Darrell shook his head.
“Not a bit of it, Charley. Not if you help me out to the best of your ability. The reason they’re holding you here is because the drunken man skipped while you and your boss were over at the laundry. He was beating his check, Charley, and he took your alibi along with him.” He stopped. He did not wish to give the Celestial a too cheerful outlook on affairs yet, nor any intimation that he would likely be released by habeas corpus within the next twenty-four hours.
“Charley,” he began, “you were with Napoleon Foy last Saturday night, weren’t you?”
“Sure I with Foy Yi,” replied the Chinese waiter. “We play hui-hui-sip-soo with cards. I not work nights that week. Just like Amer-can waiter — one week days — one week nights. Pletty soon waiters’ union, too, mebbe!”
“I see. What hours that night were you with Foy in the back of his laundry?”
“I come ‘bout seven. Go home ‘bout ‘leven. Foy Yi win all hui-hui-sip-soo games. Bad luck Charley Yat Gong have — bad luck you call ‘im, eh?” The spectacled eyes surveyed the reporter with such solemnness that he wondered if he were being made sport of in some way.
“Anybody bring any laundry, Charley, while the two of you were playing?”
“Foy Yi not like to be int’rup’ when he play. He say let laundly come daytimes like Amer-can hours. He turn down front lights and lock door. But once he get up and go to front door when somebody pound. He turn on lights and gone tlee — mebbe fi’ minutes. He lock up again an’ come back. He tell me jus’ man with bundle of laundly.”
“Yes. That is what I want to question you about, Charley,” said Darrell. “Did you see that man, or did you remain seated back of the partition?”
The Chinese waiter shook his head.
“No see. Just hear ‘em talk. Man say: ‘Sorry disturb you, Cholly, but didn’t know you close down nights. I s’pose all chinks keep open twenty-flor hours’ day.’”
“Was that all that was said?” queried Darrell halfheartedly.
Charley Yat Gong thought for a moment.
“Well, I wait for Foy Yi to come back to play hui-hui-sip-soo, an’ I hear argiment. I hear man say: ‘Nix, Cholly, how I know red tlicket mean my laundly, eh? I don’ like red tlickets. Here, if you got lite out tlicket so you can lead, you lite tlicket so I can tell my laundly, too. One time I get wrong bundle laundly from chink, and never get my own again. That chink have nerve tell me: “Tickee say you bundle — then you bundle.” So I get stung. Chink not know half time how to lead his own liting. Here, Cholly, you lite you tlicket out on my tlicket, then ev’body happy — you, me, an’ the devil!’”
This was highly interesting. Darrell leaned forward. “And was there any more argument?”
Charley Yat Gong shook his head.
“Pletty soon I hear silence, then door slam and key lock, and Foy Yi come back and sit down. He say ‘Plenty business, but no like loughnecks. No like be called Cholly. I take good name — why in ‘ell they don’t use? All lite, Cholly Yat Gong. You play. How you move um card now, Cholly Yat Gong?”
Darrell reflected. Here was something of importance gained by a bit of combing about the fringe of the Foy case. Only one man had come with the laundry to Foy’s place Saturday night — the night on which the laundryman had told Chi Tsung Liang he had taken in the bundle which proved Monday morning to contain the handkerchief message.
This man, as was evidenced by the one-sided argument Charley Yat Gong had overheard, had possessed an inherent distrust of Chinese business methods, had demanded that Foy discard his red-slip ticket system, and write out the laundry ticket — presumably to be torn across, Chinese fashion, as in the case of other tickets — on something he had produced from one of his own pockets, thus helping him as well as the proprietor to identify his own laundry bundle several days later when it should have graduated from the wringer and the flat-iron.
That this substitute for Foy’s red slip was not the street-car transfer the man had brought and laid carefully on the counter, was made certain by Mrs. Chi Tsung Liang’s faithful and painstaking rendition of the facts which her husband had received from Foy. The customer had carried that same street-car transfer away with him.
