IX
The history of his young life, as he told it to me, began with his departure from home after falling into disgrace through slugging the Prohi. He had come to San Francisco to wait until his father cooled off. Meanwhile his mother kept him in funds, but she didn’t send him all the money a young fellow in a wild city could use.
That was the situation when he ran into The Whistler, who suggested that a chap with Garthorne’s front could pick up some easy money in the rum-running game if he did what he was told to do. Garthorne was willing enough. He didn’t like Prohibition—it had caused most of his troubles. Rum-running sounded romantic to him—shots in the dark, signal lights off the starboard bow, and so on.
The Whistler, it seemed, had boats and booze and waiting customers, but his landing arrangements were out of whack. He had his eye on a little cove down the shore line that was an ideal spot to land hooch. It was neither too close nor too far from San Francisco. It was sheltered on either side by rocky points, and screened from the road by a large house and high hedges. Given the use of that house, his troubles would be over. He could land his hooch in the cove, run it into the house, repack it innocently there, put it through the front door into his automobiles, and shoot it to the thirsty city.
The house, he told Garthorne, belonged to a Chinese girl named Lillian Shan, who would neither sell nor rent it. Garthorne was to make her acquaintance—The Whistler was already supplied with a letter of introduction written by a former classmate of the girl’s, a classmate who had fallen a lot since university days—and try to work himself in with her to a degree of intimacy that would permit him to make her an offer for the use of the house. That is, he was to find out if she was the sort of person who could be approached with a more or less frank offer of a share in the profits of The Whistler’s game.
Garthorne had gone through with his part, or the first of it, and had become fairly intimate with the girl, when she suddenly left for the East, sending him a note saying she would be gone several months. That was fine for the rumrunners. Garthorne, calling at the house, the next day, had learned that Wang Ma had gone with her mistress, and that the three other servants had been left in charge of the house.
That was all Garthorne knew firsthand. He had not taken part in the landing of the booze, though he would have liked to. But The Whistler had ordered him to stay away, so that he could continue his original part when the girl returned.
The Whistler told Garthorne he had bought the help of the three Chinese servants, but that the woman, Wan Lan, had been killed by the two men in a fight over their shares of the money. Booze had been run through the house once during Lillian Shan’s absence. Her unexpected return gummed things. The house still held some of the booze. They had to grab her and Wang Ma and stick them in a closet until they got the stuff away. The strangling of Wang Ma had been accidental—a rope tied too tight.
The worst complication, however, was that another cargo was scheduled to land in the cove the following Tuesday night, and there was no way of getting word out to the boat that the place was closed. The Whistler sent for our hero and ordered him to get the girl out of the way and keep her out of the way until at least two o’clock Wednesday morning.
Garthorne had invited her to drive down to Half Moon with him for dinner that night. She had accepted. He had faked engine trouble, and had kept her away from the house until two-thirty, and The Whistler had told him later that everything had gone through without a hitch.
After this I had to guess at what Garthorne was driving at—he stuttered and stammered and let his ideas rattle looser than ever. I think it added up to this: he hadn’t thought much about the ethics of his play with the girl. She had no attraction for him—too severe and serious to seem really feminine. And he had not pretended—hadn’t carried on what could possibly be called a flirtation with her. Then he suddenly woke up to the fact that she wasn’t as indifferent as he. That had been a shock to him—one he couldn’t stand. He had seen things straight for the first time. He had thought of it before as simply a wit-matching game. Affection made it different—even though the affection was all on one side.
“I told The Whistler I was through this afternoon,” he finished.
“How did he like it?”
“Not a lot. In fact, I had to hit him.”
“So? And what were you planning to do next?”
“I was going to see Miss Shan, tell her the truth, and then—then I thought I’d better lay low.”
“I think you’d better. The Whistler might not like being hit.”
“I won’t hide now! I’ll go give myself up and tell the truth.”
“Forget it!” I advised him. “That’s no good. You don’t know enough to help her.”
That wasn’t exactly the truth, because he did know that the chauffeur and Hoo Lun had still been in the house the day after her departure for the East. But I didn’t want him to get out of the game yet.
“If I were you,” I went on, “I’d pick out a quiet hiding place and stay there until I can get word to you. Know a good place?”
“Yes,” slowly. “I have a—a friend who will hide me—down near—near the Latin Quarter.”
“Near the Latin Quarter?” That could be Chinatown. I did some sharpshooting. “Waverly Place?”
He jumped.
“How did you know?”
“I’m a detective. I know everything. Ever hear of Chang Li Ching?”
“No.”
I tried to keep from laughing into his puzzled face.
The first time I had seen this cut-up he was leaving a house in Waverly Place, with a Chinese woman’s face showing dimly in the doorway behind him. The house had been across the street from a grocery. The Chinese girl with whom I had talked at Chang’s had given me a slave-girl yarn and an invitation to that same house. Bighearted Jack here had fallen for the same game, but he didn’t know that the girl had anything to do with Chang Li Ching, didn’t know that Chang existed, didn’t know Chang and The Whistler were playmates. Now Jack is in trouble, and he’s going to the girl to hide!
I didn’t dislike this angle of the game. He was walking into a trap, but that was nothing to me—or, rather, I hoped it was going to help me.
“What’s your friend’s name?” I asked.
He hesitated.
“What is the name of the tiny woman whose door is across the street from the grocery?” I made myself plain.
“Hsiu Hsiu.”
“All right,” I encouraged him in his foolishness. “You go there. That’s an excellent hiding place. Now if I want to get a Chinese boy to you with a message, how will he find you?”
“There’s a flight of steps to the left as you go in. He’ll have to skip the second and third steps, because they are fitted with some sort of alarm. So is the handrail. On the second floor you turn to the left again. The hall is dark. The second door to the right—on the right-hand side of the hall—lets you into a room. On the other side of the room is a closet, with a door hidden behind old clothes. There are usually people in the room the door opens into, so he’ll have to wait for a chance to get through it. This room has a little balcony outside, that you can get to from either of the windows. The balcony’s sides are solid, so if you crouch low you can’t be seen from the street or from other houses. At the other end of the balcony there are two loose floor boards. You slide down under them into a little room between walls. The trapdoor there will let you down into another just like it where I’ll probably be. There’s another way out of the bottom room, down a flight of steps, but I’ve never been that way.”
A fine mess! It sounded like a child’s game. But even with all this frosting on the cake our young chump hadn’t tumbled. He took it seriously.
“So that’s how it’s done!” I said. “You’d better get there as soon as you can, and stay there until my messenger gets to you. You’ll know him by the cast in one of his eyes, and maybe I’d better give him a password. ‘Haphazard’—that’ll be the word. The street door—is it locked?”
“No. I’ve never found it locked. There are forty or fifty Chinamen—or perhaps a hundred—living in that building, so I don’t suppose the door is ever locked.”
“Good. Beat it now.”