Chapter 11

O’Connor’s answer must have been a poser, judging from the look of surprise on Craig’s face. “The Jap—Nichi Moto?” he repeated. “And it is the same sort of non-fatal wound, the same evidence of asphyxia, the same circumstances, even down to the red car reported by residents in the neighbourhood.”

Nothing further happened that day except this thickening of the plot by the murder of the peculiar-acting Nichi. We saw his body and it was as O’Connor said.

“That fellow wasn’t on the level toward Clendenin,” Craig mused after we had viewed the second murder in the case. “The question is, who and what was he working for?”

There was as yet no hint of answer, and our only plan was to watch again that night. This time O’Connor, not knowing where the lightning would strike next, took Craig’s suggestion and we determined to spend the time cruising about in the fastest of the police motor boats, while the force of watchers along the entire shore front of the city was quietly augmented and ordered to be extra vigilant.

O’Connor at the last moment had to withdraw and let us go alone, for the worst, and not the unexpected, happened in his effort to clean up Chinatown. The war between the old rivals, the Hep Sing Tong and the On Leong Tong, those ancient societies of troublemakers in the little district, had broken out afresh during the day and three Orientals had been killed already.

It is not a particularly pleasant occupation cruising aimlessly up and down the harbour in a fifty-foot police boat, staunch and fast as she may be.

Every hour we called at a police post to report and to keep in touch with anything that might interest us. It came at about two o’clock in the morning and of all places, near the Battery itself. From the front of a ferry boat that ran far down on the Brooklyn side, what looked like two flashlights gleamed out over the water once, then twice.

“Headlights of an automobile,” remarked Craig, scarcely taking more notice of it, for they might have simply been turned up and down twice by a late returning traveller to test them. We were ourselves near the Brooklyn shore. Imagine our surprise to see an answering light from a small boat in the river which was otherwise lightless. We promptly put out our own lights and with every cylinder working made for the spot where the light had flashed up on the river. There was something there all right and we went for it.

On we raced after the strange craft, the phantom that had scared Staten Island. For a mile or so we seemed to be gaining, but one of our cylinders began to miss—the boat turned sharply around a bend in the shore. We had to give it up as well as trying to overtake the ferry boat going in the opposite direction.

Kennedy’s equanimity in our apparent defeat surprised me. “Oh, it’s nothing, Walter,” he said. “They slipped away to-night, but I have found the clue. To-morrow as soon as the Customs House is open you will understand. It all centres about opium.”

At least a large part of the secret was cleared, too, as a result of Kennedy’s visit to the Customs House. After years of fighting with the opium ring on the Pacific coast, the ring had tried to “put one over” on the revenue officers and smuggle the drug in through New York.

It did not take long to find the right man among the revenue officers to talk with. Nor was Kennedy surprised to learn that Nichi Moto had been in fact a Japanese detective, a sort of stool pigeon in Clendenin’s establishment working to keep the government in touch with the latest scheme.

The finding of the can of opium on the scene of the murder of Bertha Curtis, and the chase after the lightless motor boat had at last placed Kennedy on the right track. With one of the revenue officers we made a quick trip to Brooklyn and spent the morning inspecting the ships from South American ports docked in the neighbourhood where the phantom boat had disappeared.

From ship to ship we journeyed until at last we came to one on which, down in the chain locker, we found a false floor with a locker under that. There was a compartment six feet square and in it lay, neatly packed, fourteen large hermetically sealed cylinders, each full of the little oblong tins such as Kennedy had picked up the other day—forty thousand dollars’ worth of the stuff at one haul, to say nothing of the thousands that had already been landed at one place or another.

It had been a good day’s work, but as yet it had not caught the slayer or cleared up the mystery of Bertha Curtis. Some one or something had had a power over the girl to lure her on. Was it Clendenin? The place in Forty-fourth Street, on inquiry, proved to be really closed as tight as a drum. Where was he?

