Terry Clane appraised the painting with critical eyes.
“A wonderful portrait,” he said. “I thought you told me you didn’t know him.”
She clutched at his arm with one hand; the fingers of her other hand dug into his shoulder. With his eyes still on the painting. Clane said, “It’s a clever bit of treatment, Alma. When did you do it?”
She stared at him with hurt, helpless eyes. “Terry, please,” she pleaded.
“Please what?”
“Please don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t question me about this.”
“So far,” he told her, “I’ve gone to considerable trouble to co-operate with you. And I’m afraid I’ll be put to more trouble to give more co-operation. I don’t want to keep running around in circles in the dark. I might stub my toe.”
She clamped her lips into a tight line of obstinate silence.
“How long have you been here?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“How long have you been here?” he repeated.
She hesitated until the compelling power of his silence dragged an answer from her.
“Since about four o’clock this morning... Oh, Terry, please don’t make me tell you. You can make me tell you. You know it and I know it. You’ve always had that power over me. You can make me do anything. I can’t keep anything from you and never could. Before you went to China... that night...” She choked into silence.
“Why not tell me, Alma, and let me help?” he asked tenderly.
“No. No! You mustn’t! Terry, for God’s sake, keep out of this!”
“But I’ve already been dragged into it, Alma.”
“No, you haven’t. You’ve just been questioned. That doesn’t mean a thing. Promise me that you’ll take a plane and get out of town.”
“That wouldn’t get me out of it, Alma,” he said. “That would get me into it that much deeper. And I’m not going to run away and leave you to fight this thing alone. Now tell me what it is. Come on, let’s have it out. You didn’t kill him, did you?”
“Of course not.”
“Do you know who did?”
“No,” she said swiftly, her tone savage, “of course not... Oh, Terry, I need you so d-d-d-damn much. Why is it I can’t ever have you when I need you most?”
He opened his arms and she clung to him like a child clinging to its mother in the dark.
“Alma,” he said, “stop trembling and talk to me. Tell me what it’s all about, and I’m going to help you.”
She was silent for a few moments while her fingers dug into his shoulders, her cheek pressed against the lapel of his coat. Then she pushed herself free and laughed. There was a little catch in her laugh, but her eyes were defiant.
“No, Terry,” she said, “you’re not going to help me, and that’s final.”
“But I am going to help you.”
“And I say you’re not.”
He drew her to him, and she raised hungry quivering lips to his; then once more freed herself.
He motioned towards the portrait. “Tell me about this, Alma.”
“No.”
“Look here, Alma, are you trying to shield George Levering in this thing?”
“Terry, I’m not going to talk with you. I’m not going to say another word.”
He stared for several seconds moodily at the picture, then said grimly, “All right, Alma. Perhaps it’ll be better that way. But understand this: I’m going to see this thing through, and I’m going to help you. Perhaps it would be better if you didn’t tell me any of the facts. If you did, it might tie my hands. But understand this, Alma, my help is for you, and for you alone. And if you’re trying to shield someone, or trying to shoulder responsibility which rightly belongs to someone else, I’m going to rip the lid off. I’m not going to let you be made the goat. And that goes for Levering, Cynthia, and everyone else!”
He strode through the door from the studio into the living-room, picked up his hat and pulled it firmly into place.
“Terry,” she called sharply, as his fingers closed about the knob of the corridor door. “Oh, Terry, if you only understood. If you only knew...”
“Don’t worry,” he interrupted grimly, “you may not approve of the understanding part, but you’ll have to admit I’ll ferret out the facts. And when I do, whoever’s taking you for a ride had better get out from under.”
He slammed the door, leaving her standing there, watching after him with heart-hungry eyes.
Where San Francisco’s Stockton Street emerges from the north side of the tunnel, it becomes as much a part of China as though it were directly under the domination of the Dragon.
Chinese curio stores, offering rare objects of Oriental art, exhibit smartly dressed show windows for the benefit of tourists. Rubbing elbows with their more pretentious neighbors, are little shops given over to supplying the demands of the Chinese trade. Here can be found rare drugs from the Orient, sliced deer-horn tips for strength and courage, gents’en for the building of blood, if one but refrains from eating any earth-grown vegetable while the blood is building. On the corners are open-air stalls where one may buy Chinese sweetmeats, dried shrimps, and the peculiar, dark brown hemispherical chunks which look like bits of maple sugar but are, in reality, dried abalones.
Behind the spacious display windows of the front streets are crowded domiciles where Chinese huddle together like swarming bees. When a people have lived for crowded generations in cities where space is at a premium, and have learned to be happy in a sardine-like existence, habit naturally gravitates them into close and odoriferous juxtaposition when left to their own devices.
Here are plain doorways which white men will never open, long flights of stairs leading to corridors where numerous doors give an atmosphere of spacious privacy. But these doors all open into common halls where families dwell in a harmonious congestion impossible for the Western mind to comprehend.
Terry Clane opened an unmarked door and climbed two flights of gloomy stairs flanked by banisters on which countless human hands had left a mahogany-like veneer. He walked to the end of a passage and turned the knob of a door which seemed even more shabby and dirty than those of its neighbors. The door swung on noiseless hinges to disclose yet another closed portal. This one, however, was a massive door of carved teakwood.
Terry pressed a button. From the interior came the sounds of a jangling bell. A moment later a Chinese servant, whose face was as seamed and wrinkled as the outer shell of a dried lychee nut, surveyed him with eyes far too self-controlled to give the faintest flicker of expression.
The man stood to one side, and Clane entered a deep-carpeted passage, turned sharply to the left, through a doorway, and stepped round a screen.
Chu Kee was too imbued with Oriental superstitions to occupy any room in which a door was on a straight line with the window, or in which two doors were directly opposite. And, to make assurance doubly sure, he had even gone so far as to place a folding screen just inside the door.
For it is a well-known fact that those unattached and dishonored spirits known as “Homeless Ghosts,” destined to wail through the twilight of after-life, can travel only in straight lines. Such ghosts cannot cross a zigzag bridge, nor can they round the corner of a screen. Moreover, they cannot lift their leaden feet from the floor to climb over a six-inch beam set in a dark corridor.