured blandly, “even to the value of noise in driving away demons. If he says the man he struck was Chang Li Ching’s servant, who is Chang to deny it?”
I tried him with my other barrel.
“I don’t know much — not even why the police haven’t yet heard of the death of the man who was killed here yesterday.”
One of his hands made little curls in his white beard.
“I had not heard of the death,” he said.
“You might ask the man who brought me here yesterday,” I suggested.
Chang Li Ching picked up a little padded stick from the table and struck a tasseled gong that hung at his shoulder. Across the room the hangings parted to admit the pock-marked Chinese who had brought me in.
“Did death honor our hovel yesterday?” Chang asked in English.
“No, Ta Jen.”
“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.