Sing Sing Nights Read online

  “Of exactly ten dollars,” retorted the other firmly. “No more.” He looked at his watch. Then he rose “Well, old boy, I’m only stopping here while on a story over this part of the city. Later, I’m going out on another story; hence I can’t stay and gas with you. But I’ll be over to-night, however, and we’ll see what luck you’ve had, and also go over a few plans. And you’ll stay off the moonshine, old man?”

  The other stood up and wrung his hand fervently. “So help me, Jason, not another drop. Not — one — drop! I promise you.” He held up his fingers again. They were like the fingers of a man with palsy. “So help me, Jason, I’m off it for good. Never again.” He held up his right hand in mock solemnity.

  * * *

  Barton took his departure from Fawcett’s room and stumbled down the dark, musty-smelling stairway of the Star Hotel to the sunny street. Outside he walked briskly northward several blocks until he came to Huron Street a narrow thoroughfare lined on both sides with cottages and lodging-houses of the cheaper class, each bearing its drab sign in its parlour window. There he turned eastward and proceeded a half-block until he came upon a low store built out to the inner edge of the sidewalk from the foundations of an old tottering house. Its glass front had been covered with cheap green paint up to a point just a little higher than the level of a man’s eyes, but above the opaque colouring matter was painted in bright red the simple announcement:

  SAM TOY

  Laundering.

  The glass of the front door was hung with cheap calico cloth, but through a long tear Barton spied the figure of a bluecoat seated in a chair near the door, and smoking away at a cigar. So he turned the door-knob and walked in.

  CHAPTER XXVI

  A DISCOVERY

  AT Barton’s entrance the police officer looked up in surprise. The younger man quickly turned back his coat and displayed his reporter’s badge.

  “Heard a Chink got stabbed here last night,” he said. “What is there to it, officer?”

  The other spat contemptuously on the clean floor of the store. “Nothin’ much to it. Tong stuff again. That’s all. Wish the yellow heathens would murder each other all off and be done with it.”

  Barton gazed about the store curiously. The front had been boarded off from the rear by a crude partition of unpainted matchboards. The space near the store window was occupied by a trio of washtubs, a counter bearing a ball of string and a quaint inkpot, an ironing-board and a great compartmented rack filled with bundle after bundle of tied-up laundry, each ticketed with a red slip marked with a few undecipherable Chinese characters. A number of the red tickets were scattered over the floor of the shop. The one door through the partition was surmounted by a box-like transom, inside of which a piece of rusty screen had been tacked; the doorway appeared to lead in to a living-room at the rear.

  “Yes,” the bluecoat was saying, “Kelly seen the light burning this morning and peered in over the green paint on the window. He found the Chink lyin’ across the counter there.” He flicked his thumb toward that worn article of store furniture. “The heathen’s head was hangin’ down and his pigtail was sweepin’ the floor. Old-fashioned type of Chink, y’ see: the kind that kept their pigtail to th’ bitter end.” He paused. “But as I was saying, they’d run him in the ribs with a long knife. Same knife he cuts the string for the bundles with, accordin’ to the man across the street.” The bluecoat yawned. “He had his little paintbrush in his fingers just as if he’d tried to paint a farewell message on one of his blank laundry tickets; but Old Man Death got him too soon. Kelly ‘phoned in to Chicago Avenue, and me and one of the dicks came over and looked him over. Then we dragged him into the back room and flung him on the cot. There was a crowd outside boostin’ each other up to the window, an’ that’s the only way we could get ‘em away. Take a pike at him if you want. You’re the first reporter that’s got here. Most likely none of ‘em’ll take the trouble to run it down. They’re all fed up. on this On Leong Tong and Hip Sing Tong warfare.”

