“EXTRA! EXTRA!” in shrill diminuendo awakened Jack Lanagan from the very heart of his morning slumber. The morning paper man sleeps late and nothing short of cataclysm or the cry of an extra is likely to awaken him. Lanagan was from his bed to the window in a lanky leap hailing the newsboy.
It was the Evening Record with a “screamer” head and two hundred words of black-face type. Lanagan swept through it in a comprehensive flash. With more speed than was his custom he thereupon dressed.
“Swanson!” he said. “Gad, what a story!”
He sat on the edge of the bed, more leisurely to roll a brown-paper cigarette and read the story more carefully. Stripped of flaring headlines, it was as follows:
“All hope for the safety of Captain Robert Swanson, the retired millionaire shipping man who disappeared on Wednesday evening, was dissipated this morning, shortly after 9.30 o’clock, when the body of the well-known philanthropist was found in a subcellar room in the notorious Palace Hotel in Chinatown.
[Pg 210]“Death was due to strangulation.
“Life had probably been extinct three days, and it is the police theory that Captain Swanson went directly to the hotel or was lured there on the evening of his disappearance.
“His watch and valuables were found on his person.
“So far as a hasty examination could discover no one saw him enter the hotel, which bears an evil reputation and is occupied by the lowest type of denizen of Chinatown and the Barbary Coast.
“The room where the body was found is one of several that have been dug out beneath the basement and is used entirely by opium smokers.
“Chief of Police Leslie has ordered all available detectives on the case and arrests are expected at any moment.”
“Which means,” finally grumbled Lanagan, “that I get no day off to-morrow to split a quart of Chianti with mine host Pastori.
“Swanson,” he ran quickly back in his mind, “is president of the Seamen’s Bank; director of the Cosmos Club; director of a dozen corporations; trustee of his church; sound as a nut at sixty-five; solidly established in the old conservative families of Nob Hill, with a family of married children likewise solidly established in the solidest kind of respectability and a wife who is a silvery-haired saint if there ever was one.
[Pg 211]“Yet he, a man who probably didn’t know such a place as Chinatown’s Palace Hotel existed until that night, is found dead in the lowest sink of that hole. The extremes of the social system met in his end and the place of it.”
The Chinatown Palace Hotel of the days just before the fire gave that quarter of San Francisco obliteration, the one thing that could cleanse it, was a sorry second to the pretentious hostelry on Market Street. A ramshackle structure, illy lit through its crooked corridors and musty rooms with ancient gas jets, it looked more, in its complete dirt and dinginess, like an exaggerated rabbit warren. Three stories above ground and one or two below, cut up into rooms, the largest not more than eight by ten, the smallest just large enough for a bunk and an opium layout, it had survived by some miracle the health authorities to hive in musty murk the off-scourings of a city. Once, when Portsmouth Square was the civic centre, it had harboured the kings of the early gold days.
The rooms were larger in those days; the front suites that gave ease to the idling, new-made Cr?sus had long since been cut up into five, six, seven, or eight, as the increasing congestion of the quarter threw an increasing swarm of vermin to its recesses.
Save for white “dope fiends,” known in the vernacular of the police as “hops,” “cokes,” or “morphs,” users of opium, cocaine, or morphine,[Pg 212] it was inhabited solely by Chinese, some of them coolie labourers, but the most of them likewise “fiends.”
Below the basement floor were a dozen rooms not high enough for a man to stand erect in. The light of day never entered. What light they received came from one main gas jet in the corridor or the occasional flash of a policeman’s pocket light as the Chinatown squad made their rounds. Save for the members of the squad, and at times a jaded police reporter, idling from the reporters’ room in the near-by Hall of Justice on a quiet night through the district with the squad sergeant, it is probable no white man save the “fiends” of the district had ever before gasped for breath in that foul den—no white man, that is, before Captain Robert Swanson, who entered there one night never to emerge. It was three days before one of the denizens of the subcellar, finally realising that the occupant of the next bunk was not in the stupor of drug but the stiffness of death, made his way with frantic hippity-hoppings to the first member of the squad he could find and reported the matter, not forgetting to whine for his ten cents for so doing.
Such, in substance, were the facts in the mystery that set the city and the coast—Swanson was a notable figure in shipping circles—in a ferment for a week.
For, more than the initial fact of finding the body in Chinatown’s cesspool, five days had now[Pg 213] elapsed with not one single additional fact of consequence to clear the mystery. Suspects without number had been jailed. Every ex-convict, “fiend,” vagrant, or questionable character of the district, white, yellow, or black, male or female, had been put through the police mill. The opium dens had been emptied of their wastrels, blinking like bats in the light of day. Swanson’s past and his present life were run under a high-power lens; his servants’ and his employees’ lives and the lives of his former servants and former employees; Chief Leslie was a fellow member of the Cosmos Club with Swanson, and if any additional good to his natural police pride were necessary to spur him on, that afforded it. Every recourse that police experience could adapt or devise was applied.
