I thought he was missing me until I had my finger tight on my trigger. Then I woke up in time to hold my fire.
He wasn’t shooting at me. He was pouring metal into the door behind me—the door from which I had been shot at.
I rolled away from it, across the hall.
The scrawny little man stepped closer and finished his bombardment. His slugs shredded the wood as if it had been paper. His guns clicked empty.
The door swung open, pushed by the wreck of a man who was trying to hold himself up by clinging to the sliding panel in the door’s center.
Dummy Uhl—all the middle of him gone—slid down to the floor and made more of a puddle than a pile there.
The hall filled with yellow men, black guns sticking out like briars in a blackberry patch.
I got up. My guide dropped his guns to his side and sang out a guttural solo. Chinese began to disappear through various doors, except four who began gathering up what twenty bullets had left of Dummy Uhl.
The stringy old boy tucked his empty guns away and came down the hall to me, one hand held out toward my gun.
“You give ’em,” he said politely.
I gave ’em. He could have had my pants.
My gun stowed away in his shirt-bosom, he looked casually at what the four Chinese were carrying away, and then at me.
“No like ’em fella, huh?” he asked.
“Not so much,” I admitted.
“All light. I take you.”
Our two-man parade got under way again. The ring-around-the-rosy game went on for another flight of stairs and some right and left turns, and then my guide stopped before a door and scratched it with his finger-nails.
V
The door was opened by another Chinese. But this one was none of your Cantonese runts. He was a big meat-eating wrestler—bull-throated, mountain-shouldered, gorilla-armed, leather-skinned. The god that made him had plenty of material, and gave it time to harden.
Holding back the curtain that covered the door, he stepped to one side. I went in, and found his twin standing on the other side of the door.
The room was large and cubical, its doors and windows—if any—hidden behind velvet hangings of green and blue and silver. In a big black chair, elaborately carved, behind an inlaid black table, sat an old Chinese man. His face was round and plump and shrewd, with a straggle of thin white whiskers on his chin. A dark, close-fitting cap was on his head; a purple robe, tight around his neck, showed its sable lining at the bottom, where it had fallen back in a fold over his blue satin trousers.
He did not get up from his chair, but smiled mildly over his whiskers and bent his head almost to the tea things on the table.
“It was only the inability to believe that one of your excellency’s heaven-born splendor would waste his costly time on so mean a clod that kept the least of your slaves from running down to prostrate himself at your noble feet as soon as he heard the Father of Detectives was at his unworthy door.”
That came out smoothly in English that was a lot clearer than my own. I kept my face straight, waiting.
“If the Terror of Evildoers will honor one of my deplorable chairs by resting his divine body on it, I can assure him the chair shall be burned afterward, so no lesser being may use it. Or will the Prince of Thief-catchers permit me to send a servant to his palace for a chair worthy of him?”
I went slowly to a chair, trying to arrange words in my mind. This old joker was spoofing me with an exaggeration—a burlesque—of the well-known Chinese politeness. I’m not hard to get along with: I’ll play anybody’s game up to a certain point.
“It’s only because I’m weak-kneed with awe of the mighty Chang Li Ching that I dare to sit down,” I explained, letting myself down on the chair, and turning my head to notice that the giants who had stood beside the door were gone.
I had a hunch they had gone no farther than the other side of the velvet hangings that hid the door.
“If it were not that the King of Finders-out”—he was at it again—“knows everything, I should marvel that he had heard my lowly name.”
“Heard it? Who hasn’t?” I kidded back. “Isn’t the word change, in English, derived from Chang? Change, meaning alter, is what happens to the wisest man’s opinions after he has heard the wisdom of Chang Li Ching!” I tried to get away from this vaudeville stuff, which was a strain on my head. “Thanks for having your man save my life back there in the passage.”
He spreads his hands out over the table.
“It was only because I feared the Emperor of Hawkshaws would find the odor of such low blood distasteful to his elegant nostrils that the foul one who disturbed your excellency was struck down quickly. If I have erred, and you would have chosen that he be cut to pieces inch by inch, I can only offer to torture one of my sons in his place.”
“Let the boy live,” I said carelessly, and turned to business. “I wouldn’t have bothered you except that I am so ignorant that only the help of your great wisdom could ever bring me up to normal.”
“Does one ask the way of a blind man?” the old duffer asked, cocking his head to one side. “Can a star, however willing, help the moon? If it pleases the Grandfather of Bloodhounds to flatter Chang Li Ching into thinking he can add to the great one’s knowledge, who is Chang to thwart his master by refusing to make himself ridiculous?”
I took that to mean he was willing to listen to my questions.
“What I’d like to know is, who killed Lillian Shan’s servants, Wang Ma and Wan Lan?”
He played with a thin strand of his white beard, twisting it in a pale, small finger.
“Does the stag-hunter look at the hare?” he wanted to know. “And when so mighty a hunter pretends to concern himself with the death of servants, can Chang think anything except that it pleases the great one to conceal his real object? Yet it may be, because the dead were servants and not girdle-wearers, that the Lord of Snares thought the lowly Chang Li Ching, insignificant one of the Hundred Names, might have knowledge of them. Do not rats know the way of rats?”
