“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.
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
