VIII
At ten minutes after ten the next morning Lillian Shan and I arrived at the front door of Fong Yick’s employment agency on Washington Street.
“Give me just two minutes,” I told her as I climbed out. “Then come in.”
“Better keep your steam up,” I suggested to the driver. “We might have to slide away in a hurry.”
In Fong Yick’s, a lanky, grey-haired man whom I thought was the Old Man’s Frank Paul was talking around a chewed cigar to half a dozen Chinese. Across the battered counter a fat Chinese was watching them boredly through immense steel-rimmed spectacles.
I looked at the half-dozen. The third from me had a crooked nose—a short, squat man.
I pushed aside the others and reached for him.
I don’t know what the stuff he tried on me was—jiu jitsu, maybe, or its Chinese equivalent. Anyhow, he crouched and moved his stiffly open hands trickily.
I took hold of him here and there, and presently had him by the nape of his neck, with one of his arms bent up behind him.
Another Chinese piled on my back. The lean, grey-haired man did something to his face, and the Chinese went over in a corner and stayed there.
That was the situation when Lillian Shan came in.
I shook the flat-nosed boy at her.
“Yin Hung!” she exclaimed.
“Hoo Lun isn’t one of the others?” I asked, pointing to the spectators.
She shook her head emphatically, and began jabbering Chinese at my prisoner. He jabbered back, meeting her gaze.
“What are you going to do with him?” she asked me in a voice that wasn’t quite right.
“Turn him over to the police to hold for the San Mateo sheriff. Can you get anything out of him?”
“No.”
I began to push him toward the door. The steel-spectacled Chinese blocked the way, one hand behind him.
“No can do,” he said.
I slammed Yin Hung into him. He went back against the wall.
“Get out!” I yelled at the girl.
The grey-haired man stopped two Chinese who dashed for the door, sent them the other way—back hard against the wall.
We left the place.
There was no excitement in the street. We climbed into the taxicab and drove the block and a half to the Hall of Justice, where I yanked my prisoner out. The rancher Paul said he wouldn’t go in, that he had enjoyed the party, but now had some of his own business to look after. He went on up Kearney Street afoot.
Half-out of the taxicab, Lillian Shan changed her mind.
“Unless it’s necessary,” she said, “I’d rather not go in either. I’ll wait here for you.”
“Righto,” and I pushed my captive across the sidewalk and up the steps.
Inside, an interesting situation developed.
The San Francisco police weren’t especially interested in Yin Hung, though willing enough, of course, to hold him for the sheriff of San Mateo County.
Yin Hung pretended he didn’t know any English, and I was curious to know what sort of story he had to tell, so I hunted around in the detectives’ assembly room until I found Bill Thode of the Chinatown detail, who talks the language some.
He and Yin Hung jabbered at each other for some time.
Then Bill looked at me, laughed, bit off the end of a cigar, and leaned back in his chair.
“According to the way he tells it,” Bill said, “that Wan Lan woman and Lillian Shan had a row. The next day Wan Lan’s not anywheres around. The Shan girl and Wang Ma, her maid, say Wan Lan has left, but Hoo Lun tells this fellow he saw Wang Ma burning some of Wan Lan’s clothes.
“So Hoo Lun and this fellow think something’s wrong, and the next day they’re damned sure of it, because this fellow misses a spade from his garden tools. He finds it again that night, and it’s still wet with damp dirt, and he says no dirt was dug up anywheres around the place—not outside of the house anyways. So him and Hoo Lun put their heads together, didn’t like the result, and decided they’d better dust out before they went wherever Wan Lan had gone. That’s the message.”
“Where is Hoo Lun now?”
“He says he don’t know.”
“So Lillian Shan and Wang Ma were still in the house when this pair left?” I asked. “They hadn’t started for the East yet?”
“So he says.”
“Has he got any idea why Wan Lan was killed?”
“Not that I’ve been able to get out of him.”
“Thanks, Bill! You’ll notify the sheriff that you’re holding him?”
“Sure.”
Of course Lillian Shan and the taxicab were gone when I came out of the Hall of Justice door.
I went back into the lobby and used one of the booths to phone the office. Still no report from Dick Foley—nothing of any value—and none from the operative who was trying to shadow Jack Garthorne. A wire had come from the Richmond branch. It was to the effect that the Garthornes were a wealthy and well-known local family, that young Jack was usually in trouble, that he had slugged a Prohibition agent during a café raid a few months ago, that his father had taken him out of his will and chased him from the house, but that his mother was believed to be sending him money.
That fit in with what the girl had told me.
A street car carried me to the garage where I had stuck the roadster I had borrowed from the girl’s garage the previous morning. I drove around to Cipriano’s apartment building. He had no news of any importance for me. He had spent the night hanging around Chinatown, but had picked up nothing.
I was a little inclined toward grouchiness as I turned the roadster west, driving out through Golden Gate Park to the Ocean Boulevard. The job wasn’t getting along as snappily as I wanted it to.
I let the roadster slide down the boulevard at a good clip, and the salt air blew some of my kinks away.
A bony-faced man with pinkish mustache opened the door when I rang Lillian Shan’s bell. I knew him—Tucker, a deputy sheriff.
“Hullo,” he said. “What d’you want?”
“I’m hunting for her too.”
“Keep on hunting,” he grinned. “Don’t let me stop you.”
“Not here, huh?”
“Nope. The Swede woman that works for her says she was in and out half an hour before I got here, and I’ve been here about ten minutes now.”
“Got a warrant for her?” I asked.
“You bet you! Her chauffeur squawked.”
“Yes, I heard him,” I said. “I’m the bright boy who gathered him in.”
I spent five or ten minutes more talking to Tucker and then climbed in the roadster again.
“Will you give the agency a ring when you nab her?” I asked as I closed the door.
“You bet you.”
I pointed the roadster at San Francisco again.
Just outside of Daly City a taxicab passed me, going south. Jack Garthorne’s face looked through the window.
I snapped on the brakes and waved my arm. The taxicab turned and came back to me. Garthorne opened the door, but did not get out.
I got down into the road and went over to him.
“There’s a deputy sheriff waiting in Miss Shan’s house, if that’s where you’re headed.”
His blue eyes jumped wide, and then narrowed as he looked suspiciously at me.
“Let’s go over to the side of the road and have a little talk,” I invited.
He got out of the taxicab and we crossed to a couple of comfortable-looking boulders on the other side.
“Where is Lil—Miss Shan?” he asked.
“Ask The Whistler,” I suggested.
This blond kid wasn’t so good. It took him a long time to get his gun out. I let him go through with it.
“What do you mean?” he demanded.
I hadn’t meant anything. I had just wanted to see how the remark would hit him. I kept quiet.
“Has The Whistler got her?”
“I don’t think so,” I admitted, though I hated to do it. “But the point is that she has had to go in hiding to keep from being hanged for the murders The Whistler framed.”
“Hanged?”
“Uh-huh. The deputy waiting in her house has a warrant for her—for murder.”
He put away his gun and made gurgling noises in his throat.
“I’ll go there! I’ll tell everything I know!”
He started for his taxicab.
“Wait!” I called. “Maybe you’d better tell me what you know first. I’m working for her, you know.”
He spun around and came back.
“Yes, that’s right. You’ll know what to do.”
“Now what do you really know, if anything?” I asked when he was standing in front of me.
“I know the whole thing!” he cried. “About the deaths and the booze and—”
“Easy! Easy! There’s no use wasting all that knowledge on the chauffeur.”
He quieted down, and I began to pump him. I spent nearly an hour getting all of it.