He kept this stuff up for some minutes, while I sat and listened and studied his round, shrewd yellow mask of a face, and hoped that something clear would come of it all. Nothing did.
“My ignorance is even greater than I had arrogantly supposed,” he brought his speech to an end. “This simple question you put is beyond the power of my muddled mind. I do not know who killed Wang Ma and Wan Lan.”
I grinned at him, and put another question:
“Where can I find Hoo Lun and Yin Hung?”
“Again I must grovel in my ignorance,” he murmured, “only consoling myself with the thought that the Master of Mysteries knows the answers to his questions, and is pleased to conceal his infallibly accomplished purpose from Chang.”
And that was as far as I got.
There were more crazy compliments, more bowing and scraping, more assurances of eternal reverence and love, and then I was following my rope-necked guide through winding, dark halls, across dim rooms, and up and down rickety stairs again.
At the street door—after he had taken down the bars—he slid my gun out of his shirt and handed it to me. I squelched the impulse to look at it then and there to see if anything had been done to it. Instead I stuck it in my pocket and stepped through the door.
“Thanks for the killing upstairs,” I said.
The Chinese grunted, bowed, and closed the door.
I went up to Stockton Street, and turned toward the office, walking along slowly, punishing my brains.
First, there was Dummy Uhl’s death to think over. Had it been arranged before-hand: to punish him for bungling that morning and, at the same time, to impress me? And how? And why? Or was it supposed to put me under obligations to the Chinese? And, if so, why? Or was it just one of those complicated tricks the Chinese like? I put the subject awa
y and pointed my thoughts at the little plump yellow man in the purple robe.
I liked him. He had humor, brains, nerve, everything. To jam him in a cell would be a trick you’d want to write home about. He was my idea of a man worth working against.
But I didn’t kid myself into thinking I had anything on him. Dummy Uhl had given me a connection between The Whistler’s Hotel Irvington and Chang Li Ching. Dummy Uhl had gone into action when I accused him of being mixed up in the Shan killings. That much I had—and that was all, except that Chang had said nothing to show he wasn’t interested in the Shan troubles.
In this light, the chances were that Dummy’s death had not been a planned performance. It was more likely that he had seen me coming, had tried to wipe me out, and had been knocked off by my guide because he was interfering with the audience Chang had granted me. Dummy couldn’t have had a very valuable life in the Chinese’s eye—or in anybody else’s.
I wasn’t at all dissatisfied with the day’s work so far. I hadn’t done anything brilliant, but I had got a look at my destination, or thought I had. If I was butting my head against a stone wall, I at least knew where the wall was and had seen the man who owned it.
In the office, a message from Dick Foley was waiting for me. He had rented a front apartment up the street from the Irvington and had put in a couple of hours trailing The Whistler.
The Whistler had spent half an hour in “Big Fat” Thomson’s place on Market Street, talking to the proprietor and some of the sure-thing gamblers who congregate there. Then he had taxi-cabbed out to an apartment house on O’Farrell Street—the Glenway—where he had rung one of the bells. Getting no answer, he had let himself into the building with a key. An hour later he had come out and returned to his hotel. Dick hadn’t been able to determine which bell he had rung, or which apartment he had visited.
I got Lillian Shan on the telephone.
“Will you be in this evening?” I asked. “I’ve something I want to go into with you, and I can’t give it to you over the wire.”
“I will be at home until seven-thirty.”
“All right, I’ll be down.”
It was seven-fifteen when the car I had hired put me down at her front door. She opened the door for me. The Danish woman who was filling in until new servants were employed stayed there only in the daytime, returning to her own home—a mile back from the shore—at night.
The evening gown Lillian Shan wore was severe enough, but it suggested that if she would throw away her glasses and do something for herself, she might not be so unfeminine looking after all. She took me upstairs, to the library, where a clean-cut lad of twenty-something in evening clothes got up from a chair as we came in—a well-set-up boy with fair hair and skin.
His name, I learned when we were introduced, was Garthorne. The girl seemed willing enough to hold our conference in his presence. I wasn’t. After I had done everything but insist point-blank on seeing her alone, she excused herself—calling him Jack—and took me out into another room.
By then I was a bit impatient.
“Who’s that?” I demanded.
She put her eyebrows up for me.
“Mr. John Garthorne,” she said.
“How well do you know him?”
“May I ask why you are so interested?”
“You may. Mr. John Garthorne is all wrong, I think.”
“Wrong?”
I had another idea.
“Where does he live?”
She gave me an O’Farrell Street number.
“The Glenway Apartments?”
“I think so.” She was looking at me without any affectation at all. “Will you please explain?”
“One more question and I will. Do you know a Chinese named Chang Li Ching?”
“No.”