Always there was lacking motive: that mainspring for crime.
That Swanson had by any chance been addicted to the drug habit was early dismissed. Practically every hour of his methodical life could be accounted for for months back.
But in so far as his movements were concerned from the moment he left his doorstep on Wednesday evening until the body was found, he may as well have left his doorstep invested in an invisible mantle, for no living person that could be located had seen him alive.
There was one peculiar circumstance. He had worn that night a heavy ulster overcoat, although[Pg 214] the night had not been chilly, and Mrs. Swanson had remarked on it at parting. The coat was not found with the body.
It is not exaggeration to say that in physical output Lanagan worked harder than any three reporters or detectives during the first five days of the case. He did not take me into his confidence: he seldom did until the “smash” approached on any story. He smoked eternally or chewed to pulp his own select brand of rank Manilas, or consumed innumerable cigarettes. Lanagan never had to bother with the daily routine of a story; that was all left to me. His work was the big “feature” stuff. He might not write a line for a week and then he would saunter into the picture with a news sensation that would upend the town.
But there seemed to be no “upending” on this case. During the five days that had elapsed the big portion of the work had fallen to me. Lanagan had absolutely not turned a trick. On Wednesday evening at midnight, as I turned in my story for the day, identical as I felt it would be with the other two morning papers, Lanagan ’phoned me to meet him at the Hall of Justice.
I drifted down there.
“I just wanted to tell you,” was his greeting, “that I am going to disappear. Don’t look for me. I will discover myself when the time comes. I’m going to lose myself up in Chinatown, for the solution of that story is there, and I’m not coming[Pg 215] until I’ve landed something and choked off the side remarks of the Times and Herald outfit, if I stay there for the balance of my natural life. The police can hang as they please to their hoary old dogma that a ‘hop head’ never commits murder. Just because they’re so positive, I am going to take the other tack; at least until I have proved their theory to my own satisfaction. There isn’t a man outside the frequenters of this quarter knew of that subcellar and that’s the theory I am going to stick with now. Keep in pretty close touch with the office so I can get you in a hurry if anything turns up. Good-by.”
In another moment he was walking rapidly up Washington Street to disappear down Dupont, out of sight for three days.
The story had run eight days and a dearth of fresh angles had thinned it out a trifle, when, on Saturday evening, along about ten o’clock, as I hung around the local room hoping against hope for a call from Lanagan, it came.
“Meet me in front of old St. Mary’s,” he said, shortly, and I thrilled instantly with that same premonitory tremor that always came over me when the climax was on. I sped down Kearney Street and in the shadow of the church steps picked him up.
“Dorrett is watching me,” he said. “He’s been covering me for days.” Dorrett was the oldest special policeman in Chinatown and generally held[Pg 216] to be a “leak” for the Herald through personal friendship for a former police reporter, now city editor of that paper. In such fashion do papers develop their “sources” of news. “I have one clue that may be the key to the solid brick wall we have been up against. And I am not going to lose that key to the Herald via Dorrett,” concluded Lanagan, as he suddenly stepped fully into the glare of the gas street lamp on the corner just as Dorrett sidled up. I saw that Lanagan had deliberately exposed himself.
“Really, Dorrett,” he remarked in that sinister tone he could assume so well on occasion, “some of these days I shall actually trip over you if you persist in blundering beneath my feet. You might fall quite hard in that case and hurt yourself. However, just tell Cartwright” (city editor of the Herald) “that I am going to hand him a package of nitroglycerin right on your own particular little bailiwick, will you? Please run along now, like a good little special policeman, because we are going to lose you—thusly.”
He turned on his heel and ran for a California Street car just lumbering past us up the hill and I followed suit. After a few blocks he crossed through the car and dropped off on the other side. Scouting cautiously back toward Chinatown by way of Washington Street, drifting along with eyes wide for Dorrett, we finally made Ross Alley, where Lanagan stopped for a fraction of a second[Pg 217] at the wicket of the gambling house at No. 8.
At that time it was a strict rule of the gambling “joints” that a white man could not enter. Personally, for all of my four years’ dubbing around on police, I never had been able to enter a Chinese gambling house when the play was on. Yet the lookout flashed one glance at Lanagan, grinned yellowly and ingenuously, and the massive solid oak door before us swung noiselessly open and we passed quickly through. As it shut behind us I heard a faint click-click, and glanced back. Three separate two-by-four scantlings, heavily re-enforced with iron, had dropped back into their sockets. The door was as solid as a concrete wall against the axes of the Chinatown squad; the theory being that by the time the squad had the door battered down, the players had departed through some secret runway.
