“Our stout friend can tell you perhaps,” he said. “I was about to extract the information from him when you so — ah — dramatically arrived.”
“Thomas, for goodness sakes don’t stand there dreaming,” she snapped at her husband, who to all appearances was still the same mild old man who had given me an excellent cigar. “Tie up this Chinaman! I don’t trust him an inch, and I won’t feel easy until he’s tied up. Tie him, up, and then we’ll see what’s to be done.”
I got up from my seat on the side of the bed, and moved cautiously to a spot that I thought would be out of the line of fire if the thing I expected happened.
Tai had dropped the gun that had been in his hand, but he hadn’t been searched. The Chinese are a thorough people; if one of them carries a gun at all, he usually carries two or three or more. (I remember picking up one in Oakland during the last tong war, who had five on him — one under each armpit, one on each hip, and one in his waistband.) One gun had been taken from Tai, and if they tried to truss him up without frisking him, there was likely to be fireworks. So I moved off to one side.
Fat Thomas Quarre went phlegmatically up to the Chinese to carry out his wife’s orders — and bungled the job perfectly.
He put his bulk between Tai and the old woman’s gun.
Tai’s hands moved.
An automatic was in each.
Once more Tai ran true to racial form. When a Chinese shoots, he keeps on shooting until his gun is empty.
When I yanked Tai over backward by his fat throat, and slammed him to the floor, his guns were still barking metal; and they clicked empty as I got a knee on one of his arms. I didn’t take any chances. I worked on his throat until his eyes and tongue told me that he was out of things for a while.
Then I looked around.
Thomas Quarre was huddled against the bed, plainly dead, with three round holes in his starched white vest — holes that were brown from the closeness of the gun that had put them there.
Across the room, Mrs. Quarre lay on her back. Her clothes had somehow settled in place around her fragile body, and death had given her once more the gentle friendly look she had worn when I first saw her. One thin hand was on her bosom, covering, I found later, the two bullet-holes that were there.
The red-haired girl Elvira was gone.
Presently Tai stirred, and, after taking another gun from his clothes, I helped him sit up. He stroked his bruised throat with one fat hand, and looked coolly around the room.
“So this is how it came out?” he said.
“Uh-huh!”
“Where’s Elvira?”
“Got away — for the time being.”
He shrugged.
“Well, you can call it a decidedly successful operation. The Quarres and Hook dead; the bonds and I in your hands.”
“Not so bad,” I admitted, “but will you do me a favor?”
“If I may.”
“Tell me what the hell this is all about!”
“All about?” he asked.
“Exactly! From what you people have let me overhear, I gather that you pulled some sort of job in Los Angeles that netted you a hundred-thousand-dollars’ worth of Liberty Bonds; but I can’t remember any recent job of that size down there.”
“Why, that’s preposterous!” he said with what, for him, was almost wild-eyed amazement. “Preposterous! Of course you know all about it!”
“I do not! I was trying to find a young fellow named Fisher who left his Tacoma home in anger a week or two ago. His father wants him found on the quiet, so that he can come down and try to talk him into going home again. I was told that I might find Fisher in this block of Turk Street, and that’s what brought me here.”
He didn’t believe me. He never believed me. He went to the gallows thinking me a liar.
When I got out into the street again (and Turk Street was a lovely place when I came free into it after my evening in that house!) I bought a newspaper that told me most of what I wanted to know.
A boy of twenty — a messenger in the employ of a Los Angeles stock and bond house — had disappeared two days before, while on his way to a bank with a wad of Liberty Bonds. That same night this boy and a slender girl with bobbed red hair had registered at a hotel in Fresno as J. M. Riordan and wife. The next morning the boy had been found in his room — murdered. The girl was gone. The bonds were gone.
That much the paper told me. During the next few days, digging up a little here and a little there, I succeeded in piecing together most of the story.
The Chinese — whose full name was Tai Choon Tau — had been the brains of the mob. Their game had been a variation of the always-reliable badger game. Tai selected the victims, and he must have been a good judge of humans, for he seems never to have picked a bloomer. He would pick out some youth who was messenger or runner for a banker or broker — one who carried either cash or negotiable securities in large quantities around the city.
The girl Elvira would then make this lad, get him all fussed up over her — which shouldn’t have been very hard for her — and then lead him gently around to running away with her and whatever he could grab in the way of his employer’s bonds or currency.
Wherever they spent the first night of their flight, there Hook would appear — foaming at the mouth and loaded for bear. The girl would plead and tear her hair and so forth, trying to keep Hook — in his rôle of irate husband — from butchering the youth. Finally she would succeed, and in the end the youth would find himself without either girl or the fruits of his thievery.
Sometimes he had surrendered to the police. Two we found had committed suicide. The Los Angeles lad had been built of tougher stuff than the others. He had put up a fight, and Hook had had to kill him. You can measure the girl’s skill in her end of the game by the fact that not one of the half dozen youths who had been trimmed had said the least thing to implicate her; and some of them had gone to great trouble to keep her out of it.
The house in Turk Street had been the mob’s retreat, and, that it might be always a safe one, they had not worked their game in San Francisco. Hook and the girl were supposed by the neighbors to be the Quarres’ son and daughter — and Tai was the Chinese cook. The Quarres’ benign and respectable appearances had also come in handy when the mob had securities to be disposed of.
The Chinese went to the gallows. We threw out the widest and finest-meshed of drag-nets for the red-haired girl; and we turned up girls with bobbed red hair by the scores. But the girl Elvira was not among them.
I promised myself that some day...
The Girl with the Silver Eyes
Originally appeared in The Black Mask, June 1924
I
A bell jangled me into wakefulness. I rolled to the edge of my bed and reached for the telephone. The neat voice of the Old Man — the Continental Detective Agency’s San Francisco manager — came to my ears:
“Sorry to disturb you, but you’ll have to go up to the Glenton Apartments on Leavenworth Street. A man named Burke Pangburn, who lives there, phoned me a few minutes ago asking to have someone sent up to see him at once. He seemed rather excited. Will you take care of it? See what he wants.”
I said I would and, yawning, stretching and cursing Pangburn — whoever he was — got my fat body out of pajamas and into street clothes.
The man who had disturbed my Sunday morning sleep — I found when I reached the Glenton — was a slim, white-faced person of about twenty-five, with big brown eyes that were red-rimmed just now from either sleeplessness or crying, or both. His long brown hair was rumpled when he opened the door to admit me; and he wore a mauve dressing-robe spotted with big jade parrots over wine-colored silk pajamas.