Half the roll had been exposed.
“Came aboard to get a picture of Hassler and Little Goldilocks,” he decided, slipping the camera into his vest pocket. It was worth over two hundred and could be hocked for at least fifteen bucks.
The following afternoon, Hassler phoned Cragin’s office.
“Bring your gun and toothbrush out to the house. You’ve got a twenty-four hour a day job.”
“That’ll cost you,” began Cragin.
“Tell me when you get here,” snapped Hassler, hanging up.
There was not a cab in sight. Cragin hoofed it from Kearney toward a stand on Stockton Street. Near it was a loan office, where he could hock the imported snooping camera.
Half a block from Grant Street, Cragin’s ears were blasted by Mongolian yells, wrathful screeches, and the vicious chatter of automatics in a cross alley. A tong war, and a damn good one, too.
His vest buttons bit into the paving behind a garbage receptacle as a hatful of slugs spattered glass and brick-dust into his checks. In view of Chinese marksmanship, staying was better than running.
The clashing highbinders surged to the mouth of the alley. Cragin reached for the candid camera. An action shot of a tong war was a rara avis, which is Greek for a hot number.
A dollar’s worth of forty-fives chunked through the garbage can. Three highbinders paused to blast a survivor, then turned to dash across Jackson—and toward Cragin.
One of them spied Cragin and the camera. Pistols shifted toward him. The Chinese don’t like pictures.
Simultaneously, the iron cover of a coal chute erupted from the opposite paving. A baldheaded, wizened little Chinese with a face like a withered apple thrust a shotgun up from a subterranean passage. A gust of flame and a hail of buckshot caught the three highbinders amidships, bowling them into the street, a kicking, writhing, gory mass of torn flesh.
It all happened as Cragin snapped the camera, and before he could react to his peril and reach for his pistol; and only then did the details register. The subterranean gunner was the first of six Chinese who had conferred with Hassler, on the yacht. The new job became interesting.
* * * *
Cragin changed his mind about hocking the camera. Instead, he left the film at a drug store, bought a fresh roll, and hopped a cab for Hassler’s palace at the right end of Jackson Street.
It was a rose granite heap perched on a steep hill, with porte cochere, garage, and tradesmen’s entrance in the sub-structure between main floor and the side hill.
He found Hassler in his third floor study, which was at the rear of the house, overlooking the grounds.
“I’m holing in,” he explained. “The carpenters and plumbers have fixed up a room that blocks the entrance to this section. That’s yours. I guess you noticed it on your way in.
“Nobody can get in unless they pass you. Not a chance to come in through the windows, either from the roof or the ground. You receive phone calls in your room. Give me the dirt over the house wire. Get it?”
“Sold,” said Cragin.
Hassler dropped not a hint as to the source of peril. But the tong war made that needless.
That night Hassler instructed, “Call Mona Bartley, and tell her to come up.”
An hour later, the bronze-haired girl with the topaz eyes was admitted to the guard house. Mona’s smile was a riddle in crimson. Her fingers lingered caressingly on Cragin’s wrist, and her fragrance dizzied him.
“If I walk in my sleep, don’t shoot,” she whispered as she pasted onto Hassler’s apartment.
But Hassler, at about 2 A.M. buzzed him to root out Giles, the chauffeur, who was to drive Mona home.
“I wish I was an exporter,” he grumbled as Mona emerged.
He grabbed an armful. Before it reached the high compression stage, she wriggled clear, and left without a word. Her geared-up breathing, however was as good as an oration…
* * * *
Several days passed, Hassler, despite the sweetening effect of Mona’s visits, was becoming peevish. The splintering of wood brought Cragin to Hassler’s hide-out. He had kicked the radio to pieces.
“Don’t stand there, gaping like a —damn fool!” he roared. “Order me a good one!” Mona returned that evening, which eased the riot that followed when Cragin reported that the new radio had not arrived. The shipping clerk had pulled a boner; an empty packing case had been sent. Hassler’s rage kept Cragin from noticing the singularity of such an error.
