I knew her before the Old Man introduced me. The San Francisco papers had been full of her affairs for a couple of days. They had printed photographs and diagrams, interviews, editorials, and more or less expert opinions from various sources. They had gone back to 1912 to remember the stubborn fight of the local Chinese—mostly from Fokien and Kwangtung, where democratic ideas and hatred of Manchus go together—to have her father kept out of the United States, to which he had scooted when the Manchu rule flopped. The papers had recalled the excitement in Chinatown when Shan Fang was allowed to land—insulting placards had been hung in the streets, an unpleasant reception had been planned.
But Shan Fang had fooled the Cantonese. Chinatown had never seen him. He had taken his daughter and his gold—presumably the accumulated profits of a life-time of provincial misrule—down to San Mateo County, where he had built what the papers described as a palace on the edge of the Pacific. There he had lived and died in a manner suitable to a Ta Jen and a millionaire.
So much for the father. For the daughter—this young woman who was coolly studying me as I sat down across the table from her: she had been ten-year-old Ai Ho, a very Chinese little girl, when her father had brought her to California. All that was Oriental of her now were the features I have mentioned and the money her father had left her. Her name, translated into English, had become Water Lily, and then, by another step, Lillian. It was as Lillian Shan that she had attended an eastern university, acquired several degrees, won a tennis championship of some sort in 1919, and published a book on the nature and significance of fetishes, whatever all that is or are.
Since her father’s death, in 1921, she had lived with her four Chinese servants in the house on the shore, where she had written her first book and was now at work on another. A couple of weeks ago, she had found herself stumped, so she said—had run into a blind alley. There was, she said, a certain old cabalistic manuscript in the Arsenal Library in Paris that she believed would solve her troubles for her. So she had packed some clothes and, accompanied by her maid, a Chinese woman named Wang Ma, had taken a train for New York, leaving the three other servants to take care of the house during her absence. The decision to go to France for a look at the manuscript had been formed one morning—she was on the train before dark.
On the train between Chicago and New York, the key to the problem that had puzzled her suddenly popped into her head. Without pausing even for a night’s rest in New York, she had turned around and headed back for San Francisco. At the ferry here she had tried to telephone her chauffeur to bring a car for her. No answer. A taxicab had carried her and her maid to her house. She rang the door-bell to no effect.
When her key was in the lock the door had been suddenly opened by a young Chinese man—a stranger to her. He had refused her admittance until she told him who she was. He mumbled an unintelligible explanation as she and the maid went into the hall.
Both of them were neatly bundled up in some curtains.
Two hours later Lillian Shan got herself loose—in a linen closet on the second floor. Switching on the light, she started to untie the maid. She stopped. Wang Ma was dead. The rope around her neck had been drawn too tight.
Lillian Shan went out into the empty house and telephoned the sheriff’s office in Redwood City.
Two deputy sheriffs had come to the house, had listened to her story, had poked around, and had found another Chinese body—another strangled woman—buried in the cellar. Apparently she had been dead a week or a week and a half; the dampness of the ground made more positive dating impossible. Lillian Shan identified her as another of her servants—Wan Lan, the cook.
The other servants—Hoo Lun and Yin Hung—had vanished. Of the several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of furnishings old Shan Fang had put into the house during his life, not a nickel’s worth had been removed. There were no signs of a struggle. Everything was in order. The closest neighboring house was nearly half a mile away. The neighbors had seen nothing, knew nothing.
That’s the story the newspapers had hung headlines over, and that’s the story this girl, sitting very erect in her chair, speaking with businesslike briskness, shaping each word as exactly as if it were printed in black type, told the Old Man and me.
“I am not at all satisfied with the effort the San Mateo County authorities have made to apprehend the murderer or murderers,” she wound up. “I wish to engage your agency.”
The Old Man tapped the table with the point of his inevitable long yellow pencil and nodded at me.
“Have you any idea of your own on the murders, Miss Shan?” I asked.
“I have not.”
“What do you know about the servants—the missing ones as well as the dead?”
“I really know little or nothing about them.” She didn’t seem very interested. “Wang Ma was the most recent of them to come to the house, and she has been with me for nearly seven years. My father employed them, and I suppose he knew something about them.”
“Don’t you know where they came from? Whether they have relatives? Whether they have friends? What they did when they weren’t working?”
“No,” she said. “I did not pry into their lives.”
“The two who disappeared—what do they look like?”
“Hoo Lun is an old man, quite white-haired and thin and stooped. He did the housework. Yin Hung, who was my chauffeur and gardener, is younger, about thirty years old, I think. He is quite short, even for a Cantonese, but sturdy. His nose has been broken at some time and not set properly. It is very flat, with a pronounced bend in the bridge.”
“Do you think this pair, or either of them, could have killed the women?”
“I do not think they did.”
“The young Chinese—the stranger who let you in the house—what did he look like?”
“He was quite slender, and not more than twenty or twenty-one years old, with large gold fillings in his front teeth. I think he was quite dark.”
