The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard Original)

by Unknown

  “Hai! It is Choy!” Wei Lum cried out, pushing forward, but the parrot gave no sign of recognition, merely staring at them with drooping, cynical eyes.

  O’Hara caught the first dawning of doubt on Wei Lum’s face as the yellow man scrutinized the green bird more closely—then saw the doubt deepen into reluctant conviction.

  “I make mistake, Sah-jin,” Wei Lum confessed. “This Feather Devil same for size and color, but it is not Choy.”

  “His name Shao,” Tai Gat put in, and the green Feather Devil, cocking its head and crisping its claw, burst into sudden angry clamor with a raucous repetition of “Shao! Shao! Shao!”

  “Shao—that means fire or flame,” O’Hara remarked. “He should have some red feathers with a name like that.… Well, sorry to have troubled you, Tai Gat.”

  The mafoo made a polite bow. “You likee stop see Master Chang? Maybe you not see him again. Doctor Meng say Master go soon to join honorable ancestors.”

  On the way downstairs they stopped briefly at the room where the stricken silversmith lay silent and motionless on his k’ang, as though Yo Fei the Dread One had already tapped his shoulder.

  Young Chang Loo stood at the window, smoking a cigarette. Doctor Meng the apothecary kept watch beside the k’ang, eyes fixed on Chang Pao’s withered face. The gray-bearded tuchum of the Five Tongs Council was also present, and Sang Lee the scrivener, busy painting the prayers that would be burned the moment old Chang “mounted the Dragon.”

  They all bowed gravely at O’Hara’s entrance, all but young Chang, who only turned his head far enough for a sullen, sidelong flicker.

  O’Hara stood beside the k’ang, looking down at the unconscious silversmith. “Has there been any change?” he asked Meng.

  The apothecary held a silvered mirror above Chang’s nostrils and examined the result, peering through iron-rimmed spectacles which were without lenses. “Sah-jin, the Breath of Life grows weaker with every hour.”

  “I’m sorry,” O’Hara said gently, for he regarded Chang Pao as an old friend. The Death Watch bowed gravely again as O’Hara turned toward the door, but out of the corner of his eye he saw young Chang scowl and make the same furtive “finger curse.”

  “Well, Wei Lum, we struck out on that clue,” O’Hara remarked to the crestfallen yellow man when they were outside. “Are you sure you picked the right house?”

  “Sah-jin, I play twice on the flute, and listen twice, to make sure it is Choy,” Wei Lum declared.

  O’Hara shook his head. “I suppose a couple of green parrots that look alike, sound alike, too. Don’t give up your search, Wei Lum. Maybe you’ll have better luck next time.”

  “Kwei lung—devil dragons!” Wei Lum muttered as he tucked the bamboo flute into his sleeve and padded off into the darkness of Lantern Court.

  O’Hara glanced up at the lighted windows of Chang Pao’s room. A distorted shadow slanted across the drawn shades—Chang Loo the lucky nephew, smoking his White Devil cigarettes, watching beady-eyed for the dawn of his Day of Riches.

  And young Chang did not have long to wait, for the old silversmith died that night. Still unconscious, he breathed his last during the hour of the Tiger, which is between four and six a.m. by White Devil reckoning. O’Hara learned this from Doc Stanage, who had issued the death certificate.

  O’Hara knew what routine steps would follow Chang Pao’s demise. After prayers had been burned and the death candles lit, Chang’s body would be placed in its ironwood coffin and conveyed to the Hall of Sorrows in the Plum Blossom Joss House.

  hen the tong tuchum, with the proper witnesses, would seal the doors of Chang’s house with paper strips bearing the tong insignia—seals which would not be broken until the silversmith’s will had been read and his lawful heir placed in possession.

  Later in the day O’Hara and Driscoll attended that brief ceremony in the silk-draped office of Lee Shu the Chinese banker. Lee opened his iron vault and brought out Chang’s sealed will, which had been in his keeping for several years. It turned out to be a short, concise document, leaving his entire estate, without condition, to his nephew, Chang Loo.

  So Chang Loo presented his credentials for formal inspection by Lee Shu and the tong council, and became master of No. 14 Lantern Court and its sealed riches.

  “That guy was born with a horseshoe in each fist!” Driscoll remarked. “Chances are he never had one dollar to rub against another, and now look at him. I hear old Chang left a shelf-ful of ginger-jars filled up and running over with Rice Face cash. But I bet young Chang’ll empty ’em quick enough. You can see he’s just itchin’ to step out high, wide and handsome.”

