The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard Original)

by Unknown

  Gus thought of Giant Pardo and said very softly:

  “Don’t look—at me—go to—a neutral corner—”

  When the proprietor of the lunch-wagon heard Gus’s body fall, he came around from behind the counter and swore. He put the lighted cigarette between his own lips. When he leaned over Gus’s body he saw the red stain on the floor. Gus had been dead ten minutes when the first cop reached the place. It was a cold dawn, and they weren’t easy to find.

  The Parrot That Wouldn’t Talk

  Walter C. Brown

  WALTER C. BROWN, a Pennsylvanian, quit his job as a bookkeeper to become partner in a bookshop, then acquired an extensive collection of criminological information, much of it unpublished. From these files, as well as a dedicated reading of mystery and detective fiction, he had sufficient material to make the decision to write mysteries himself.

  His first short story, “The Squealer,” was published in the pulp magazine Clues in 1929, the same year in which his first novel, The Second Guess, appeared. He went on to write two more mystery novels, Laughing Death (1932) and Murder at Mocking House (1933), as well as dozens of stories in the 1930s and 1940s for such pulps as Argosy, Blue Book, Detective Tales, and Black Mask, as well as such higher-paying slicks as Liberty and The Saturday Evening Post.

  Several of his short stories were adapted for early television series, and his novella “Prelude to Murder,” first published in the October 1945 issue of Blue Book, served as the basis for the highly suspenseful, if largely unknown, British motion picture House in the Woods (1957). It is the chilling story of a couple, played by Patricia Roc and Michael Gough, who seek solitude and rent an isolated house whose landlord, played by Ronald Howard (the son of Trevor Howard and once the star of a 1950s Sherlock Holmes television series), is an artist and very weird indeed. It was directed by Maxwell Munden, who also wrote the screenplay.

  “The Parrot That Wouldn’t Talk” was published in the January 1942 issue.

  The Parrot That Wouldn’t Talk

  Walter C. Brown

  A CHINATOWN NOVELETTE

  Sah-jin O’Hara, Blue Coat Devil of the Chinatown Squad, had been handed some queer crime clues in his dealings with the slant-eyed Sons of Han, but never a plastered parrot that wouldn’t talk—not even to utter the three little words that held the key to a fabulous fortune.

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE PURLOINED PARROT

  HE PARROT IS KNOWN by many names, but call it perico, papagei or perroquet, it is still a remarkable bird. Bespectacled professors describe it as a zygodactyl of the order Psittaci; howling black savages of the Congo speak of it as The Talking Ghost—and down in Chinatown the slant-eyed Sons of Han call it The Feather Devil.

  But mention the word “parrot” to Sergeant Dennis O’Hara of the Chinatown Squad and you will hear a shorter and stronger name for the species, for the Red-Hair Sah-jin, as the Yellow Quarter calls him, is not likely to forget the mystery of The Parrot That Wouldn’t Talk.

  “That’s the kind of breaks you get in Chinatown,” O’Hara said. “Everywhere else the parrot is famous for imitating the human voice—so I get stuck with one that wouldn’t talk. We didn’t want a whole speech, either—just three little words, but drunk or sober, that blasted Feather Devil kept its beak shut.”

  Then O’Hara grins at you. “Never heard of a drunk parrot, eh? Well, this one was plastered, all right—wobbling on its feet, and making noises like hiccoughs. Yes, sir, I’ve been handed some damn queer clues in my time, but that liquored parrot tops ’em all!”

  It happened that the mysterious chain of events began one quiet evening as Yun Chee the tea merchant sat in his favorite bamboo chair, reading aloud from the poems of Li Po. Behind him, on a pedestal-stand near the open window, was a green parrot called Choy.

  “Rawk-awk!” squawked the parrot, stirring restlessly.

  “Silence!” Yun Chee commanded, frowning, then began Li Po’s famous Moon Poem in a sing-song chant:

  “I fish for the Moon in the Yellow River,

  I cast my net with cunning hand—”

  “Awk!” shrilled the parrot, and there was a swift sound like the rustling of feathers.

  In rising anger Yun Chee twisted his head around—then his jaw dropped, and the wooden-bound volume of poems clattered to the floor, for a long arm had darted in through the open window, snaring the parrot in folds of black cloth. And before the startled merchant could spring to his feet, the pedestal was empty—the parrot gone!