Hours later, Mona emerged from the study. “Don’t phone the chauffeur yet,” she whispered.
Cragin’s heart hammered like voodoo drums. She meant it; but he was not quite sure until she wriggled out of her coat.
“He’s so jittery,” she whispered that I told him he’d better try reading, or something.”
“I’ll be any dirty name,” Cragin assured her, “if my financial worries keep me from appreciating the beauties of nature.”
He proved that point without further discussion; and when Mona finally broke away from his kiss and came up for air, she murmured “Oh…Cliff…you’re hurting me…don’t hold me quite so close…” In spite of that presently Mona clinched and began making inarticulate sounds that mean the same in any language…
* * * *
When Mona finally left, Cragin winked at the door of Hassler’s study and quoted the one about not missing a slice from a cut loaf. Then he lighted a cigarette and sat down to figure out whose loaf it was, anyhow.
His pondering was interrupted by a faint whiff of bitter almonds; Cyanide fumes!
Cragin yanked the door open. Hassler lay on the rug at the foot of his desk. Two men were searching his filing cabinets. Their faces were concealed by gas masks.
Cragin, holding his breath, fired a shot as the startled intruders whirled.
One staggered, leaped to the window, and cleared the sill. The other stood fast and returned the fire.
Cragin squeezed another wild burst, retreated to the hall door, kicked it open. He gulped a lungful of clean air, then whirled to sift lead past the door jamb; but the rear guard was clearing the sill. He flinched, wavered as a slug hit him, then slipped from view.
Cragin, holding his breath, dashed to the window. The raiders were clearing the rear wall of the estate.
Certain that the brisk breeze had swept out the deadly fumes, Cragin turned toward Hassler.
His face was no longer ruddy, but slate blue. There was no pulse. When cyanogen hits, they stay hit.
His expression indicated surprise and query rather than alarm; amazed recognition. He had died before realizing his peril. But most peculiar of all was his hands.
The left, touching his chest, had three fingers extended, with the index curled to touch the tip of the thumb. The right, thrust out, gestured oddly: the third and fourth digits were bent in, touching the palm, the other two, and the thumb were extended It looked like a lodge sign.
Before he could stoop for a closer look, he heard a sound behind him. He turned. A slender girl in a pale blue Chinese tunic and silken trousers was emerging from behind a bookcase and dashing toward the hall.
Cragin bounded after her.
She tripped at the entrance of his guard annex. She lay there gasping for breath; but despite the distortion of her features, she was uncommonly attractive. A slender, exquisitely formed creature.
“What the hell’s the idea?” he demanded “And how come you’re not blue in the face?”
“I was hiding when they came in through the window,” she gasped. “Right at a furnace outlet that feeds hot air into the room. That kept most of the fumes from reaching me. They walked up to him, then broke a glass globe against his desk. Then put on their gas masks.”
Cragin noted fragments that confirmed her account. “You saw them before they put on their masks?” Then, as she nodded: “Were they Chinese?�
�
“Yes. And when you broke in, I was so nearly dead from holding my breath, I couldn’t wait to slip out.”
Cragin, lifting her to her feet, learned that the straightness of her Chinese costume was deceptive; that her apparent flat-chestedness was a delusion, fostered by the Oriental version of a brassiere.
“Trot along,” he said, catching her by the wrist.
She followed him toward Hassler’s body.
“What do you know about that?” he demanded, indicating the oddly arranged fingers.
“If I knew what you were going to do with me,” she countered, smiling mysteriously, “we might get somewhere.”
Cragin reached for the telephone, but the girl caught his hand.
“Keep me clear of the police, and I will tell you plenty.”
“Okay,” he conceded “They won’t search that clothes closet. But who the devil are you?”
“I’m Anita Tsang,” she said “You’d be surprised at what’s ahead of you.”
“I can stand surprises,” he countered, pausing for a left-handed appraisal of Anita’s right knee.