One or two more queries put to the depressed Chinese elicited nothing of value. So Darrell rose. He rapped on the iron door for old Ferguson and put his hand on the Chinaman’s shoulder.
“Cheer up, Charley,” he said. “You’ll be out of here before long.” And a second later he was going down the corridor with Ferguson.
Reaching the first floor, he proceeded at once to Corrigan’s office, just off the more pretentious quarters of his superior, Inspector Notman. A wisp of blue cigar smoke and a light back of the glazed doors proclaimed that the indefatigable Corrigan was on the job in the night hours when crime usually broke. Darrell turned the handle of the door and went in. Corrigan was tilted back in his swivel chair, his feet on his desk, a cigar in his mouth, quite alone.
“Hello, Jeff,” he said genially. “What are you smelling around for now?”
“I’m smelling around for an interesting and newsy solution of that Foy killing,” smiled Darrell.
Corrigan laughed contentedly.
“You’ve dug up some good Chinese yarns, Jeff, in the past, due to your acquaintance with old Chi Tsung Liang, but this affair is a dead fish so far as any news story is concerned.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Darrell returned smilingly. “I had a little tip to-day that makes me think there’s more in it than either a tong murder or a ‘no-tickee-no-laundly’ killing.”
“The devil you say!” returned Corrigan ingratiatingly. He took his feet off the desk. “What is it, Jeff?”
“And I should spill a perfectly good clue,” mocked Darrell to the professional detective. But he grew serious at once. “Frank, what did you do with all the laundry tickets — both the half tickets on the bundles yet uncalled for, and the torn pairs which matched up together after customers had called and gotten their stuff?” He paused. “I’m not saying why I want to know, Frank, but if anything develops I shan’t forget you, you know. The little satisfaction of following our own noses and reaching something worth while is all we newspaper men really get out of these cases.”
“Well, about the tickets,” Corrigan declared, mystification in his voice, “I myself collected every scrap of paper in that laundry, back and rear, from bills due and rent receipts to tickets on the bundles. I left nothing.”
“Can I have a look at ‘em, Frank?”
Corrigan surveyed him a moment, then reluctantly took down from a heap of battered enameled black boxes one upon which a paster marked “Foy” had been affixed. He unlocked it with a key on his key ring. He dumped the contents out on the table, a mass of red half tickets, a few square, untorn blank pieces of red paper, a few bills of tradesmen, and a pair of twisted door keys. Darrell riffled them over attentively. He noted how every half ticket with its black hieroglyphics held a ragged edge to its right, but a square, machine-cut edge to its left. He looked up.
“Frank, I see you evidently garnered in all the half tickets that were on the waiting bundles. But what about the pairs of half tickets — the ones that match up and identify the customer’s laundry when he comes for it?”
“Foy evidently destroyed those,” said Corrigan, “although they’d have been of no value to us. Nothing to that old belief, you know, Jeff, that a Chinaman writes the description of his customer on a ticket. He merely writes a Chinese numeral.”
“But you mean to say that not one of the pairs was to be found?”
“I do,” retorted Corrigan coolly. “I ought to know, I guess. I collected all the papers in the place myself. What for would a chink hold on to the disposed-of tickets anyway?”
Darrell’s face bore a studious look.
“I’m sure I don’t know,” he replied, “for I’ve never yet fully fathomed the Chinese mind.” He dumped the mass of papers and half tickets back into the tin box. “Fra
nk, let me have these keys to the store, will you? I’d like to run down there and look around. I might unearth something you overlooked, you know.”
Corrigan clutched the keys. There was a crafty bargaining look in his face.
“I’ll make a proposition with you, Jeff. You can have ‘em subject to the following arrangement: If you find a scrap of paper in that place that Hooper or I overlooked, you’re so much to the good. If you can’t, then you owe me a fat dinner at Marx’s Fish House. How about it?”
“Your proposition is so one-sided, Frank, it’s cutthroat, but by George I’ll go you anyway.” And Darrell rose with the keys in his fingers just as a bluecoat came to the door and announced to Corrigan that he was wanted in his superior’s office.