All the deaths had been mysterious, were still mysterious. Bertha Curtis had carried her secret with her to the grave to which she had been borne, willingly it seemed, in the red car with the unknown companion and the goggled chauffeur. I found myself still asking what possible connection she could have with smuggling opium.

Kennedy, however, was indulging in no such speculations. It was enough for him that the scene had suddenly shifted and in a most unexpected manner. I found him voraciously reading practically everything that was being printed in the papers about the revival of the tong war.

“They say much about the war, but little about the cause,” was his dry comment. “I wish I could make up my mind whether it is due to the closing of the joints by O’Connor, or the belief that one tong is informing on the other about opium smuggling.”

Kennedy passed over all the picturesque features in the newspapers, and from it all picked out the one point that was most important for the case which he was working to clear up. One tong used revolvers of a certain make; the other of a different make. The bullet which had killed Bertha Curtis and later Nichi Moto was from a pistol like that of the Hep Sings.

The difference in the makes of guns seemed at once to suggest something to Kennedy and instead of mixing actively in the war of the highbinders he retired to his unfailing laboratory, leaving me to pass the time gathering such information as I could. Once I dropped in on him but found him unsociably surrounded by microscopes and a very sensitive arrangement for taking microphotographs. Some of his negatives were nearly a foot in diameter, and might have been, for all I knew, pictures of the surface of the moon.

While I was there O’Connor came in. Craig questioned him about the war of the tongs.

“Why,” O’Connor cried, almost bubbling over with satisfaction, “this afternoon I was waited on by Chin Jung, you remember?—one of the leading merchants down there. Of course you know that Chinatown doesn’t believe in hurting business and it seems that he and some of the others like him are afraid that if the tong war is not hushed up pretty soon it will cost a lot—in money. They are going to have an anniversary of the founding of the Chinese republic soon and of the Chinese New Year and they are afraid that if the war doesn’t stop they’ll be ruined.”

“Which tong does he belong to?” asked Kennedy, still scrutinising a photograph through his lens.

“Neither,” replied O’Connor. “With his aid and that of a Judge of one of our courts who knows the Chinaman like a book we have had a conference this afternoon between the two tongs and the truce is restored again for two weeks.”

“Very good,” answered Kennedy, “but it doesn’t catch the murderer of Bertha Curtis and the Jap. Where is Clendenin, do you suppose?”

“I don’t know, but it at least leaves me free to carry on that case. What are all these pictures?”

“Well,” began Kennedy, taking his glass from his eye and wiping it carefully, “a Paris crime specialist has formulated a system for identifying revolver bullets which is very like that of Dr. Bertillon for identifying human beings.”

He picked up a handful of the greatly enlarged photographs. “These are photographs of bullets which he has sent me. The barrel of every gun leaves marks on the bullet that are always the same for the same barrel but never identical for two different barrels. In these big negatives every detail appears very distinctly and it can be decided with absolute certainty whether a given bullet was fired from a given revolver. Now, using this same method, I have made similar greatly enlarged photographs of the two bullets that have figured so far in this case. The bullet that killed Miss Curtis shows the same marks as that which killed Nichi.”

He picked up another bunch of prints. “Now,” he continued, “taking up the firing pin of a rifle or the hammer of a revolver, you may not know it but they are different in every case. Even among the same makes they are different, and can be detected.

“The cartridge in either a gun or revolver is struck at a point which is never in the exact centre or edge, as the case may be, but is always the same for the same weapon. Now the end of the hammer when examined with the microscope bears certain irregularities of marking different from those of every other gun and the shell fired in it is impressed with the particular markings of that hammer, just as paper is by type. On making microphotographs of firing pins or hammers, with special reference to the rounded ends and also photographs of the corresponding rounded depressions in the primers fired by them it is forced on any one that cartridges fired by each individual rifle or pistol can positively be identified.

