The matilda hunter murde.., p.32
The Matilda Hunter Murder, page 32
The Jap studied his interlocutor somewhat cautiously, as one figuring what card or cards the other might hold, or possibly only contemplating the probability of a stiff fist driven into his face.
“Oui, monsieur, je parle un peu le français.”
Callahan was as delighted as though he had found a hundred dollar bill in an old suit.
“Where’d you learn French?”
“Me? In Tokyo—in school. We got schools. Teach langwidges.”
“And you got schooling, eh? Hm. Never knew a man named Loucheur?”
“Me? No sair.”
“Michaux then? Victor Michaux?”
“Michaux? No. Me nevair know no French peoples of no kind. Jus’ Miss Daladier. My teacher. In Tokyo.”
“Oh, haven’t got French friends, eh? Got any Jap friends, then?”
“Me? No, I got no frien’s. Me—I’m all alone. Don’ beat me, mister—my frien’s not like be drag in here and beat too.”
“Oh—I thought you didn’t have any friends. You talk turkey, or we’ll beat you good and proper, remember that.”
“Me, I not talk Turkish. Jus’ ’Merican and Jap’neze—an’ lil French.”
“Why’d you leave Burlington, Iowa?”
“Me? I queet. I no like work for Meest’ Kemp. Me, I like work in Chacogo—and leev’ with nize Meesos Honder.”
“Did you know that Mrs. Hunter is dead?”
“Dead?” The Jap blinked, but gave no sign of shock. “She die? She nize lady. Why she die?”
“Well, that machine you were trying to get hold of killed her, see?”
“Oh—I see. I am ver’ sorry, all right. I theenk the machine ver’ bad machine—but I no like it to keel nize Mrs. Honder.”
Callahan sat with mouth open. “Then you admit—that this Z-ray machine—this Z-ray machine you were trying to get hold of—”
“Zeeray machine? No, he’s Ford machine. I tell man bring him around. I buy him—mebbe. I sorry Meesos Honder go ride. So she get keeled? She ver’ nize. Nize lady. I like her.”
There was a faintly amused smile on Trotter’s face as he watched this verbal gymkhana which seemed, at least thus far, perfectly to justify all of his predictions. Ellwood surveyed matters sourly and silently. Callahan was angry—the only one who now was perturbed. The Jap, as one who had suddenly gotten for the first time the full grasp of an unknown situation, had recovered all of his aplomb.
“Say, you’re a slick piece of poultry, Sato. You’re the God of Innocence himself. I got the goods on you, my saffron colored bird, whether or not you’re lying about Burlington. You’re too slick to lie. You’re a smoke-screen thrower. I know your type now.”
Hump appeared. “Got Burlington, Chief. Kemp himself.”
“And?” inquired Callahan.
“He says he fired this fellow. Only hired him last week. Started getting letters in Japanese from Chicago as soon as he started work. Mooning around—as though he was homesick or in love or something. Hobnobbing with other Japs in town, when he should have been running the vacuum cleaner. He used the Kemp phone a couple of times for a long-distance message to Chi, saying he’d pay for it, but it made the old man rage because both times he happened to want to use the phone himself. Kamura always talked in Japanese, he said. The Jap got a long-distance message from Chicago late last night—at exactly one minute after midnight, to be exact—and packed up his duds and quit. Or was fired. You know, Chief, how it is—the employer and employee both trying to get in first under the tape with their egos!” Hump paused. “Anyway, whether he quit before he was fired, or was fired before he quit, it was in time to put him on the Burlington railroad train that goes through there at 2 in the morning, and would have brought him in to Chicago about 9. Just in time to check his suitcase at the depot and mosey over to the Hunter home and walk in, where Noonan caught him.”
Callahan turned to the Jap. “So you got a lot of Jap friends in Chicago after all, eh?”
“Me? I got frien’—two frien’s—mebbe three.”
“I’ll bet you have. Ever have a friend named Fuchida?”
“No,” unblinkingly. “No frien’ Fuchida.”
“Ever been in London?”
“No,” unperturbably. “Nevair be in Londone.”
“Ever eat an eel pie?”
“No eat sick pies. Mus’ be good pies. Good food.”
“Sick pies? Eel pies—sick pies? Oh! Eel—not ill. Ever hear of a man named Kodansha?”
“No,” stolidly. “Nevair hear.”
“Haven’t seen anything, heard anything, and don’t know anything, eh? Well, seeing you don’t know anybody, who was that long distance message from—the one that called you back to Chicago, eh?”
“Message from my frien’—Nitchi—he say he got me new job. Chacago. Nizer job. He say come back.”