Outside he boarded a car at once and within twenty minutes stood in front of Foy’s one-time laundry. Fitting the longer of the two keys in the door he entered what only last night had been the scene of a ruthless and brutal slaying of a poor Oriental. Snapping on the lights in the front, he proceeded on back of the partition and did the same there. He stood for a second surveying the scene.
Many indications there were of police and reporters; much dust; many prints of feet, evidences that everything in the place had been handled. But that was all. He repaired slowly back to the front of the laundry where he gazed down first at the tiny conical pot of ink and its slender brush, then to the heap of ironed shirts and collars, formerly laid carefully in bundles in the rack on the wall, and now ruthlessly unwrapped again by some oversagacious headquarters man in the effort to find a clue through the laundry marks.
Allowing his gaze to travel around the room again, Darrell found not a scrap of paper meeting his eye. He turned his attention to several bundles of soiled linen that lay under the counter, and which had evidently come in the day of Foy’s death. None bore even the half ticket usually pinned to them in such cases. Corrigan had indeed stripped the place of every particle of printing or writing, whether Chinese or American. And yet — among Corrigan’s collection was nothing that might constitute the piece of printing or writing which a customer could have unearthed from his own pockets to serve as a ticket. Nor was such in evidence here. Had it been destroyed, together with other matched-up halves?
From long association with Chinese and study of Chinatown, Darrell knew that a Chinaman never wastes anything on earth. The old proverb: “The man of the Chinese Empire wastes not even a mustard seed,” described the attitude of the Celestial to an extreme nicety. If Napoleon Foy, himself none too plentifully supplied with the world’s goods, was in the habit of destroying day after day the halves of tickets which had been matched up and their corresponding bundle delivered to the customer, he would be a very un-Chinese Chinaman.
Darrell strolled into the back room, where he stood with his hands in his pockets, a frown on his forehead. What would be the most likely use for such delicate paper slips? To light a fire with? But this was June! Nevertheless he crossed the room and threw open the door of the little rusty iron stove which awaited winter. A grin spread over his face. He would buy no dinner for Corrigan at Marx’s Fish House.
The interior of the stove was stuffed with countless halves of red tickets awaiting the call of the first roaring fire of fall.
He thrust in his arm joyously, raking them all out on the dusty wooden floor, getting his wrist well covered with soot. But he did not need to tumble them over, back and forth, for among the red slips was one which, although it bore some undecipherable Chinese characters, was a pale-green color. He fished it out, and, as he did so, disturbed a knot of the red slips and unearthed its green mate. He placed the two halves together. The usual Chinese characters and nothing more. He turned them both over and again fitted them together. This time English letters — letters printed by an automatic taximeter — met his eye and announced that the green square was nothing other than a taxicab fare ticket. It read:
GREEN TAXICAB COMPANY
CAB NO. 455
June 8
Fare . .$1.85 Extras. . 25 Waiting. .0
Was the case at an end? As Darrell stood there staring down at the taxicab ticket, he felt that peculiar depression which always came to him when he was at the end of a chase — when the case was solved. With a sigh he rose from his knees, snapped off the lights, both front and rear, and left the place for good, locking the door behind him.
CHAPTER XXI
“To Take Effect at Dead Line To-night”
IT was late in the afternoon when Darrell, an odd smile on his face as though at a secret, stepped from a green cab in the down-town district after a long ride which had taken him to the rural outskirts of the city.
The finding of the driver who had given that green fare ticket had not proved very difficult. Yes, the man remembered that particular trip; but, to Jeff’s keen disappointment, that was about all of definite value the driver did recall. It had been a busy day for his cab; he had driven upward of two dozen fares, both long and short hauls, and three or four of them had been to the suburbs and rural outskirts.