“You will see on the edge of the photographs I have made a rough sketch calling attention to the ‘L’-shaped mark which is the chief characteristic of this hammer, although there are other detailed markings which show well under the microscope but not well in a photograph. You will notice that the characters on the firing hammer are reversed on the cartridge in the same way that a metal type and the character printed by it are reversed as regards one another. Again, depressions on the end of the hammer become raised characters on the cartridge, and raised characters on the hammer become depressions on the cartridge.

“Look at some of these old photographs and you will see that they differ from this. They lack the ‘L’ mark. Some have circles, others a very different series of pits and elevations, a set of characters when examined and measured under the microscope utterly different from those in every other case. Each is unique, in its pits, lines, circles and irregularities. The laws of chance are as much against two of them having the same markings as they are against the thumb prints of two human subjects being identical. The firing-pin theory, which was used in a famous case in Maine, is just as infallible as the finger-print theory. In this case when we find the owner of the gun making an ‘L’ mark we shall have the murderer.”

Something, I could see, was working on O’Connor’s mind. “That’s all right,” he interjected, “but you know in neither case was the victim shot to death. They were asphyxiated.”

“I was coming to that,” rejoined Craig. “You recall the peculiar marking on the nose of those bullets? They were what is known as narcotic bullets, an invention of a Pittsburg scientist. They have the property of lulling their victims to almost instant slumber. A slight scratch from these sleep-producing bullets is all that is necessary, as it was in the case of the man who spied on the queer doings on Staten Island. The drug, usually morphia, is carried in tiny wells on the cap of the bullet, is absorbed by the system and acts almost instantly.”

The door burst open and Walker Curtis strode in excitedly. He seemed surprised to see us all there, hesitated, then motioned to Kennedy that he wished to see him. For a few moments they talked and finally I caught the remark from Kennedy, “But, Mr. Curtis, I must do it. It is the only way.”

Curtis gave a resigned nod and Kennedy turned to us. “Gentlemen,” he said, “Mr. Curtis in going over the effects of his sister has found a note from Clendenin which mentions another opium joint down in Chinatown. He wished me to investigate privately, but I have told him it would be impossible.”

At the mention of a den in the district he was cleaning up O’Connor had pricked up his ears. “Where is it?” he demanded.

Curtis mentioned a number on Dover Street.

“The Amoy restaurant,” ejaculated O’Connor, seizing the telephone. A moment later he was arranging with the captain at the Elizabeth Street station for the warrants for an instant raid.

XII

THE “DOPE TRUST”

As we hurried into Chinatown from Chatham Square we could see that the district was celebrating its holidays with long ropes of firecrackers, and was feasting to reed discords from the pipes of its most famous musicians, and was gay with the hanging out of many sunflags, red with an eighteen-rayed white sun in the blue union. Both the new tong truce and the anniversary were more than cause for rejoicing.

Hurried though it was, the raid on the Hep Sing joint had been carefully prepared by O’Connor. The house we were after was one of the oldest of the rookeries, with a gaudy restaurant on the second floor, a curio shop on the street level, while in the basement all that was visible was a view of a huge and orderly pile of tea chests. A moment before the windows of the dwellings above the restaurant had been full of people. All had faded away even before the axes began to swing on the basement door which had the appearance of a storeroom for the shop above.

The flimsy outside door went down quickly. But it was only a blind. Another door greeted the raiders. The axes swung noisily and the crowbars tore at the fortified, iron-clad, “ice box” door inside. After breaking it down they had to claw their way through another just like it. The thick doors and tea chests piled up showed why no sounds of gambling and other practices ever were heard outside.

Pushing aside a curtain we were in the main room. The scene was one of confusion showing the hasty departure of the occupants.

Kennedy did not stop here. Within was still another room, for smokers, anything but like the fashionable place we had seen uptown. It was low, common, disgusting. The odour everywhere was offensive; everywhere was filth that should naturally breed disease. It was an inferno reeking with unwholesome sweat and still obscured with dense fumes of smoke.

Three tiers of bunks of hardwood were built along the walls. There was no glamour here; all was sordid. Several Chinamen in various stages of dazed indolence were jabbering in incoherent oblivion, a state I suppose of “Oriental calm.”