Nevertheless, he locked the closet door before he returned to the study.
* * * *
While awaiting the arrival of the police, Cragin noted that the assassins had escaped by sliding down a silken cord which reached to the ground. But who had anchored it there in the first place?
The hot air register was out of place. Anita had entered from a lower and unguarded floor. Better not turn her over to the police at once. Let the papers play it up, then crack the case. He had to, with his client murdered.
A news hound entered with the cops. Mr. Denby, recovered from his plunge in the Bay, was representing the Times.
“Financial stuff?” mocked Cragin.
Denby’s thin face hardened, then he chuckled.
When the law’s quiz was over, he edged Cragin into a corner.
“I’ll trade horses with you,” he proposed. “The G-men were on Hassler’s trail. Opium smuggling. You know that. Cut me in on the dirt and I’ll put you next to some velvet.”
“Nuts!”
“The government,” resumed Denby, “has heavy reward money out for the round up of the ring. Let’s work together for a split.”
“Fair enough,” Cragin agreed. He told Denby that Mona’s presence on the Medea must have been business, not pleasure. That was the lousiest steer he could at the moment think of.
He smoked a pack of butts before he saw a chance to smuggle Anita out of the house. When he approached the closet door, it was no longer locked. A twisted lingerie clasp lay near the door jamb.
“Clever gal,” he gritted, jamming his hat on and slipping into his top coat.
Cragin’s wrath was still simmering when he barged into his inner office, which was equipped with an army cot and a gas plate. It cut down expenses, and came in handy for serving tea to feminine clients.
Denby, for all his newspaper credentials, was a sour note. A financial reporter with a candid camera and a blackjack did not ring true. When Cragin heard the tapping at the front office door, he yanked the knob and thrust his automatic into line.
Anita Tsang had returned.
“I couldn’t take any chances on that clothes closet,” she explained, “So I waited outside and followed you.”
“Better make this good, or the cops get you,” warned Cragin as Anita followed him to the inner room.
She snuggled up, warm and confidential, then resumed, “The position of Hassler’s fingers proves he was a member of the Tien-Hau Hoi’h.”
“The which!” gasped Cragin, somewhat distracted by Anita’s exotic fragrance. The sleek silken tunic’s high collared reserve made her supple curves all the more tantalizing.
“The Society of the Queen of Heaven,” she explained. “They just called off their war with the Hop Wang Tong.”
“Nice while it lasted,” reminisced Cragin, who was interested in finding that Anita’s waist was designed to fit the curve of his arm. “But then what?”
“That’s where I come in,” she continued. “My father is chief of the Hop Wang Tong. The old louse agreed to give me to Yut Lee, the leader of the Queen of Heaven outfit. To seal the treaty of peace. And he’s just poisonous!
“So when I listened in on a tapped wire the Hop Wangs used to check up on Hassler, I heard you order a radio. I got into an old crate and had it substituted for the loaded one. So I got into Hassler’s house.”
“But why!” demanded Cragin, for a moment forgetting his interest in the embroidered trimmings around Anita’s knees.
“The Tien Hau Hoi’h is smuggling opium into the country. I was trying to get the dirt on Hassler, have the whole works rounded up, and with Yut Lee spending the next ten years in the federal pen, I’d not be added to his string of playmates.”
It was all clear now, except for Cragin’s part.
“You raid the Queen of Heaven headquarters and get the evidence they took from Hassler. He must have double-crossed them so his fellow members finished him. I’ll tell you how to get to their lodge room—”
“The hell you will,” growled Cragin. “Take a walk for yourself!”
But getting Anita to the door was not so easy. She was slender, but an armful. It happened so fast that Cragin for an instant believed that a young anaconda had been coiled about him. While he could not see more than a third of the curves, he knew where each one was.
Just as he was beginning to get groggy from the exhalation of jasmine, she kissed him and made a job of it.
Thrills raced all the way to his ankles.
