I put my gun in sight, close to his scared-grey face.
“Keep yourself still while I do my phoning!”
Reaching for the telephone with my free hand, I kept one eye on the Dummy.
It wasn’t enough. My gun was too close to him.
He yanked it out of my hand. I jumped for him.
The gun turned in his fingers. I grabbed it — too late. It went off, its muzzle less than a foot from where I’m thickest. Fire stung my body.
Clutching the gun with both hands I folded down to the floor. Dummy went away from there, leaving the door open behind him.
One hand on my burning belly, I crossed to the window and waved an arm at Dick Foley, stalling on a corner down the street. Then I went to the bathroom and looked to my wound. A blank cartridge does hurt if you catch it close up!
My vest and shirt and union suit were ruined, and I had a nasty scorch on my body. I greased it, taped a cushion over it, changed my clothes, loaded the gun again, and went down to the office to wait for word from Dick. The first trick in the game looked like mine. Heroin or no heroin, Dummy Uhl would not have jumped me if my guess — based on the trouble he was taking to make his eyes look right and the lie he had sprung on me about there being no strangers in Chinatown — hadn’t hit close to the mark.
Dick wasn’t long in joining me.
“Good pickings!” he said when he came in. The little Canadian talks like a thrifty man’s telegram. “Beat it for phone. Called Hotel Irvington. Booth — couldn’t get anything but number. Ought to be enough. Then Chinatown. Dived in cellar west side Waverly Place. Couldn’t stick close enough to spot place. Afraid to take chance hanging around. How do you like it?”
“I like it all right. Let’s look up ‘The Whistler’s’ record.”
A file clerk got it for us — a bulky envelope the size of a brief case, crammed with memoranda, clippings and letters. The gentleman’s biography, as we had it, ran like this:
Neil Conyers, alias The Whistler, was born in Philadelphia — out on Whiskey Hill — in 1883. In ’94, at the age of eleven, he was picked up by the Washington police. He had gone there to join Coxey’s Army. They sent him home. In ’98 he was arrested in his home town for stabbing another lad in a row over an election-night bonfire. This time he was released in his parents’ custody. In 1901 the Philadelphia police grabbed him again, charging him with being the head of the first organized automobile-stealing ring. He was released without trial, for lack of evidence. But the district attorney lost his job in the resultant scandal. In 1908 Conyers appeared on the Pacific Coast — at Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles — in company with a con-man known as “Duster” Hughes. Hughes was shot and killed the following year by a man whom he’d swindled in a fake airplane manufacturing deal. Conyers was arrested on the same deal. Two juries disagreed and he was turned loose. In 1910 the Post Office Department’s famous raid on get-rich-quick promoters caught him. Again there wasn’t enough evidence against him to put him away. In 1915 the law scored on him for the first time. He went to San Quentin for buncoing some visitors to the Panama-Pacific International Exposition. He stayed there for three years. In 1919 he and a Jap named Hasegawa nicked the Japanese colony of Seattle for $20,000, Conyers posing as an American who had held a commission in the Japanese army during that late war. He had a counterfeit medal of the Order of the Rising Sun which the emperor was supposed to have pinned on him. When the game fell through, Hasegawa’s family made good the $20,000 — Conyers got out of it with a good profit and not even any disagreeable publicity. The thing had been hushed. He returned to San Francisco after that, bought the Hotel Irvington, and had been living there now for five years without anybody being able to add another word to his criminal record. He was up to something, but nobody could learn what. There wasn’t a chance in the world of getting a detective into his hotel as a guest. Apparently the joint was always without vacant rooms. It was as exclusive as the Pacific-Union Club.
This, then, was the proprietor of the hotel Dummy Uhl had got on the phone before diving into his hole in Chinatown.
I had never seen Conyers. Neither had Dick. There were a couple of photographs in his envelope. One was the profile and full-face photograph of the local police, taken when he had been picked up on the charge that led him to San Quentin. The other was a group picture: all rung up in evening clothes, with the phoney Japanese medal on his chest, he stood among half a dozen of the Seattle Japs he had trimmed — a flashlight picture taken while he was leading them to the slaughter.
These pictures showed him to be a big bird, fleshy, pompous-looking, with a heavy, square chin and shrewd eyes.
“Think you could pick him up?” I asked Dick.
“Sure.”
“Suppose you go up there and see if you can get a room or apartment somewhere in the neighborhood — one you can watch the hotel from. Maybe you’ll get a chance to tail him around now and then.”
I put the pictures in my pocket, in case they’d come in handy, dumped the rest of the stuff back in its envelope, and went into the Old Man’s office.
“I arranged that employment office stratagem,” he said. “A Frank Paul, who has a ranch out beyond Martinez, will be in Fong Yick’s establishment at ten Thursday morning, carrying out his part.”
“That’s fine! I’m going calling in Chinatown now. If you don’t hear from me for a couple of days, will you ask the street-cleaners to watch what they’re sweeping up?”
He said he would.
San Francisco’s Chinatown jumps out of the shopping district at California Street and runs north to the Latin Quarter — a strip two blocks wide by six long. Before the fire nearly twenty-five thousand Chinese lived in those dozen blocks. I don’t suppose the population is a third of that now.
Grant Avenue, the main street and spine of this strip, is for most of its length a street of gaudy shops catering to the tourist trade and flashy chop-suey houses, where the racket of American jazz orchestras drowns the occasional squeak of a Chinese flute. Farther out, there isn’t so much paint and gilt, and you can catch the proper Chinese smell of spices and vinegar and dried things. If you leave the main thoroughfares and show places and start poking around in alleys and dark corners, and nothing happens to you, the chances are you’ll find some interesting things — though you won’t like some of them.
However, I wasn’t poking around as I turned off Grant Avenue at Clay Street, and went up to Spofford Alley, hunting for the house with red steps and red door, which Cipriano had said was Chang Li Ching’s. I did pause for a few seconds to look up Waverly Place when I passed it. The Filipino had told me the strange Chinese were living there, and that he thought their house might lead through to Chang Li Ching’s; and Dick Foley had shadowed Dummy Uhl there.
But I couldn’t guess which was the important house. Four doors from Jair Quon’s gambling house, Cipriano had said, but I didn’t know where fair Quon’s was. Waverly Place was a picture of peace and quiet just now. A fat Chinese was stacking crates of green vegetables in front of a grocery. Half a dozen small yellow boys were playing at marbles in the middle of the street. On the other side, a blond young man in tweeds was climbing the six steps from a cellar to the street, a painted Chinese woman’s face showing for an instant before she closed the door behind him.
I went on up to Spofford Alley and found my house with no difficulty at all. It was a shabby building with steps and door the color of dried blood, its windows solidly shuttered with thick, tight-nailed planking. What made it stand out from its neighbors was that its ground floor wasn’t a shop or place of business. Purely residential buildings are rare in Chinatown.