I
She was sitting straight and stiff in one of the Old Man’s chairs when he called me into his office—a tall girl of perhaps twenty-four, broad-shouldered, deep-bosomed, in mannish grey clothes. That she was Oriental showed only in the black shine of her bobbed hair, in the pale yellow of her unpowdered skin, and in the fold of her upper lids at the outer eye-corners, half hidden by the dark rims of her spectacles. But there was no slant to her eyes, her nose was almost aquiline, and she had more chin than Mongolians usually have. She was modern Chinese-American from the flat heels of her tan shoes to the crown of her untrimmed felt hat.
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 lifetime 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 doorbell 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 checkbook.
“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.