  Barton walked back into the rear room of the store. His sweeping glance showed him that the place was sparsely furnished, for it held only a kitchen range, a cheap wooden table bearing a cracked yellow bowl and a couple of chop-sticks, a cupboard of crude shelves containing a few teacups, a tin plate or so, and a teapot. On a rack back of the stove a few pots and pans hung, together with an American teakettle and an equally American coffee-pot. From the ceiling hung a cheap coal-oil lamp, and in the corner of the room was a wooden cot of the 79-cent. variety, with a quilt and blanket on it. And stretched out on the cot, his yellow features rigid, was the victim of the Tong murder.

  Barton, striding over to the cot, stared down at the dead figure with some degree of interest. The queue had been wound loosely about the forehead, apparently by the officers, but they had not disturbed the knife, the handle of which protruded from the Chinaman’s chest in a mass of clotted blood that had matted the cheap cotton blouse into a hard lump. The loose blue garments lay in folds over the gaunt figure, and the blank yellow features had already shrunk into a grotesque death-mask. Tightly clasped in the Chinaman’s right hand was a thin brush with camel’s hair tip; and Barton, trying it roughly with his fingers, found that the thing was held so rigidly that nothing less than extreme force would have to be used to remove it.

  For several more seconds he stared down at the shell of the Chinese laundryman, and then, with a final cursory glance about the living-room, he returned to the front of the store where the officer was still tilted back in his chair.

  “So Kelly found him lying across the counter?” Barton queried curiously. “And with the paintbrush in his hand?” He pondered for a moment. “Death couldn’t have come instantaneously then; he must have tried to write something out — and fainted across the counter, eh?”

  The other yawned. “I guess so,” he assented wearily. “I guess so.” He unbuttoned his great blue coat and looked at his watch. Then he turned to the younger man. “Say, Bud, can you stay here for a minute or two? I’d like to run into the saloon farther up the street and get a plug and a few cigars. I’m rooted here for the rest of the day, I’m afraid.”

  “Sure; go ahead,” Barton acquiesced cheerfully. “I’ll hold the fort while you’re gone.”

  The bluecoat jumped up, buttoned his coat together and swung out of the door, forging eastward. Barton sat side-wise on the edge of the counter, pondering again over the brush in the dead Chinaman’s hand.

  His eyes fell on the blank red laundry tickets scattered about the floor of the store; then on the little pot of black ink on the counter. He leaned down and picked one of the tickets up. At the top had been crudely printed by a cheap handpress:

  SAM TOY

  144, W. Huron Street,

  Hand Laundry.

  The rest of the ticket, however, was blank.

  The opening of the door on the part of the officer, he saw, had dispersed the red tickets in a dozen directions. A sudden thought struck him. He went over to the door and held it wide open. The gust of wind that shot through the store and out of the cracked window of the rear living-room animated every one of the red squares. He propped open the door with a chair. Then he stepped to the doorway in the partition and wet his finger. With the moistened digit he could feel a most pronounced breeze.

  “Now, I wonder,” he said softly to himself, “If Sammy Toy did write something before he dropped across the counter — and it got blown away?” He was instantly on the alert. He looked down at the floor and under the counter. There was nothing there, however; but an idea struck him. He took one of the blank tickets, and holding it some distance from the floor, suddenly released it. Much to his surprise it sailed upward, caught in the flowing breeze through the store, and disappeared in the box-like screened transom over the partition door. Quickly he got the chair, and, standing on it, raised himself up on tiptoe and peered over the edge of the transom.

  His heart gave a peculiar little leap. There were two red slips there, the one he ha
d just released, and one more.

  He brought them hurriedly down. The one, of course, was blank; but the other, underneath Sam Toy’s cheaply printed name, bore a wavering set of crudely splotched Chinese characters that ran in two vertical wobbly lines. The officer was just turning the knob of the door. Barton quickly stuffed the second red slip into his pocket.

  “Maybe it’s only a spare laundry ticket,” he said to himself, “and on the other hand it may be Sam Toy’s last message to the police. If it tells the name of the Tong that pulled the stunt — it means something more than a stickful. At any rate, my boy, we’ll just hang on to it.”