“Will you tell me exactly why you are dissatisfied with what the sheriff is doing, Miss Shan?”
“In the first place, I am not sure they are competent. The ones I saw certainly did not impress me with their brilliance.”
“And in the second place?”
“Really,” she asked coldly, “is it necessary to go into all my mental processes?”
“It is.”
She looked at the Old Man, who smiled at her with his polite, meaningless smile—a mask through which you can read nothing.
For a moment she hung fire. Then: “I don’t think they are looking in very likely places. They seem to spend the greater part of their time in the vicinity of the house. It is absurd to think the murderers are going to return.”
I turned that over in my mind.
“Miss Shan,” I asked, “don’t you think they suspect you?”
Her dark eyes burned through her glasses at me and, if possible, she made herself more rigidly straight in her chair.
“Preposterous!”
“That isn’t the point,” I insisted. “Do they?”
“I am not able to penetrate the police mind,” she came back. “Do you?”
“I don’t know anything about this job but what I’ve read and what you’ve just told me. I need more foundation than that to suspect anybody. But I can understand why the sheriff’s office would be a little doubtful. You left in a hurry. They’ve got your word for why you went and why you came back, and your word is all. The woman found in the cellar could have been killed just before you left as well as just after. Wang Ma, who could have told things, is dead. The other servants are missing. Nothing was stolen. That’s plenty to make the sheriff think about you!”
“Do you suspect me?” she asked again.
“No,” I said truthfully. “But that proves nothing.”
She spoke to the Old Man, with a chin-tilting motion, as if she
were talking over my head.
“Do you wish to undertake this work for me?”
“We shall be very glad to do what we can,” he said, and then to me, after they had talked terms and while she was writing a check, “you handle it. Use what men you need.”
“I want to go out to the house first and look the place over,” I said.
Lillian Shan was putting away her check-book.
“Very well. I am returning home now. I will drive you down.”
It was a restful ride. Neither the girl nor I wasted energy on conversation. My client and I didn’t seem to like each other very much. She drove well.
II
The Shan house was a big brownstone affair, set among sodded lawns. The place was hedged shoulder-high on three sides. The fourth boundary was the ocean, where it came in to make a notch in the shore-line between two small rocky points.
The house was full of hangings, rugs, pictures, and so on—a mixture of things American, European and Asiatic. I didn’t spend much time inside. After a look at the linen-closet, at the still open cellar grave, and at the pale, thick-featured Danish woman who was taking care of the house until Lillian Shan could get a new corps of servants, I went outdoors again. I poked around the lawns for a few minutes, stuck my head in the garage, where two cars, besides the one in which we had come from town, stood, and then went off to waste the rest of the afternoon talking to the girl’s neighbors. None of them knew anything. Since we were on opposite sides of the game, I didn’t hunt up the sheriff’s men.
By twilight I was back in the city, going into the apartment building in which I lived during my first year in San Francisco. I found the lad I wanted in his cubby-hole room, getting his small body into a cerise silk shirt that was something to look at. Cipriano was the bright-faced Filipino boy who looked after the building’s front door in the daytime. At night, like all the Filipinos in San Francisco, he could be found down on Kearny Street, just below Chinatown, except when he was in a Chinese gambling-house passing his money over to the yellow brothers.
I had once, half-joking, promised to give the lad a fling at gum-shoeing if the opportunity ever came. I thought I could use him now.
“Come in, sir!”
He was dragging a chair out of a corner for me, bowing and smiling. Whatever else the Spaniards do for the people they rule, they make them polite.
“What’s doing in Chinatown these days?” I asked as he went on with his dressing.
He gave me a white-toothed smile.
“I take eleven bucks out of bean-game last night.”
“And you’re getting ready to take it back tonight?”
“Not all of ’em, sir! Five bucks I spend for this shirt.”
“That’s the stuff,” I applauded his wisdom in investing part of his fan-tan profits. “What else is doing down there?”
“Nothing unusual, sir. You want to find something?”
“Yeah. Hear any talk about the killings down the country last week? The two Chinese women?”
“No, sir. Chinaboy don’t talk much about things like that. Not like us Americans. I read about those things in newspapers, but I have not heard.”
“Many strangers in Chinatown nowadays?”
“All the time there’s strangers, sir. But I guess maybe some new Chinaboys are there. Maybe not, though.”
“How would you like to do a little work for me?”
“Yes, sir! Yes, sir! Yes, sir!” He said it oftener than that, but that will give you the idea. While he was saying it he was down on his knees, dragging a valise from under the bed. Out of the valise he took a pair of brass knuckles and a shiny revolver.
“Here! I want some information. I don’t want you to knock anybody off for me.”
“I don’t knock ’em,” he assured me, stuffing his weapons in his hip pockets. “Just carry these—maybe I need ’em.”
I let it go at that. If he wanted to make himself bow-legged carrying a ton of iron it was all right with me.