  O’Hara nodded. “Funny, how Wei Lum’s tip on the parrot brought us to Chang’s house. When I caught young Chang making the ‘finger curse,’ I thought maybe we had something.”

  “Listen, Sarge.” Driscoll grinned. “If we started hauling in all the Chinks who hate cops, we’d run out of cell-space in half an hour.”

  “But there was a parrot in the house,” O’Hara declared.

  “So what?” Driscoll argued. “Wei Lum looked it over and told you it wasn’t Choy. What more do you want?”

  O’Hara made a restless gesture. “I don’t know, Driscoll, but I have a sort of hunch that I’ve overlooked something—somewhere.”

  Then came the night when Sergeant O’Hara learned that stronger names than Feather Devil could be applied to a parrot. It was a night of lowering blue fog that turned the neon lights of Mulberry Lane into gaudy strings of smoldering jewels.

  O’Hara, pursuing his usual rounds, paused at the gilded doorway of a tong house to put on the black slicker he had been carrying on his arm. The misty fog was changing rapidly to a steady, cold drizzle, and the few Celestials who were abroad drifted past like blurred shadows.

  The iron bell of St. Mary’s steeple tolled out ten solemn strokes—the hour of the Fox—as O’Hara came within sight of the glass lantern hanging beside the doorway to the Plum Blossom Joss House—a deep blue glow which floated in the smoky void like a sinister moon.

  A globular shadow loomed up on O’Hara’s left, bobbing along toward the brownstone steps of the joss house, and as the bulky figure passed under the peacock-blue lantern O’Hara recognized Mark Sin, Chinatown’s Number One gambler.

  He watched the slant-eyed master of gaming disappear through the Plum Blossom portals. Mark Sin’s visits to the joss house were for one purpose only—to burn silver-paper prayers at the shrine of Liu Hai the Money God. Which meant there would be another “floating” fan-tan game tonight somewhere in Paradise Court.

  “And just try to break it up!” O’Hara muttered, with the wry smile that came of long experience with the cunning ways of the Yellow Quarter.

  O’Hara even knew who would be the principal players around Mark Sin’s gaming table. There would be Wing Lung the silk merchant, Kim Yao the goldsmith, Meng Tai the apothecary, Long Jon of the Tea House—and yes, no doubt young Chang Loo, the two-handed spendthrift who was treading a silken path since he had fallen heir to the wealth of his uncle, Chang Pao.

  “Beggar on horseback!” O’Hara growled, recalling the many stories about young Chang’s unceasing round of carousing and drinking and reckless gaming. Chang Loo had not even made a pretense of mourning his dead uncle—no white sorrow-robes for him, no period of fasting and seclusion, no ancestor joss burning in the Plum Blossom.

  Moving like a black shadow, O’Hara proceeded through Half Moon Street and into Lantern Court. In passing, he glanced at the shuttered windows of No. 14, standing dark and silent as a Ming tomb.

  “I wonder what old Chang would say if he knew how his hard-earned money was being thrown around,” O’Hara thought to himself. Well, when young Chang’s follies had eaten up all the Rice Face dollars, he could replenish his purse by stripping the old house of its valuable antique furnishings and start all over again.

  “If Chang Loo lives that long!” O’Hara thought. For the slant-eyed upstart was arrogant and quarrel
some in his cups, conducting himself with the haughty insolence of a red-button mandarin.

  There was a whispered tale of a rash insult to a certain tongster—one of the dreaded Red Lamp men—a deed which might well have cost Chang Loo his shadow had not Tai Gat the limping mafoo come to his rescue. But instead of being grateful, young Chang had screamed drunken curses at his uncle’s servant, and hurled a stone wine-bottle at his head.

  “Guess I’d better give that blasted fool a talking-to, before he gets a knife between his ribs,” O’Hara said to himself as he groped his way across Lantern Court. The slow rain was beginning to drip eerily from hidden eaves, and somewhere in the darkness an unseen musician was playing a moon-fiddle.

  Presently O’Hara found the narrow opening to Mandarin Lane, and so came out upon Canton Street. He walked past the dark houses, peering up at an occasional lighted window. Then O’Hara felt cobblestones under his feet; and knew that the bleary yellow glow to his right was the lamp-post at the entrance to the three-sided Court called Manchu Place.