  “Hai! Thief! Thief!” Yun Chee yelled, dashing to the window in time to see a dark figure racing through the back garden. Snatching an antique Mongol dagger from the wall, Yun Chee dashed out to corner the brazen thief.

  The marauder was halfway up a narrow ladder set against the high, spiked wall, when the merchant leaped forward and seized him by the legs, pulling him to the ground. As Yun Chee struck with his antique blade, his knife hand was seized in a grip of iron. There was a brief, sharp scuffle—a scream—a groaning fall.

  Wei Lum, the merchant’s servant, hearing his master’s cries, came running through the back door as the black silhouette of the thief was poised atop the wall, hauling up his ladder, then making a headlong leap into the darkness.

  “Ai-yee!” Wei Lum wailed, crouching down beside Yun Chee’s prostrate body to strike a match. The spurt of yellow flame revealed the antique dagger which was buried to the hilt in Yun Chee’s chest.

  “Mask—thief—steal—Choy!” Yun Chee gasped, then gave a bubbling cough, shuddered, and subsided into limp silence.

  “Poh-liss! Poh-liss!” Wei Lum screamed to the arousing neighbors, and dashing into the house, pounded out shivering crashes on a gong which hung in the hall.

  Detective Driscoll of the Chinatown Squad came on the run from Mulberry Lane, but Yun Chee was already dead when he arrived. He was busy questioning the servant when Sergeant O’Hara reached the scene in a red prowl car.

  “Yun Chee—stabbed to death,” Driscoll reported. “This is gonna be a tough nut to crack, Sarge. The guy made a clean getaway. We’ve got the knife, but it belonged to Yun Chee himself, and worse luck, Wei Lum pawed it over, trying to pull it out of the wound. That kills our chance of getting decent prints.”

  “Hell!” was O’Hara’s brief comment. He stood outside the window through which the parrot had been snatched, his glance taking in the details of the richly furnished room. A red-and-gold lacquered cabinet stood just inside the window, holding a jade figure of Kwan-Yin and a vase with a plum blossom design.

  “Look at the stuff on this cabinet, Driscoll. Here’s a Kwan-Yin in mutton-fat jade. And this vase is genuine Ming. A thousand dollars’ worth of loot right under the thief’s hand, and he steals a five-dollar parrot! Does that make sense?”

  “Maybe he didn’t know it was a Ming vase,” Driscoll suggested.

  “Could be,” O’Hara conceded, “but show me a Chink who doesn’t know mutton-fat jade when he sees it.”

  Driscoll rubbed his chin. “Look, Sarge, the parrot he stole wasn’t even worth five dollars. For five bucks you can get a talking bird, and this one was just the squawky kind. Even so, it’ll be enough to put a rope around that killer’s neck—if he holds on to it! That’s the catch. If the guy has ten cents’ worth of brains, he’ll wring the bird’s neck and toss it into the first ash can.”

  “I don’t think so, Driscoll. This looks like a planned job to me. I think this fellow wanted Yun Chee’s parrot—and nothing else.”

  “But why?” Driscoll argued. “Why kill a man for a dumb, no-account bird like that Choy? There’s the Ming vase—and the jade. Either one would buy a boat load of parrots.”

  “Well, screwy things happen in Chinatown,” O’Hara replied, “but there’s always a reason behind it, and I’m betting this is more than just a sneak-thief job. We’ll see, Driscoll. As the Chinks say: Time holds the key to every lock.”

  “I’d say the parrot was the key to this one,” Driscoll replied. “How’s chances of tr
acing it?”

  “No dice,” O’Hara growled. “There are dozens of those damn green parrots in Chinatown. The Chinks buy ’em from sailors along the waterfront. Some are kept for pets, others make parrot stew. If we start a systematic search, the news will be all over the place inside of five minutes. Our man simply gets rid of the bird, and we blow our only chance.”

  But the Blue Coat Devils were not the only ones in Chinatown concerned over the deed of violence which had sent Yun Chee to join his honorable ancestors. The tea merchant had been a high official of the Tsin Tien Tong, which would suffer a Number One “loss of face” if his death went unsolved and unavenged.

  Soon it was rumored that the Tsin Tien Tong offered a reward of five hundred Rice Face dollars for the capture of Yun Chee’s murderer, and that the tong council had already voted upon the punishment to be visited upon the guilty man. He would not be delivered to the Rice Face Law—no, by Tao! He would be taken to a secret place to hear his doom. Death—death by the split bamboo!