“Here’s what I want. Two of the servants ducked out of the house down there.” I described Yin Hung and Hoo Lun. “I want to find them. I want to find what anybody in Chinatown knows about the killings. I want to find who the dead women’s friends and relatives are, where they came from, and the same thing for the two men. I want to know about those strange Chinese—where they hang out, where they sleep, what they’re up to.
“Now, don’t try to get all this in a night. You’ll be doing fine if you get any of it in a week. Here’s twenty dollars. Five of it is your night’s pay. You can use the other to carry you around. Don’t be foolish and poke your nose into a lot of grief. Take it easy and see what you can turn up for me. I’ll drop in tomorrow.”
From the Filipino’s room I went to the office. Everybody except Fiske, the night man, was gone, but Fiske thought the Old Man would drop in for a few minutes later in the night.
I smoked, pretended to listen to Fiske’s report on all the jokes that were at the Orpheum that week, and grouched over my job. I was too well known to get anything on the quiet in Chinatown. I wasn’t sure Cipriano was going to be much help. I needed somebody who was in right down there.
This line of thinking brought me around to “Dummy” Uhl. Uhl was a dummerer who had lost his store. Five years before, he had been sitting on the world. Any day on which his sad face, his package of pins, and his I am deaf and dumb sign didn’t take twenty dollars out of the office buildings along his route was a rotten day. His big card was his ability to play the statue when skeptical people yelled or made sudden noises behind him. When the Dummy was right, a gun off beside his ear wouldn’t make him twitch an eye-lid. But too much heroin broke his nerves until a whisper was enough to make him jump. He put away his pins and his sign—another man whose social life had ruined him.
Since then Dummy had become an errand boy for whoever would stake him to the price of his necessary nose-candy. He slept somewhere in Chinatown, and he didn’t care especially how he played the game. I had used him to get me some information on a window-smashing six months before. I decided to try him again.
I called “Loop” Pigatti’s place—a dive down on Pacific Street, where Chinatown fringes into the Latin Quarter. Loop is a tough citizen, who runs a tough hole, and who minds his own business, which is making his dive show a profit. Everybody looks alike to Loop. Whether you’re a yegg, stool-pigeon, detective, or settlement worker, you get an even break out of Loop and nothing else. But you can be sure that, unless it’s something that might hurt his business, anything you tell Loop will get no further. And anything he tells you is more than likely to be right.
He answered the phone himself.
“Can you get hold of Dummy Uhl for me?” I asked after I had told him who I was.
“Maybe.”
“Thanks. I’d like to see him tonight.”
“You got nothin’ on him?”
“No, Loop, and I don’t expect to. I want him to get something for me.”
“All right. Where d’you want him?”
“Send him up to my joint. I’ll wait there for him.”
“If he’ll come,” Loop promised and hung up.
I left word with Fiske to have the Old Man call me up when he came in, and then I went up to my rooms to wait for my informant.
He came in a little after ten—a short, stocky, pasty-faced man of forty or so, with mouse-colored hair streaked with yellow-white.
“Loop says y’got sumpin’ f’r me.”
“Yes,” I said, waving him to a chair, and closing the door. “I’m buying news.”
He fumbled with his hat, started to spit on the floor, changed his mind, licked his lips, and looked up at me.
“What kind o’ news? I don’t know nothin’.”
I was puzzled. The Dummy’s yellowish eyes should have showed the pinpoint pupils of the heroi
n addict. They didn’t. The pupils were normal. That didn’t mean he was off the stuff—he had put cocaine into them to distend them to normal. The puzzle was—why? He wasn’t usually particular enough about his appearance to go to that trouble.
“Did you hear about the Chinese killings down the shore last week?” I asked him.
“No.”
“Well,” I said, paying no attention to the denial, “I’m hunting for the pair of yellow men who ducked out—Hoo Lun and Yin Hung. Know anything about them?”
“No.”
“It’s worth a couple of hundred dollars to you to find either of them for me. It’s worth another couple hundred to find out about the killings for me. It’s worth another to find the slim Chinese youngster with gold teeth who opened the door for the Shan girl and her maid.”
“I don’t know nothin’ about them things,” he said.
But he said it automatically while his mind was busy counting up the hundreds I had dangled before him. I suppose his dope-addled brains made the total somewhere in the thousands. He jumped up.
“I’ll see what I c’n do. S’pose you slip me a hundred now, on account.”
I didn’t see that.
“You get it when you deliver.”
We had to argue that point, but finally he went off grumbling and growling to get me my news.
I went back to the office. The Old Man hadn’t come in yet. It was nearly midnight when he arrived.
“I’m using Dummy Uhl again,” I told him, “and I’ve put a Filipino boy down there too. I’ve got another scheme, but I don’t know anybody to handle it. I think if we offered the missing chauffeur and house-man jobs in some out-of-the-way place up the country, perhaps they’d fall for it. Do you know anybody who could pull it for us?”
Corkscrew and Other Stories Page 9