  And O’Hara stopped dead in his tracks, for in the murky depths of Manchu Place a tiny light winked on and off, on and off—and his ears caught a whistled signal, low and toneless and continually repeated.

  Following the sidewall with outstretched hand, O’Hara moved toward the mysteriously winking light. “Flashlight!” he decided, and tried to make out the vague, blurred figure directing the beam.

  The winking light focused briefly on the shuttered window of a house, clicked on again, centered now on a doorway above five brownstone steps. The toneless whistle sounded again.

  O’Hara, quietly moving his gun to the pocket of his slicker, crept nearer the winking beam, closing in at an oblique angle.

  “What goes on here?” he demanded sharply. “Don’t move, you! Stand there, and hold that light steady! I want a look at you!”

  The beam steadied and seemed to freeze into rigidity as O’Hara stepped forward, but as he reached the brownstone steps he broke out with a muttered oath, for there was no one behind the light! At his challenge the quick-witted shadow had simply placed the flashlight on the top step and slipped away into the shrouding fog.

  O’Hara snatched up the flash and swung the beam to and fro in a half circle, then clicked it off while he stood motionless, listening. His ears picked out the faint pad-pad of slippered feet—a whispering sound that fled and died.

  “A flashlight in a fog,” O’Hara muttered. “Now what in thunder would he be hunting for?”

  As if in answer to his question, a muffled cry shrilled through the murky dark—the raucous “Awk-awk!” of a parrot!

  O’Hara whirled toward the sound, and when the squawk was repeated, his flash beam picked out the parrot. The Feather Devil was perched on the windowsill of a vacant house, seemingly hypnotized by the glare of the electric eye turned upon it, for it made no effort to escape O’Hara’s reaching hand.

  “Awk!” said the parrot plaintively, and snuggled down in the crook of his arm. It was cold and wet and bedraggled, and one wing appeared to be injured. But it was green, this Feather Devil—all green—and a startling thought leaped into O’Hara’s mind.

  Could it be Choy, the parrot stolen from Yun Chee’s house? Had it somehow managed to escape from its captor? And if this were so, the man with the flashlight might have been the masked killer of the tea merchant.

  “And I let the guy run out on me!” O’Hara groaned. “Me, with a gun in my fist, and him not ten feet away! But at least I’ve got the parrot, and believe me, this Feather Devil gets a Number One going-over!”

  Unconsciously O’Hara’s hand had tightened on the bird, and he felt something soft under his fingers, something that made him quickly focus the flash beam. There was a tight little scroll of cloth wound around the parrot’s leg!

  Steadying the flashlight under his arm, O’Hara unwound the ragged strip of cloth, eyes glinting as he saw that it was covered with ragged columns of Chinese writing in a deep red tint.

  “Blood!” O’Hara exclaimed. “It’s written with blood!”

  With the precious scroll tucked away in his pocket and the Feather Devil nestled inside his slicker, O’Hara hurried back to the precinct station. “Hey, Driscoll!” he called, sticking his head in at the Squad Room door. “Get Sang Lee the scrivener! And take it on the jump!”

  O’Hara went into his office and put the green-feathered bird on the edge of his desk while he closed the door and pulled down the windows. “All right, birdie, let’s have a good look at you. Sort of mussed up, eh? What’s your name—Choy? … Come on, speak up. Choy?”

  “Awk!” the parrot said, and made a clumsy swoop to the top of the desk lamp. It swayed there for a moment, preening its ruffled feathers, then slid off awkwardly to the desktop.

  “Hey, keep your tail-feathers out of the inkwell!” O’Hara exclaimed. “What’s the matter—got a lame foot? You’re wobbling around like you were drunk—”

  O’Hara broke off short on that word, and leaning over the bird, sniffed. There was an odor, a most unmistakable Oriental odor.

  “Samshu!” O’Hara burst out. “By God, it is drunk! A drunken parrot! What in hell’s going on here, anyway?”

  CHAPTER THREE

  A PLASTERED PARROT

  he parrot wobbled along the edge of the desk, swaying. Its beak opened and a gurgling sound like a hiccough issued from its throat. Then it rustled its feathers and trumpeted, “Shao! Shao! Shao!”

  “What’s that?” O’Hara stiffened alertly. “Say that again! Go on, speak up!” and he jostled the bird with his finger.

