Ahead of them lay the weird intermarriage of the Occident and the Orient, which is San Francisco’s Chinatown. Neon signs blazoned Chinese characters in a crimson glare which turned the overhanging fog bank into wine. Plate-glass show windows, brilliantly lighted with electricity, displayed delicate embroideries which had been sewed by the flickering flames of peanut-oil lamps.
Terry slowed his car to a stop in front of one of these lighted windows. His eyes stared moodily at the silken display.
Sou Ha’s voice was soft in his ear. “You are thinking,” she said, “of the painter woman?”
He shook his head without shifting his eyes and said moodily, “To tell you the truth, Embroidered Halo, I was thinking of the topsy-turvy world in which we live. The women who go blind after a few years because they must work such long hours by poor light, making these embroideries which are sold to people who are too lazy to dam a pair of stockings.”
“It is the law of life,” she said with the finality of a fatalist.
Terry Clane said savagely, “It is not the law of life. It is the law of man. It’s a topsy-turvy scheme of things which has been built by piling error on error, one mistake at a time, until the completed pattern shows it’s lack of logic, yet is all so inextricably mingled, one mistake flowing so easily from another, that it is impossible to tell where the trouble lies. Mark you, Sou Ha, I myself have seen a Chinese woman seated on a Hong Kong sidewalk long after midnight, sewing these embroideries by the weak light of a street lamp. Two daughters lay beside her, stretched on the hard cement. One was a girl of eleven or twelve years old, the other about nine. Such light as came from the street lamp was weak and reddish. The woman was bent forward, straining her eyes to see the tiny stitches she was taking. She stopped from time to time, to wipe away the water which ran from her smarting eyes, using the germ-laden cloth of her coat sleeve. Within a few months she would be blind. Perhaps that bit of embroidery, which she sold for a few cents, is one of the pieces displayed in the luxury of that lighted window.”
Sou Ha’s warm fingers squeezed the back of Terry Clane’s hand. “I am glad, First Born, that you think of these things. But you cannot help the woman in China, and you can help your painter woman. Good night.”
She opened the door of the car, slid lightly to the pavement and was gone, almost instantly swallowed in the shuffling stream of humanity that flowed ceaselessly along the narrow sidewalks.
For a long moment Terry sat there, motionless, the slip-slop of Chinese shoes, the clanging bells of the cable cars, sing-song intonations of Cantonese conversation audible above the purring sound of his idling motor. Then he changed gear and depressed the accelerator.
He took precautions to make certain he was not followed, and went at once to the studio of Vera Matthews.
Alma Renton opened the door only after he had knocked twice and gently called her name. Her face was grey with fatigue. She had sought to discount this by the generous application of make-up. But an aura of weariness clinging to her skin made mockery of the crimson lips and rouged cheeks.
With a glad little cry she came to his arms and snuggled close to him.
“Oh, Terry, I’m so glad you’re back! The minutes have been fighting me, and have me licked.”
“You didn’t answer the telephone,” he said.
“I was afraid to, Terry. If it had been someone calling Vera, I didn’t want to explain who I was, and why I was here; and if it had been someone calling me... I couldn’t trust myself to talk. I mustn’t see anyone until...”
“Until what?” he asked, as she hesitated.
“Until Cynthia comes.”
“Cynthia,” he said, “went to the district attorney’s office.”
“I know,” she told him. “Sit down, Terry. There’s Scotch, soda, and ice on the table. Help yourself, but don’t give me any.”
“It might do you good,” he told her.
“No,” she said, “I tried it. I didn’t get any lift out of it.”
“That bad?” he asked, stretching out in a chair and dropping ice cubes into a glass.
She rested one hip on the flat arm of an easy chair, and watched him pour a small amount of amber liquid over the ice cubes, then water from the siphon.
“You don’t go in much for liquor, do you, Terry?”
He raised his eyebrows in silent interrogation.
“You’re using that drink just as a prop,” she said, “a stage setting you can have to fall back on. You have something important to say, and you don’t want me to realize how important it is. So you’ll sit and toy with that drink, slide the tips of your fingers up and down the moist glass, and make comments which are apparently casual, yet are filled with deadly importance.”
“Know me that well, Alma?” he asked.
“A woman always knows the man she loves.”
“No,” he said slowly, “she doesn’t. That’s the hell of it.” He would have said something more, but she silenced him with a gesture and said, “That’s something else we’ve got to settle, Terry, but we mustn’t do it now. We won’t do it now, so you needn’t be frightened.”
“Frightened?” he asked, frowning and sliding the tips of his fingers up and down the moist glass. He checked himself abruptly as he realized what he was doing, and saw the amusement in her watching eyes.
She laughed throatily and said, “I’ll discuss that with you later. Terry, do you suppose anything has gone wrong with Cynthia? They’ve been holding her down there for hours.”
“You know what time she went there?” he asked, making the question very casual indeed.
“Approximately, yes,” she admitted.
“In other words, Alma, you and Cynthia knew that my apartment was being watched. When you were ready for Cynthia to tell her story, you had her come to call on me, knowing that she’d be picked up.”
Alma tried to keep her face expressionless, but Clane didn’t even bother to look at her. He stared moodily at the bubbles which shot upward from the drink in his glass, and went on in a low monotone, “Obviously, Cynthia had been carefully rehearsed in the story she was to tell the police. She left Mandra’s apartment at two o’clock in the morning, carrying Mandra’s portrait. In order to substantiate her alibi she’ll have to produce the portrait. Now why didn’t she leave it where she could produce it?”
“But she did,” Alma said, puzzled.
“Where?”
“It’s at my apartment.”
“At your apartment?”
“Yes.”
“You’re certain?”
“Of course I’m certain.”
“How did it get there?”
“By taxicab, silly.”
“In which case the police will trace it back to you here.”
“No. They won’t trace it, Terry. They can’t.”
“Why can’t they?”
“Because it wasn’t sent directly.”
Terry kept his eyes fastened on his drink. His voice was noncommittal. “Tell me about it,” he said.
“There’s nothing to tell. The portrait is at my apartment. That is, it was at my apartment. I presume it’s at police headquarters now. You see, Cynthia will tell her story, and the police will pick up the portrait. Then they’ll check her alibi. A young artist saw her on the stairs. They’ll ask him to identify her. If he’s truthful, he’ll do it — and that will be all there’ll be to it. Mandra was killed about three o’clock. Cynthia left there at two o’clock.”