From the Filipino’s room I went to the office. Everybody except Fiske, the night man, was gone, but Fiske thought the Old Man would drop in for a few minutes later in the night.
I smoked, pretended to listen to Fiske’s report on all the jokes that were at the Orpheum that week, and grouched over my job. I was too well known to get anything on the quiet in Chinatown. I wasn’t sure Cipriano was going to be much help. I needed somebody who was in right down there.
This line of thinking brought me around to “Dummy” Uhl. Uhl was a dummerer who had lost his store. Five years before, he had been sitting on the world. Any day on which his sad face, his package of pins, and his I am deaf and dumb
sign didn’t take twenty dollars out of the office buildings along his route was a rotten day. His big card was his ability to play the statue when skeptical people yelled or made sudden noises behind him. When the Dummy was right, a gun off beside his ear wouldn’t make him twitch an eyelid. But too much heroin broke his nerves until a whisper was enough to make him jump. He put away his pins and his sign—another man whose social life had ruined him.
Since then Dummy had become an errand boy for whoever would stake him to the price of his necessary nose-candy. He slept somewhere in Chinatown, and he didn’t care especially how he played the game. I had used him to get me some information on a window-smashing six months before. I decided to try him again.
I called “Loop” Pigatti’s place—a dive down on Pacific Street, where Chinatown fringes into the Latin Quarter. Loop is a tough citizen, who runs a tough hole, and who minds his own business, which is making his dive show a profit. Everybody looks alike to Loop. Whether you’re a yegg, stool-pigeon, detective, or settlement worker, you get an even break out of Loop and nothing else. But you can be sure that, unless it’s something that might hurt his business, anything you tell Loop will get no further. And anything he tells you is more than likely to be right.
He answered the phone himself.
“Can you get hold of Dummy Uhl for me?” I asked after I had told him who I was.
“Maybe.”
“Thanks. I’d like to see him tonight.”
“You got nothin’ on him?”
“No, Loop, and I don’t expect to. I want him to get something for me.”
“All right. Where d’you want him?”
“Send him up to my joint. I’ll wait there for him.”
“If he’ll come,” Loop promised and hung up.
I left word with Fiske to have the Old Man call me up when he came in, and then I went up to my rooms to wait for my informant.
He came in a little after ten—a short, stocky, pasty-faced man of forty or so, with mouse-colored hair streaked with yellow-white.
“Loop says y’got sumpin’ f’r me.”
“Yes,” I said, waving him to a chair, and closing the door. “I’m buying news.”
He fumbled with his hat, started to spit on the floor, changed his mind, licked his lips, and looked up at me.
“What kind o’ news? I don’t know nothin’.”
I was puzzled. The Dummy’s yellowish eyes should have showed the pinpoint pupils of the heroin addict. They didn’t. The pupils were normal. That didn’t mean he was off the stuff—he had put cocaine into them to distend them to normal. The puzzle was—why? He wasn’t usually particular enough about his appearance to go to that trouble.
“Did you hear about the Chinese killings down the shore last week?” I asked him.
“No.”
“Well,” I said, paying no attention to the denial, “I’m hunting for the pair of yellow men who ducked out—Hoo Lun and Yin Hung. Know anything about them?”
“No.”
“It’s worth a couple of hundred dollars to you to find either of them for me. It’s worth another couple hundred to find out about the killings for me. It’s worth another to find the slim Chinese youngster with gold teeth who opened the door for the Shan girl and her maid.”
“I don’t know nothin’ about them things,” he said.
But he said it automatically while his mind was busy counting up the hundreds I had dangled before him. I suppose his dope-addled brains made the total somewhere in the thousands. He jumped up.
“I’ll see what I c’n do. S’pose you slip me a hundred now, on account.”
I didn’t see that.
“You get it when you deliver.”
We had to argue that point, but finally he went off grumbling and growling to get me my news.
I went back to the office. The Old Man hadn’t come in yet. It was nearly midnight when he arrived.
“I’m using Dummy Uhl again,” I told him, “and I’ve put a Filipino boy down there too. I’ve got another scheme, but I don’t know anybody to handle it. I think if we offered the missing chauffeur and houseman jobs in some out-of-the-way place up the country, perhaps they’d fall for it. Do you know anybody who could pull it for us?”
“Exactly what have you in mind?”
“It must be somebody who has a house out in the country, the farther the better, the more secluded the better. They would phone one of the Chinese employment offices that they needed three servants—cook, houseman, and chauffeur. We throw in the cook for good measure, to cover the game. It’s got to be airtight on the other end, and, if we’re going to catch our fish, we have to give ’em time to investigate. So whoever does it must have some servants, and must put up a bluff—I mean in his own neighborhood—that they are leaving, and the servants must be in on it. And we’ve got to