  “Shao! Shao! Shao!” The raucous word rattled out like machine-gun fire. The angry parrot sidled away, hiccoughing.

  O’Hara sat down, slowly, not taking his eyes from the bird. Not the murdered Yun Chee’s Choy, after all. This was Shao—Shao, old Chang’s parrot! How had it escaped from the silversmith’s house in Lantern Court? And what desperate message needed writing in blood, to be sent out into the night with a drunken parrot as its fantastic messenger?

  Unrolling the torn strip of cloth, O’Hara stared at the jagged red symbols as though he would tear out its meaning by sheer will power, but his limited knowledge of the “broken stick” writing was of no avail.

  “Rawk!” The parrot made an awkward flight to the top of a filing cabinet as the phone whirred. O’Hara lifted the receiver. It was the switchboard man, telling him that Driscoll had returned with Sang Lee the scrivener.

  “I’ll be right out!” O’Hara replied, and hung up. The parrot was still perched, droopy-eyed, on the filing case as he carefully closed the office door behind him.

  “Hola, Sah-jin,” Sang Lee greeted him in the Squad Room.

  “Can you read this?” O’Hara questioned, thrusting the cloth message into the scrivener’s hands.

  “It is Number One poor writing,” Sang Lee commented, squinting at the scroll. Then his breath hissed and his eyes grew round as jade buttons. “Sah-jin, hearken!” he gasped, and began to read the scarlet text.

  “My name is Chang Loo, nephew of Chang Pao, silversmith. I am a prisoner in the fifth house on narrow street within one hundred fifty paces of my uncle’s house in Lantern Court. Large reward to finder if this message is delivered to Blue Coat Men.”

  “Chang Loo—a prisoner!” O’Hara gasped in a startled voice. “In a narrow street, 150 paces from No. 14! That must be Mandarin Lane. But why in hell doesn’t he say Mandarin Lane?”

  “Maybe he was taken there blindfolded,” Driscoll suggested.

  “If he was—how would he know it was the fifth house?” O’Hara replied. “But we’re wasting valuable time. Get your hat and coat, Driscoll—and your gun. This is likely to turn out a shooting job.”

  “How about tools, Sarge?” Driscoll inquired.

  “Bring a pinch-bar and a raiding ax,” O’Hara directed, and hurried back to his office for his hat and slicker. But as he flung open the door, he stood rooted on the threshold, then let out a roar of angry s
urprise that brought Driscoll on the run.

  “The parrot!” O’Hara fumed. “It’s gone! Stolen again! I’ll be damned!” He strode over to the open window, peering out between the wide bars. “This window was closed when I went out. That fellow must have trailed me from Manchu Place—”

  O’Hara felt something crunch under his foot. He looked down, and found a number of melon seeds scattered on the floor by the window. “That’s it!” he exclaimed. “This fellow opened the window and used melon seeds as bait to bring the parrot within reach of his hands. Then he pulled it out through the bars and ran—”

  “And we’d better do some running of our own,” Driscoll broke in. “Forget the damn parrot, Sarge. If that fellow gets to Mandarin Lane ahead of us, we’re likely to find Chang Loo with his toes turned up!”

  O’Hara commandeered one of the prowl cars and they sped to the Canton Street entrance to Mandarin Lane, picking up Detective Burke as they crossed Mulberry Lane. Leaving their car parked on Canton Street, the three men plunged into the darkness of Mandarin Lane.

  “There’s the fifth house!” O’Hara whispered, and they came to a halt, scanning their objective. It was not really a house, but a two-story structure which had originally been a stables, later a garage, and finally abandoned altogether, judging by its neglected appearance and the planks nailed across its doors.

  “No light showing,” O’Hara declared, stepping back to scan the grimy upper windows, black and staring as blind eyes. The original pulley bar of the hayloft still protruded between the dormer windows, like a hangman’s gibbet. A separate door set in the sidewall led, apparently, to the upper floor of the building.

  “O.K., Burke, stand guard here in the lane,” O’Hara ordered. “Come on, Driscoll, we’ll crash this side-door and—hello, it’s not even locked! That’s funny—”

  Driscoll’s flashlight lanced the darkness of a flight of narrow, dusty stairs, ending at another door. They went up cautiously, O’Hara’s hand slowly turning the knob of the upper door, then flinging it wide as Driscoll sent his beam sweeping over a bare, atticlike room festooned with cobwebs, its windows covered with heavy sacking.