  “Aye, a life for a life!” the yellow men whispered. “The Scales of Justice must be evenly weighted.”

  “It’s a race, Sarge,” Driscoll said, reporting the rumors. “If that Tsin Tien crowd get their hands on the killer first, he’s a dead pigeon.”

  “All right, then, it’s a race,” O’Hara replied. “But I’ll give you odds that their five-hundred-dollar reward goes begging.”

  But while the two greatest powers in Chinatown pursued their grim manhunt in relentless rivalry, little Wei Lum, faithful servant of the murdered tea merchant, had his own ideas for tracking down the killer. Let the Blue Coat Devils hunt with death-dealing pistols, let the great tong bait its trap with silver. Wei Lum had a potent weapon of his own—music!

  Every night the little servant went wandering through the crooked streets, pausing here and there in the shadows to play a Cantonese tune on his bamboo flute—a musical signal designed to catch the ear of Choy, the stolen parrot.

  “In the house of Yun Chee,” Wei Lum explained to O’Hara, “Choy always make a noise like whistling when I play the flute for the Master. Wah! Now I make music in the streets. If Choy hear my flute, he will whistle, wherever he is prisoner, and so I find him.”

  “That’s a damn smart trick,” O’Hara replied. “Keep at it, boy, but remember—if you’re lucky enough to trace the parrot, don’t try anything single-handed. This fellow’s a killer. Just mark the house and come for me chop-chop.”

  So Wei Lum played his squeaky little tunes in Half Moon Street and Paradise Court and Mandarin Lane, in Pagoda Street and Peking Court and Long Sword Alley—and when he had finished he would search the night hush with ears alert for the faintest reply from the captive Choy.

  Then one night Wei Lum came racing breathlessly into the precinct station, crying out for instant speech with the Red-Hair Sah-jin.

  “I find stolen Choy!” he panted to O’Hara. “Tonight, when I make my music in Lantern Court, I hear him call out. Sah-jin, the Feather Devil is a prisoner in No. 14—in the house of Chang Pao!”

  “Chang Pao!” O’Hara exclaimed. “You must be crazy!”

  O’Hara’s astonishment was twofold. In the first place, Chang Pao was quite wealthy— Chinatown’s most famous silversmith until he had been forced into retirement by a paralytic stroke which had left him with a crippled hand.

  And to make Wei Lum’s accusation even more fantastic, Chang Pao was at that very moment on his deathbed, speechless and completely paralyzed. O’Hara had the word of Doc Stanage, the precinct medico, for that.

  “Chang Pao’s had another stroke,” Stanage had reported. “I stopped in to see him, but there’s nothing I can do. It’s just a question of time. He may linger this way for weeks, but the end is certain.”

  O’Hara placed these indisputable facts before Wei Lum, but the yellow man held stubbornly to his assertion that the stolen parrot was hidden away in No. 14 Lantern Court.

  “Sah-jin, if there were a thousand Feather Devils in dark room, I will pick out the voice of Choy without fail!”

  And Wei Lum’s words rang with so much confidence that O’Hara was impressed. After all, there were two other persons in Chang Pao’s house. There was his nephew, Chang Loo, who had been summoned from a distant city when the old silversmith’s condition became worse—and there was his servant, Tai Gat, the limping mafoo.

  But Tai Gat the mafoo was something of a Chinatown hero, noted for his unswerving devotion to his master. And as for young Chang Loo, a stranger to the quarter, was it conceivable that he would go about stealing worthless parrots on the very eve of inheriting a great fortune?

  Nevertheless, Sergeant O’Hara reached for his hat. “O.K., Wei Lum, we’ll go around to Chang’s for a look-see.”

  In the darkness of Lantern Court, the silversmith’s house at No. 14 had the frowning air of a fortress. Lights shining behind the drawn shades of the upper floor revealed the tracery of iron bars, while all the windows of the ground floor were covered by solid wooden shutters, for Chang Pao had developed a fear of thieves that amounted to a phobia.

  O’Hara’s brisk rapping was answered promptly by a grim-faced mafoo wearing a shaam of dark blue denim.

  “Hola, Tai Gat,” O’Hara greeted.

  “Ala wah, Sah-jin,” the mafoo replied, bowing gravely. He walked with a heavy limp, memento of his courageous battle against two armed thugs who had invaded his master’s house some years before.