  CHAPTER XXVII

  FEMININE VOICES

  OUTSIDE, Barton strolled leisurely away from Sam Toy’s laundry, but a block away from the place he withdrew the ticket and studied it closely. There was nothing more to be seen than at first, however; only the crudely printed English words at the top, and below them the two vertical wavering columns of Chinese hieroglyphics.

  When he dismounted from a street car in the down-town section of the city it was ten minutes to ten. It was still too early to visit the Hotel Rydenour on Michigan Avenue and make the hopeless attempt to overwhelm Frangenac by securing an interview with the uninterviewable Princess O Lyra Seng; but, indeed the slip in his pocket suggested that he might yet present the Dispatch with something that would not grace the pages of any other evening paper. Already he had in mind the means of obtaining a translation, and so, after looking at his watch, he forged straight to the Illinois Central suburban station at the foot of Randolph Street.

  He reached the platform just in time to board an express for Fifty-seventh Street, and sixteen minutes later he was walking over the campus of Chicago University. He entered the office of the world-famous college and strode straight to the desk of the registrar’s clerk.

  “How soon this morning can I get in touch with Professor Chan Fu — the exchange professor from the University of Peking?” He paused, and then explained: “Barton’s my name. I’m the man who intervewed Professor Fu when he came to Chicago-U. some months ago.”

  The clerk turned to a ‘phone and rang a number. He talked for a minute, and then hung up the receiver. “Professor Fu left for the Field Museum in Grant Park some ten minutes ago. The board of directors there is holding a meeting regarding an exhibition of Chinese tapestries, and Professor Fu is to have charge. He’s expected back at his rooms in the faculty building at three-thirty. Do you care to leave a message? If so “ — he pointed at a desk in the corner of the office — ” just write it out, and I’ll see that he gets it on his return.”

  A little crestfallen, Barton turned from the desk. He had hoped from his slight acquaintanceship with the big professor from China to secure both a translation and some advice in the matter of the problem which centred in the Hotel Rydenour. He stepped over to the empty desk and sat down. Drawing over an empty sheet of paper, he wrote:

  “DEAR PROFESSOR FU,

  “The undersigned interviewed you some months ago upon your joining your university under the new exchange system with Peking University, and on the strength of that brief but pleasant acquaintanceship takes the liberty of asking you a favour. I am anxious to secure a literal translation of these few Chinese characters. I take the liberty of enclosing them, therefore, and will return at half-past three to-day.”

  He signed his name and drew out the laundry ticket. For a moment he gazed at it, and then, remembering with a feeling of disquiet that Chicago University boasted a whole corps of student journalists who sent in daily correspondence to every paper in the city, he decided not to do as the man in the fable — to place all his eggs in one basket. In fact, he dimly recalled at this juncture a woman friend of his who claimed to have a woman friend out in Ravenswood, who in turn had a Chinese servant — or who had had some months ago. And it struck him that the two egg-baskets for any possible scoop would admirably be that Chinese servant and the big professor, Chan Fu. So he deliberately tore the laundry ticket into two vertical strips, and proceeded to enclose only the right-hand row of characters in his letter. Then he sealed it up, and marking the Professor’s name and the word “urgent” on it, left it with the registrar’s clerk. “Please see that the Professor gets this immediately on his return, and I’ll call back later.”

  He took out an old black leather bill-fold and placed the left-hand strip of the ticket in one of its many empty compartments. Then, retracing his steps across the treedotted campus, he was soon back at the Fifty-seventh Street station of the Illinois Central. A quarter of an hour later he was emerging from the commutor’s tunnel on busy Michigan Avenue, thronged now with stylishly dressed women and men of leisure swinging along with their silk hats and canes.

  A brief walk brought him to the Hotel Rydenour. He knew it to some extent from having been there before, and recalled that it usually housed the visiting potentates and people of distinction from other lands; indeed, it consisted mostly of extensive suites rather than individual rooms.

  He entered the big white-stone skyscraper, and strolling up to the desk motioned the clerk to one side.

  “On what floor is Princess O Lyra — ?” he began.

