The way he was sitting, I had to take the side of his head. And even to get at that I had to circle out a little, offside to him, which was risky business. The doorframe shielded most of the top and back of it from me. I had a good hunch he was awake, too, although he was sitting there motionless.
The corner of his eye caught my motion at the last minute, but it was already too late. He started to swing his head around to me, and that just gave me what I wanted. I swung just once, like a pile driver — there was no time for second tries in this — and he sucked in his breath, trying to build up to a yell, but it never got up that far. He slid off the chair sideways and sideswiped the wall like a turning wheel and crumpled to the floor. I waited to see if it had taken, and it had taken.
I picked him up from under the arms and hauled him around into the bunkhouse with me and out of sight behind the doorway. If bleary eyes from the bunks saw me doing it, it was just one more unreal scene from their dreams, I suppose. No one stirred; there wasn’t a sound. I tied and gagged him up with rags from the bunk I’d been in myself. Then I went out and picked up the lantern and took a good look around to see what I was up against.
There was only one logical direction in which to go from here, and that was along the dimly perceived passage toward the back. To go down the stair ladder again was no good; I’d simply find myself back where I’d started.
I struck out and started cautiously along it in my stocking feet, watering it with the lantern as I went. I passed a couple of doors, but when I nosed into them they seemed to be simply small supply or storage cubicles stacked with empty cartons and packing cases. These looked, by the telescoped way they were piled up, as though they were being reserved for future use instead of being discards that had already been used. For what purpose, I could imagine.
I kept going, and finally the passage dead-ended in a flat surface that at first sight seemed to be simply the same cracked, mildewed plaster that had lined it all along the way. Passages don’t end like that for no reason, though, with a lot of vacant space going to waste where they seem to be leading to. And, furthermore, Midnight had said that the Mama Inez premises backed up against the building housing Tio Chin’s store.
So I gave it a thump for luck, and it gave out the sound of wood backing. Then I tested the side wall, and that was genuine plaster. I brought the lantern up closer, and I could see what it was. A very clever paint job hiding a door, complete down to cracks and mottled damp patches. It would have fooled anyone, even in better light than I had.
I fingered around it for a while, and finally I located a keyhole bedded invisibly down within one of the blacker cracks, over at the side. Just about where a keyhole should be in a door, but with no knob or anything to give it away.
I turned and retraced my steps all the way back to my original point of departure. I found the clouted bunkhouse attendant still lying quietly where I’d left him. He was bleeding a little out of one ear; hadn’t come to yet. I did what I should have done in the first place, fumbled all through his clothing. I turned up, among other things, a long skinny iron key, and that looked like what I was after. I went back with it, aimed it at the crack, and it belonged. The keyhole swallowed it up to the hilt. I could hear a lock flush open, but the door continued to adhere. I pummeled it a little around the edges to spring it, and it broke and slanted outward. I picked up my lantern and took it in with me.
If I hadn’t done anything else yet, at least I’d linked up the two separate segments or cells: the dope den and Tio Chin’s store. Now all I had to do was link up the killing at one end of them and Ed Roman, in Miami, at the other end of them, and I’d have a straight line running all the way back, without a break, from the killing to Ed Roman in Miami.
But the night was getting old, and my hour was nearly gone.
12
I didn’t get very far. For a minute it looked as if I’d walked into a boxed-up bulkhead or dummy closet of some sort. The lantern light and I snubbed our noses against unbroken wooden surfacing two paces or less in from the door. There was a little amputated alley formed there, wider than it was deep, but not very much of either. Wood-walled at the sides too. I stood there blocked, with the lantern reflection bent upward into a perpendicular sheet in front of my eyes, looking at planed wood grain from an inch away. But there was no point to it: a locked door, the key to which was retained by the den attendant back there, leading into a blind niche like this.
I pressed against the frontal section first, with elbows, knee, and heel of hand, and that was rigid, fixed. Then I tried it over at the right side and that was too. But when I tackled the left, that paid off. It must have been invisibly hinged above someplace; it swung effortlessly, even loosely, out from the bottom up, like a flap, and I ducked down and went through. Then I caught it and let it back easy, so it wouldn’t sound off and give me away.
I found first of all that there was light out here, and electric light at that, so I didn’t need the lantern. I turned the little wheel around to kill it, and it gave off a whiff of oil stench and croaked. I set it down against the wall.
There was a bulb hanging on a drop cord, and someone had left it on.
I looked over the contraption that had admitted me, first of all. On the outside, the side on which I now was, it was rigged up to look like one of these enormous wardrobes that they have down there, standing nearly ceiling-high. It even had a fake seam running up the front of it, complete with grips and everything; only when you tried to open it that way, it wouldn’t open; it was in one piece. In other words, it was simply a trick entryway or exit, from back there to here and vice versa. I noticed a mate to it across on the other side of the room, identical as to width, varnish, and everything else, and wondered if that were a dummy too.
These were evidently Tio Chin’s quarters I was in; a sort of combination office and conference room. It didn’t have any of the gingerbread oriental trim of the store below, I noticed. For instance, the electric light, as I have said, instead of those phony paper lanterns with inked ideographs on them. This place looked like it belonged to a hardheaded, practical businessman — and probably a damned unscrupulous and crooked one, at that. I said to myself, I thought that was an act, that jolly-Chinese-gargoyle impersonation. He overdid it.
Cheap secondhand Spanish office furniture pitted with wormholes. There were a roll-top desk, chairs, and a table, and then the two top-heavy clothespresses. The only exotic touch in the whole room was a thick fringe of beaded strings hanging over a doorless opening opposite me that led out — and, I suppose, forward, to where his actual living quarters were.
I tried the top part of the roll-top desk first and didn’t have much luck with it. It was securely locked. There was one drawer underneath that wasn’t, but he was no fool. There were a number of ledgers in it, but when I hurriedly cracked them one after the other, all the entries were in Chinese characters; I couldn’t do anything with them.
I stopped short suddenly, held it, with that funny feeling you have of being looked at when you don’t know where it’s coming from. You sort of freeze, lock your muscles, the instinct being that further motion will betray you. Although by the time the feeling comes it’s already too late; your presence has been betrayed by then.
I let the ledgers down the rest of the way into the drawer and slowly turned my head and looked over my shoulder. No one; there wasn’t a sound. But there wasn’t any breeze or draft in here either, and there was no reason for that beaded fringe over there to be stirring slightly the way it was. Or at least settling back into immobility after just having been slightly stirred. A moment ago they’d been motionless, and now they’d just gotten through wavering.