  “Sah-jin, you come for see Master Chang?” Tai Gat inquired.

  “Yes,” O’Hara answered, “but first there’s another little matter. Tai Gat, do you have a parrot here in the house?”

  “Yiss,” the mafoo replied, without the least trace of hesitation or surprise at the question. “Master keep Feather Devil long time.”

  “Well, I’d like to have a look at it,” O’Hara said crisply. “This man—Wei Lum—is searching for a parrot that was stolen.”

  “Stolen!” Tai Gat cast a disdainful glance at Wei Lum. “Tsai! Is this a house of thieves? Wei Lum is gila—crazy!”

  “You lie, mafoo!” Wei Lum retorted angrily, roused by the measured scorn in Tai Gat’s voice and bearing. “The Feather Devil we seek is here—here in this very house! With my own ears I have heard it.”

  “Pipe down, Wei Lum!” O’Hara commanded. “Tai Gat’s offered to show us the honorable Chang Pao’s parrot.”

  “Words of wisdom, Sah-jin,” Tai Gat declared. “One glance of the eye tells more than an hour’s talk.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE POH-LISS TAKE OVER

  ’Hara looked about him with interest as he followed the limping mafoo toward the stairs, for the house of Chang Pao was a corner of the Orient magically set down in the very heart of the White Devil’s city, and he had not been inside No. 14 Lantern Court since the night, several years before, when Chang Pao’s shrill voice had screamed, “Robbers! Robbers!” from an upper window.

  Smashing his way in at the front door, O’Hara had found Tai Gat waging a desperate battle against two night robbers, and holding his own against them despite a badly hurt leg from a headlong tumble down the stairs, an injury which had left the faithful mafoo with his heavy-footed limp.

  But the attempted robbery had left its mark on Chang Pao as well. Grown secretive and suspicious, the silversmith lived in a hermit-like seclusion, fortifying his house with barred and shuttered windows, lining his doors with sheet-iron strips, so that they swung open as slowly and ponderously as the gates of a prison.

  Tai Gat’s slippered feet were noiseless on the stairs, but O’Hara chanced to stumble, and at the sound a door opened suddenly above, and a young Chinese in a gaudy house-robe of yellow silk moved quickly to the upper railing.

  “Hai! What name you? What you want?” he demanded, peering down at them with sharp-eyed suspicion.

  O’Hara knew this must be Chang Loo, nephew and heir to the dying silversmith. But before he could reply, Tai Gat’s voice cut in swiftly, naming the visitors.
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  “Poh-liss!” young Chang hissed, plainly startled. He straightened up stiffly, his right hand creeping into the folds of his yellow sleeve.

  Tai Gat’s voice went on in explanation. A Feather Devil had been stolen, and the Red-Hair Sah-jin merely wished to make a look-see at the Master’s parrot.

  The mafoo’s words seemed to banish young Chang’s momentary tenseness, although the sharp arrogance remained in his voice.

  “Feather Devils!” he echoed haughtily. “Shall we be plagued with such trifling matters in the hour when my venerable uncle stands on the threshold of the Shadow-world? Poh-liss—tsai!” Young Chang spat over his shoulder and made a quick sign with his fingers. “Bid them begone till a more seemly hour!”

  O’Hara’s jaw settled into square lines, not liking the arrogant tone of this silk-robed upstart who made the “finger curse” as he mentioned the name of police.

  “That trifling matter, Chang, happens to be a murder—Yun Chee’s murder. I want to see that parrot—and right now!”

  For a few moments their glances met and held in a tug-of-war—O’Hara’s eyes of frosty blue, Chang Loo’s shoe-button eyes of cold jet, with reddened lids that checked with the sour smell of rice-wine about him.

  Then Chang Loo stood aside, sullen and silent, but as the mafoo brushed past he seized hold of his robe and pushed him against the wall. “Brainless fool!” he snarled. “Must you open the door to all who knock?”

  So saying, he turned on his heel and stalked back into his uncle’s chamber, while Tai Gat led them to a small room on the top floor— a room hung with plum-colored draperies and fitted out as a prayer shrine. There was an altar with jade bowls and the Chang ancestral tablets, and a gilded wooden statue of Kwan-Yin, but O’Hara had eyes only for the green-feathered parrot perched on a shining steel hoop.