There, in a bunk, lay Clendenin. His slow and uncertain breathing told of his being under the influence of the drug, and he lay on his back beside a “layout” with a half-cooked pill still in the bowl of his pipe.

The question was to wake him up. Craig began slapping him with a wet towel, directing us how to keep him roused. We walked him about, up and down, dazed, less than half sensible, dreaming, muttering, raving.

A hasty exclamation from O’Connor followed as he drew from the scant cushions of the bunk a long-barreled pistol, a .44 such as the tong leaders used, the same make as had shot Bertha Curtis and Nichi. Craig seized it and stuck it into his pocket.

All the gamblers had fled, all except those too drugged to escape. Where they had gone was indicated by a door leading up to the kitchen of the restaurant. Craig did not stop but leaped upstairs and then down again into a little back court by means of a fire-escape. Through a sort of short alley we groped our way, or rather through an intricate maze of alleys and a labyrinth of blind recesses. We were apparently back of a store on Pell Street.

It was the work of only a moment to go through another door and into another room, filled with smoky, dirty, unpleasant, fetid air. This room, too, seemed to be piled with tea chests. Craig opened one. There lay piles and piles of opium tins, a veritable fortune in the drug.

Mysterious pots and pans, strainers, wooden vessels, and testing instruments were about. The odour of opium in the manufacture was unmistakable, for smoking opium is different from the medicinal drug. There it appeared the supplies of thousands of smokers all over the country were stored and prepared. In a corner a mass of the finished product lay weltering in a basin like treacle. In another corner was the apparatus for remaking yen-shee or once-smoked opium. This I felt was at last the home of the “dope trust,” as O’Connor had once called it, the secret realm of a real opium king, the American end of the rich Shanghai syndicate.

A door opened and there stood a Chinaman, stoical, secretive, indifferent, with all the Oriental cunning and cruelty hall-marked on his face. Yet there was a fascination and air of Eastern culture about him in spite of that strange and typical Oriental depth of intrigue and cunning that shone through, great characteristics of the East.

No one said a word as Kennedy continued to ransack the place. At last under a rubbish heap he found a revolver wrapped up loosely in an old sweater. Quickly, under the bright light, Craig drew Clendenin’s pistol, fitted a cartridge into it and fired at the wall. Again into the second gun he fitted another and a second shot rang out.

Out of his pocket came next the small magnifying glass and two unmounted microphotographs. He bent down over the exploded shells.

“There it is,” cried Craig scarcely able to restrain himself with the keenness of his chase, “there it is—the mark like an ‘L.’ This cartridge bears the one mark, distinct, not possible to have been made by any other pistol in the world. None of the Hep Sings, all with the same make of weapons, none of the gunmen in their employ, could duplicate that mark.”

“Some bullets,” reported a policeman who had been rummaging further in the rubbish.

“Be careful, man,” cautioned Craig. “They are doped. Lay them down. Yes, this is the same gun that fired the shot at Bertha Curtis and Nichi Moto—fired narcotic bullets in order to stop any one who interfered with the opium smuggling, without killing the victim.”

“What’s the matter?” asked O’Connor, arriving breathless from the gambling room after hearing the shots. The Chinaman stood, still silent, impassive. At sight of him O’Connor gasped out, “Chin Jung!”

“Real tong leader,” added Craig, “and the murderer of the white girl to whom he was engaged. This is the goggled chauffeur of the red car that met the smuggling boat, and in which Bertha Curtis rode, unsuspecting, to her death.”

“And Clendenin?” asked Walker Curtis, not comprehending.

“A tool—poor wretch. So keen had the hunt for him become that he had to hide in the only safe place, with the coolies of his employer. He must have been in such abject terror that he has almost smoked himself to death.”

“But why should the Chinaman shoot my sister?” asked Walker Curtis amazed at the turn of events.