The man had stood turning the ticket over and over, evidently doing his best to recall the particular fare to whom he had given it. At last he seemed to place it. Yes — that was it! This was one of the long hauls. A man and a woman had hailed him at the Twelfth Street depot. He had driven them out to the Lincoln Road. They had dismissed him near the old North-Grove Sanatorium. Funny place to go, he thought, as it was now deserted. But that was all the information he could give. No, he couldn’t recall what they were like — hadn’t paid any particular attention to ‘em. He had been in a hurry to get back to the city and pick up the short hauls that seemed to be more than plentiful that day.
Darrel had to be content with that. The man was quite willing to help, but it was evident that he was the type of taxi driver to whom all fares look alike when there is a great rush of business.
Well — that should be enough! Digging out the identity of the man and woman was up to him, Darrell.
A man — and a woman! Here indeed was something totally unexpected, but perhaps, after all, it did not involve any new element. The man was surely the unknown who had gone into Foy’s laundry that night. And on June eighth, with a companion — a woman — he had ridden out on the Lincoln Road, and had got out near the old Northgrove Sanatorium. Rapidly a theory as to the meaning of that trip was forming in Darrell’s mind.
He had jumped into the cab and was driven out to the spot where the pair had alighted. Here he got out himself, telling the driver to run back along Lincoln Road and wait for him about a quarter of a mile away. Then, on foot, he approached the old sanatorium.
And of a sudden the explanation came to him — that solemn, forbidding-looking, isolated house with its many rooms — its barred windows — that tall and likewise thick and impenetrable wall, now showing the wear and tear of many seasons. The place was nothing other than some old private insane asylum of the early and cruder days of the sixties and seventies when State institutions for the insane were not so finely equipped for the treatment of mental disorders, and upon which rested a stigma which they perhaps then deserved. Now, intensely interested, certain of the truth of his theory, Darrell trudged on until he was directly in front of the sheet-iron gateway, where he stood looking at a bright-painted sign stating that the place was for sale.
But to the left of the sheet-iron gate was affixed a larger, but far older sign; a sign whose letters had so faded that many of them were well-nigh indecipherable. One by one, painstakingly, at times not even sure of the identity of a letter, Darrell picked them out. And at last he knew that the sign had once proclaimed:
NORTHGROVE SANATORIUM
DR. LEON FLANDRAU, PROPRIETOR
But as he studied the sign from the roadway, conscious that his hypothesis regarding the sinister, prison-like residence had ‘been substantiated, the gates suddenly opened and a giant black Negro came out, locking the gates immediately behind him. The Negro resembled a great hairless gorilla, with his he
ad set deep in broad shoulders, and powerful arms that, in length, were far out of proportion to his body. He gazed suspiciously at Darrell.
“Is yo’ lookin’ fo’ anyone?” he asked.
“No,” said Darrell, measuring up that powerful physical frame. “But you might tell me where the river is, if you will?”
A grim cackle came from the Negro’s lips.
“Yo’ might as well save yo’ footsteps, w’ite man, if yo’s lookin’ fo’ to do any fishin’ heahabouts. De ribber’s down dar” — he extended a black digit — “but dey’s nary fish knee high to a minnie in it. You’s was’-in’ yo’ time if’n yo’ ‘spects to do any fishin’.”
“Well, if that’s the case, guess I won’t try,” said Darrell. “I’m a stranger about here.” He was tempted to ask a few adroit questions of this ebony Hercules, but he refrained, for he felt that he was at the end of his chase — and if so, one suspicious move on his part, and the case would be ruined.
He turned and retraced his steps with only one cautious backward glance. It revealed the Negro ambling down the road in the opposite direction toward the west, his frame, now silhouetted against the sky, resembling more than ever an ape of the African forests than a human. It was not long before Darrell was once more on Lincoln Road, whereupon he speeded up his pace and within a few minutes was back in the cab. Stopping it at the first drug store, he went in and took up the telephone directory.
He turned to the F’s, and looked for the name Flandrau. Dr. Leon Flandrau, one-time proprietor of the deserted sanatorium, must have been dead for many years now. But this was no reason for disregarding what might be a clue. And sure enough, a second later, Darrell came upon the entry, accompanied by its telephone number:
Flandrau — Victor. Physician. 770 Maxwell Street
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