But the iron will of generations of levelheaded Cragins broke the spell. He jerked her arms from his neck, and thrust her from him.
He used more force than he intended. She went spinning half way across the room. She tripped, lurched against the edge of a chair, slumped to the floor, a pathetic little heap of disarrayed garments and ivory-tinted flesh. Her head was twisted at an alarming angle.
Cragin’s blood froze as he knelt beside her. After a moment he relaxed. Her neck was not broken. He straightened her out on the cot, propped her in the crook of his arm.
Her recovery was dizzying. Before he knew it, she kissed him into a volcanic delirium. He knew he was a sap… What if she had faked that spiel?
When he viewed the slender shapely length of silk and old ivory that shimmered in the half gloom Cragin shed his last qualms about getting messed up in tong wars. This alarming Chinese stuff had its points!
“Darling,” she murmured as her arms seconded the invitation of eyes that had become long, black opals, “you really didn’t hurt me so much…you simply didn’t realize your own strength—”
* * * *
Pacific standard time had made considerable progress before Anita found occasion to discuss the Tien Hau Hoi’h without seeming grotesquely irrelevant.
“Cliff, darling,” she whispered, “I’m so glad we had this stolen hour or so. I’ll remember you when I am in Yut Lee’s house and—”
“Yut Lee’s hell!” growled Cragin. “Where does this society hang out?”
Anita gave him the address and described the approach.
“You can get into their lodge room from there,” she concluded. “I once got a peep, when I was just a kid.”
Cragin paused to glance at the snapshots developed from the roll taken from Denby’s camera. The photographer had mailed them to Hassler’s house. The one of the wrinkled Chinese using the shot-gun testified to the merits of the camera. Cragin pocketed the instrument. Anita’s tip made it seem peculiarly useful.
Presently he was creeping up a dark flight of stairs opening from a cross alley. At the end of a hallway on the second floor, he lifted a window and climbed over the sill.
By balancing himself on the ledge, he was able to reach across a narrow
airshaft and to the coping of the adjoining building. He flung himself across the gap, and made it.
He drew himself over the low brick parapet and to a flat roof. His destination was a sheet iron ventilating cupola.
Crouching in its shadow, he could peep between the warped louvers and into the loft below him.
It was an attic dressed up like a Chinese funeral. The walls were hung with green and red banners marked with black characters. The air was thick with the fumes of joss sticks. At a shrine just behind the table at the end of the loft was a brazen statue of the Queen of Heaven.
A score of Chinese in American clothing were seated in a semicircle, facing the elders of the society, who were dressed in resplendent silks.
While he was waiting for a chance to search the place for Hassler’s stolen records, a snapshot of the gathering would clinch things, particularly if he mugged one of the two assassins Anita had seen.
Cragin wracked out the lens, and carefully bent a loose corner of the rusted sheet metal cupola to give him a direct line.
Two Chinese approached the elders. One, whose shoulder was bandaged, handed the chief a flat, paper wrapped parcel. They must be the two assassins, reporting success. Was that a break! He clicked the shutter. Photography, however, was interrupted by a pistol prodding his ribs.
“Steady,” warned a whisper. “Don’t drop my camera.”
Denby was the man behind the gun. He pocketed the instrument, then added, “I figured you’d do something like that. Mighty nice of you to show me where Hassler’s Chinese enemies hang out.”
“You dirty louse,” muttered Cragin. “Playing me for a sap, and figuring on grabbing the reward yourself.”
“Wrong,” said Denby. “I’m on the Federal payroll, so I can’t touch the reward. I’m just making sure you won’t tip off Hassler’s friends instead of the law. Raise your hands.”
This was no time to ask for Denby’s credentials. Cragin’s hands rose. Cold bracelets pinned them together.
“Let’s go.” Denby boosted Cragin to his feet, then he said, “Getting you back the way you came up is going to be tough, with your hands nailed. But don’t worry—”
E. Hoffmann Price's Two-Fisted Detectives Page 5