  “Suite 14B,” interrupted the clerk. He grinned an irritating grin. “My dear sir, if you knew of the newspaper men that have been in here all morning, and filing out again, you wouldn’t ask that question. Mr. Tsung has given me the Princess’s instructions to tell all newspaper men that she does not care to give out any interviews.”

  Barton nodded carelessly, as though the matter were of little consequence to him one way or the other, and walked over to the cigar counter in order to get a cigar and consider the matter. It was just about as he had expected. He wondered if there were any subterfuge by which he could get a ‘phone connection with suite 14B. But as he was nipping off the end of his purchase in the steel cutter, a short, stocky Asiatic with squat features, yet clad in an expensive suite of Scotch tweeds, stepped up to the counter, and in perfect English spoke to the clerk about a certain brand of cigar.

  Barton scrutinised him carefully. He was about fifty years of age, as near as the newspaper man could guess. Dangling from his coat pocket was the ungainly metal shingle which is always attached to hotel keys. And when he strolled back to the lobby and rejoined a woman whose face, showing through the thick folds of her veil, was distinctly Chinese, and elderly at that, Barton whistled softly to himself.

  “That’s Li Hwei Tsung, the prime minister and his wife, all right.” His eyes searched the lobby. “But where’s the Princess?”

  Chewing on his unlighted cigar, Barton watched the two, the yellow-faced Chinese dignitary and the veiled woman, step out of the foyer and into a taxicab drawn up to the curb. A second later they had driven off. Then he spoke again to himself, this time with some enthusiasm.

  “Out on business or to see the city by themselves. And he keeps the key right on his person. That means that our haughty Princess and her maid are alone in their suite. By the Lord Harry, I’ll try it!”

  He made his way quickly over to the elevator shaft, and entered the waiting car. “Fifteenth floor,” he said quietly.

  The elevator stopped with a rush at the fifteenth floor. Barton stepped out, and leaning over, fumbled with his shoelace until the car had descended. Then he hurried down the carpet-clad hall until he came to the stairway. Quickly he descended one storey and, proceeding along the hall, studied carefully the gold-lettered wording on each of the four great oaken doors that clustered about the elevator shaft on that floor. He passed suite D, suite C and finally found himself in front of suite B.

  He lost no time. There was no telling when the elevator might return with a passenger; so he knocked three times. There was no sign of life. Again he knocked, this time louder. Again no answer.

  He stooped over and, peering through the keyhole, found that the door opened only on an inner corridor, at the further end of which were several other oak doors and a half-opened window. He tried the
knob and found, as he now half anticipated, that the door was locked. But the sight of the iron framework of a fire-escape on the window at the end of the corridor gave him an idea which he lost no time in putting into execution.

  After some hesitancy as to whether to go up or down one flight, he hurried back again to the fifteenth floor. There he tried the door of suite 15 B and found to his satisfaction that it was unlocked. He walked rapidly down the narrow corridor, passing several open rooms which showed by the the condition of their bureau covers that the suite was untenanted. Reaching the window, he raised it part way, and clambered out on the fire-escape, which looked down upon a courtyard far below.

  Down he went exactly one flight, until he came to the half-opened window he had glimpsed through the keyhole. He tumbled inside quickly and, gazing along the corridor, identical in appearance with the one above, he saw with satisfaction that the big oaken door which separated the suite from the outer hallway now protected his operations as much as a few minutes before it had barred them.

  He stepped along the corridor a few feet, straining his ears, his heart pounding a little forcibly at his unparalleled effrontery. Now, for the first time, matters had begun to dawn upon him; and over him rolled a sudden wave of resentment against Frangenac, who had been the cause of his adopting such a sensational and obtrusive method of securing something exclusive for the Evening Dispatch. But suddenly Barton stopped. Behind the second door he detected faint feminine voices, one sibilant and strangely girlish, another speaking in a harsh tone words which were quite indistinguishable.

  A second longer he listened, and then, with some trepidation, knocked firmly on the door three times. “Now to get ordered out like a dog,” he remarked dolefully to himself. “Confound such a game, anyway!”