“Melodrama?” laughed Lanagan at me. “But I had to come by the back door, as it were. I wouldn’t like to have any stray police or reporters or Dorrett suspect I was about to interview the man I am. They might smell a rat, possibly. We are more isolated among these hundred Chinks, gambling their fool heads off, than we would be in one of Leslie’s dark cells.”
We passed directly through the long room with its eight high tables, at each of which ten or a dozen impassive Celestials, with chopsticks, beans, and teacups, stood engaged in the contraband pastime[Pg 218] of fantan. At a table or two a pie gow game was running, and in a corner dominoes. The air was so heavy and heated that I felt the perspiration starting in an instant. The Chinese gambler, if he is winning, sticks in that thick atmosphere for hours at a time.
At the rear of the room was another door, likewise barred in triplicate. Here another lookout grinned friendly at Lanagan and pressed on an innocent-appearing nail head in the wainscoting and the bars dropped and the door opened to a steep ladder. We went down about ten feet into a blind areaway between two buildings.
It was as black as your derby hat. But Lanagan, the marvellous, stepped ahead with assurance and I followed him gropingly. In another moment he rapped faintly on what I took to be a section of the brick base of the building, a click sounded, he took me by the arm, pulled me after him, another click, and the next moment a blaze of electric light discovered us to be in a small lounging room elaborately appointed in Oriental furnishings.
“Hullo, Mist’ Lamagum!”
The voice came from a corpulent, twinkling-eyed, richly garbed Chinaman just arisen from a massive chair of ebony and mother-of-pearl.
“Hello, Fu,” said Lanagan, sinking into another massive chair and motioning me to do likewise.
“My friend Norton, Fu. Norton, Mr. Fu Wong, otherwise known to me as Why Because.[Pg 219] You will understand ‘why because’ presently.”
“Why? Becaus’? I tell you,” said Fu Wong, chuckling. “Him funny boy, Mist’ Lamagum. He, whatyoucalem, jolly me. You likem smoke?” He pressed a button on the arm of his chair and a flowing-garbed Chinese boy appeared with rich Havanas on a tray, together with individual teacups and two-piece teapots for three.
“Did you find See Wong?” Lanagan asked abruptly, while I studied Fu, whom I knew by reputation as one of the Chinese merchant princes. “I am in a hurry, Fu.”
“I catchem. He say Charley drive aut-o-mob-eel. Charley live there three, fo’ wicks. She cry one time See bringem tea: ‘Oh, Charley! Charley! Why fo’ you do him? What’s mala you, Charley?’ She stop quick see See. Why? Becaus’? See, he donno. He say Charley he usem, what you call ’em? Hop.”
For the first time since this story broke, that singular flashing, almost like a cat’s eyes, flamed into Lanagan’s dark eyes and they shot a responsive shiver of high tension interest through me, because I knew that at last he had struck the trail.
“You have done more for me than I can ever repay,” said Lanagan at parting. “You are a remarkable man, Fu Wong.”
Fu laughed boyishly.
“Why? Becaus’? You save my sto’ good name? I help you.”
[Pg 220]As we went back out the way we came in, Lanagan enlightened me.
“Fu is president of the Suey Sing Tong. There is a Chinaman, Swanson’s cook, See Wong, whom I have been hammering on for two days. Of all the household servants, I have a vague suspicion of him. I couldn’t land him. Finally I looked up his affiliation, found he was a Suey Sing man, and then I enlisted the services of Fu Wong. See Wong would have to talk to his tong leader where the police or the reporters couldn’t drag information out of him with a team of mules. He purely and simply wouldn’t ‘sabe,’ and that’s all the satisfaction you could get.
“‘Why Because’ is not only proprietor of one of the biggest bazaars here and a director of the Chinese Bank, but he is also proprietor—I am telling you Chinatown secrets and not to be repeated—of of the gambling house we came through and several others. He is one of the powers of the quarter.
“There was an English tourist robbed in his bazaar once of a couple of hundred dollars and I was sent up here. Fu laboured under the impression that the entire sixteen pages of the Enquirer were going to be turned over to that particular robbery. He felt the disgrace of the thing keenly, as any high-class Chinaman would, and personally offered the Englishman back the money. That was a good story. For some reason Fu, not understanding[Pg 221] the American newspaper idea of ‘human interest,’ elected to think I had written a eulogy of him deliberately. I could have had half his store at that time, I guess, if I had wanted it. But I took a cigar and a cup of tea, and ever since that time I have b............