“Your sister,” replied Craig, almost reverently, “wrecked though she was by the drug, was at last conscience stricken when she saw the vast plot to debauch thousands of others. It was from her that the Japanese detective in the revenue service got his information—and both of them have paid the price. But they have smashed the new opium ring—we have captured the ring-leaders of the gang.”

Out of the maze of streets, on Chatham Square again, we lost no time in mounting to the safety of the elevated station before some murderous tong member might seek revenge on us.

The celebration in Chinatown was stilled. It was as though the nerves of the place had been paralysed by our sudden, sharp blow.

A downtown train took me to the office to write a “beat,” for the Star always made a special feature of the picturesque in Chinatown news. Kennedy went uptown.

Except for a few moments in the morning, I did not see Kennedy again until the following afternoon, for the tong war proved to be such an interesting feature that I had to help lay out and direct the assignments covering its various details.

I managed to get away again as soon as possible, however, for I knew that it would not be long before some one else in trouble would commandeer Kennedy to untangle a mystery, and I wanted to be on the spot when it started.

Sure enough, it turned out that I was right. Seated with him in our living room, when I came in from my hasty journey uptown in the subway, was a man, tall, thick-set, with a crop of closely curling dark hair, a sharp, pointed nose, ferret eyes, and a reddish moustache, curled at the ends. I had no difficulty in deciding what he was, if not who he was. He was the typical detective who, for the very reason that he looked the part, destroyed much of his own usefulness.

“We have lost so much lately at Trimble’s,” he was saying, “that it is long past the stage of being merely interesting. It is downright serious—for me, at least. I’ve got to make good or lose my job. And I’m up against one of the cleverest shoplifters that ever entered a department-store, apparently. Only Heaven knows how much she has got away with in various departments so far, but when it comes to lifting valuable things like pieces of jewelry which run into the thousands, that is too much.”

At the mention of the name of the big Trimble store I had recognised at once what the man was, and it did not need Kennedy’s rapid-fire introduction of Michael Donnelly to tell me that he was a department store detective.

“Have you no clue, no suspicions?” inquired Kennedy.

“Well, yes, suspicions,” measured Donnelly slowly. “For instance, one day not long ago a beautifully dressed and refined-looking woman called at the jewellery department and asked to see a diamond necklace which we had just imported from Paris. She seemed to admire it very much, studied it, tried it on, but finally went away without making up her mind. A couple of days later she returned and asked to see it again. This time there happened to be another woman beside her who was looking at some pendants. The two fell to talking about the necklace, according to the best recollection of the clerk, and the second woman began to examine it critically. Again the prospective buyer went away. But this time after she had gone, and when he was putting the things back into the safe, the clerk examined the necklace, thinking that perhaps a flaw had been discovered in it which had decided the woman against it. It was a replica in paste; probably substituted by one of these clever and smartly dressed women for the real necklace.”

Before Craig had a chance to put another question, the buzzer on our door sounded, and I admitted a dapper, soft-spoken man of middle size, who might have been a travelling salesman or a bookkeeper. He pulled a card from his case and stood facing us, evidently in doubt how to proceed.

“Professor Kennedy?” he asked at length, balancing the pasteboard between his fingers.

“Yes,” answered Craig. “What can I do for you?”

“I am from Shorham, the Fifth Avenue jeweller, you know,” he began brusquely, as he handed the card to Kennedy. “I thought I’d drop in to consult you about a peculiar thing that happened at the store recently, but if you are engaged, I can wait. You see, we had on exhibition a very handsome pearl dogcollar, and a few days ago two women came to—”

“Say,” interrupted Kennedy, glancing from the card to the face of Joseph Bentley, and then at Donnelly. “What is this—a gathering of the clans? There seems to be an epidemic of shoplifting. How much were you stung for?”

“About twenty thousand altogether,” replied Bentley with rueful frankness. “Why? Has some one else been victimised, too?”

XIII

THE KLEPTOMANIAC

Quickly Kennedy outlined, with Donnelly’s permission, the story we had just heard. The two store detectives saw the humour of the situation, as well as the seriousness of it, and fell to comparing notes.