“Waverly Place?” I guessed.
Her face bobbed up and down, delightedly.
On what I took for the east side of Waverly Place she drew a square—perhaps a house. In the square she set what could have been a rose. I frowned at that. She erased the rose and in its place put a crooked circle, adding dots. I thought I had it. The rose had been a cabbage. This thing was a potato. The square represented the grocery store I had noticed on Waverly Place. I nodded.
Her finger crossed the street and put a square on the other side, and her face turned up to mine, begging me to understand her.
“The house across the street from the grocer’s,” I said slowly, and then, as she tapped my watch-pocket, I added, “at midnight tomorrow.”
I don’t know how much of it she caught, but she nodded her little head until her earrings were swinging like crazy pendulums.
With a quick diving motion, she caught my right hand, kissed it, and with a tottering, hoppy run vanished behind the velvet curtains.
I used my handkerchief to wipe the map off the table and was smoking in my chair when Chang Li Ching returned some twenty minutes later.
I left shortly after that, as soon as we had traded a few dizzy compliments. The pockmarked man ushered me out.
At the office there was nothing new for me. Foley hadn’t been able to shadow The Whistler the night before.
I went home for the sleep I had not got last night.
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,