“All right. I’ll tell you about Garthorne. So far I’ve run into two angles on this trouble of yours. One of them has to do with this Chang Li Ching in Chinatown, and one with an ex-convict named Conyers. This John Garthorne was in Chinatown today. I saw him coming out of a cellar that probably connects with Chang Li Ching’s house. The ex-convict Conyers visited the building where Garthorne lives, early this afternoon.”
Her mouth popped open and then shut.
“That is absurd!” she snapped. “I have known Mr. Garthorne for some time, and—”
“Exactly how long?”
“A long—several months.”
“Where’d you meet him?”
“Through a girl I knew at college.”
“What does he do for a living?”
She stood stiff and silent.
“Listen, Miss Shan,” I said. “Garthorne may be all right, but I’ve got to look him up. If he’s in the clear there’ll be no harm done. I want to know what you know about him.”
I got it, little by little. He was, or she thought he was, the youngest son of a prominent Richmond, Virginia, family, in disgrace just now because of some sort of boyish prank. He had come to San Francisco four months ago, to wait until his father’s anger cooled. Meanwhile his mother kept him in money, leaving him without the necessity of toiling during his exile. He had brought a letter of introduction from one of Lillian Shan’s schoolmates. Lillian Shan had, I gathered, a lot of liking for him.
“You’re going out with him tonight?” I asked when I had got this.
“Yes.”
“In his car or yours?”
She frowned, but she answered my question.
“In his. We are going to drive down to Half Moon for dinner.”
“I’ll need a key, then, because I am coming back here after you have gone.”
“You’re what?”
“I’m coming back here. I’ll ask you not to say anything about my more or less unworthy suspicions to him, but my honest opinion is that he’s drawing you away for the evening. So if the engine breaks down on the way back, just pretend you see nothing unusual in it.”
That worried her, but she wouldn’t admit I might be right. I got the key, though, and then I told her of my employment agency scheme that needed her assistance, and she promised to be at the office at half past nine Thursday morning.
I didn’t see Garthorne again before I left the house.
VI
In my hired car again, I had the driver take me to the nearest village, where I bought a plug of chewing tobacco, a flashlight, and a box of cartridges at the general store. My gun is a .38 Special, but I had to take the shorter, weaker cartridges, because the storekeeper didn’t keep the specials in stock.
My purchases in my pocket, we started back toward the Shan house again. Two bends in the road this side of it, I stopped the car, paid the chauffeur, and sent him on his way, finishing the trip afoot.
The house was dark all around.
Letting myself in as quietly as possible, and going easy with the flashlight, I gave the interior a combing from cellar to roof. I was the only occupant. In the kitchen, I looted the icebox for a bite or two, which I washed down with milk. I could have used some coffee, but coffee is too fragrant.
The luncheon done, I made myself comfortable on a chair in the passageway between the kitchen and the rest of the house. On one side of the passageway, steps led down to the basement. On the other, steps led upstairs. With every door in the house except the outer ones open, the passageway was the center of things so far as hearing noises was concerned.
An hour went by—quietly except for the passing of cars on the road a hundred yards away and the washing of the Pacific down in the little cove. I chewed on my plug of tobacco—a substitute for cigarettes—and tried to count up the hours of my life I’d spent like this, sitting or standing around waiting for something to happen.
The telephone rang.
I let it ring. It might be Lillian Shan needing help, but I couldn’t take a chance. It was too likely
to be some egg trying to find out if anybody was in the house.
Another half hour went by with a breeze springing up from the ocean, rustling trees outside.
A noise came that was neither wind nor surf nor passing car.
Something clicked somewhere.
It was at a window, but I didn’t know which. I got rid of my chew, got gun and flashlight out.
It sounded again, harshly.
Somebody was giving a window a strong play—too strong. The catch rattled, and something clicked against the pane. It was a stall. Whoever he was, he could have smashed the glass with less noise than he was making.
I stood up, but I didn’t leave the passageway. The window noise was a fake to draw the attention of anyone who might be in the house. I turned my back on it, trying to see into the kitchen.
The kitchen was too black to see anything.
I saw nothing there. I heard nothing there.
Damp air blew on me from the kitchen.
That was something to worry about. I had company, and he was slicker than I. He could open doors or windows under my nose. That wasn’t so good.
Weight on rubber heels, I backed away from my chair until the frame of the cellar door touched my shoulder. I wasn’t sure I was going to like this party. I like an even break or better, and this didn’t look like one.
So when a thin line of light danced out of the kitchen to hit the chair in the passsageway, I was three steps cellar-ward, my back flat against the stair-wall.
The light fixed itself on the chair for a couple of seconds, and then began to dart around the passageway, through it into the room beyond. I could see nothing but the light.
Fresh sounds came to me—the purr of automobile engines close to the house on the road side, the soft padding of feet on the back porch, on the kitchen linoleum, quite a few feet. An odor came to me—an unmistakable odor—the smell of unwashed Chinese.
Then I lost track of these things. I had plenty to occupy me close up.
The proprietor of the flashlight was at the head of the cellar steps. I had ruined my eyes watching the light: I couldn’t see him.
Corkscrew and Other Stories Page 11