“Why’d he call up at that unearthly hour of the night? And exactly one minute after midnight?”
The Jap surveyed Callahan warily. “He got ship rats—after meednight.”
“Ship rats? What the—ship rats? Whadeyou mean?”
“Ship rats?” The Jap made a vague gesture. “Ship rates—no coste so much—much coste one meenut’ uf meednight—then cost ship one meenut’ after.”
“Cheap rates, he means, Chief,” put in Trotter quietly.
“Oh—cheap rates! I wish to hell you’d speak English,” snapped Callahan to the Jap. “Humph. Where was this new job you were going to get?”
Sato shook his head. “I do’ know. Nize job, Nitchi say.”
“Where is Nitchi?”
“Nitchi? I dunno. He say he come—he come to Meesos Honder’s. Old plaze w’ere I leeve.”
“Oh! Smoke screen all over, eh? Checkmate me every time, don’t you?” Callahan turned away disgruntledly, “Trotter, you win hands down. It sure beats the—”
But his words were interrupted by the appearance of Hump in the opening which carried the green baize door, a look of profound puzzlement on his face. He screwed up his forehead in an odd frown. “Excuse me, Chief, but there’s a ring from Lieutenant Seever’s office, 218, right below us. He says there’s a kid down there that claims she was ordered to report to what she calls ‘The Law’—at that room number—but they don’t know anything about her. I think Lieutenant Seever’s joking a bit—he says he thinks she’s a lost kid trying to get back to her nursie in some park! You aren’t expecting any infants up here, are you? Marie Robinson’s the name she gives.” He looked about him. “Anybody here—”
Callahan glanced down at the card on his desk. “That’s that taxi dancer from the Blue Moon. Have her shown up here, Hump. Room 318—not 218!”
Hump withdrew.
Ellwood uncrossed his legs and then re-crossed them. “Excuse me,” he said irritably, “but this is the second time you’ve been talking about taxi-dancers. What in Sam Hill is a taxi-dancer? How can a person dance in a taxi? Why—”
Callahan smiled dryly. “Something that didn’t exist in your dancing days, Mr. Ellwood. Taxi-dancing is a new product of our modern jazz age. Something new, Mr. Ellwood, that’s swept over America from coast to coast, and from Texas to the Canadian line. There’s taxi-dance halls in every city in America now.” He paused, as though to pick his words with accuracy. “Taxi-dancing, Mr. Ellwood, might be said to be a cross between hard labor and pouring social pink tea! Or how shall I say it? A taxi-dancer works harder, dollar for dollar—I’d better say nickel for nickel!—than any man would consent to work. She works in a special dance hall where the prospective male customer buys a strip of ten perforate tickets for a dollar. He’s entitled to dance with any girl in the place, one dance for each ticket. The whole ten tickets with the same girl—or only one ticket—if he can stand a dirty look! The girls line up at one side of the hall—in a big hall, Mr. Ellwood, there’ll be as many as a hundred of ’em. They step out of line and into the arms of each customer who gives them the high sign. Every time the music stops—and believe me, Mr. Ellwood, when business is brisk—as on a Saturday night when the customers have their pay envelopes with ’em—it stops just about as soon as it begins, and right in the middle of a bar. The customer who is dancing with a girl has to give her one ticket. She tears it in two, and during the next dance hands half of it to the first of several floormen that she whirls past; she keeps the other half herself. Every night she turns in her collection of half tickets for the night, and receives a receipt. For every one she accumulates, she’s paid a nickel at the end of the week. Just as bookkeepers work their eyes to death, and stenographers their fingers, and statisticians their brains, and so forth and so on in our complex industrial world, the taxi-dancer too works something to death—no, not her feet, her heart muscle. That’s the organ that really carries the gaff. Dance, dance, dance, if she’s pretty, for hour on hour—seven hours straight on a Saturday night, the night of the big killing in nickel-land, the night when the dances are short and swift and in rapid endless succession, and there’s more men than girls available. On other nights, poor nights, rainy nights, perhaps, there may be a hundred girls lined up—and only a handful of men. But Saturday night—that’s the big night. The night when a girl may earn half of her whole week’s pay. When her heart has to carry a physical strain that a steel mill laborer’s wouldn’t have to. Taxi-dancer’s heart! Something like athlete’s heart. I’ve heard it referred to once or twice as a new phenomenon in medicine.”
“Say—that’s interesting,” commented Ellwood with undue enthusiasm. “Mighty so,” he echoed. “I must have our general manager make a study of it. Taxi-dancer’s heart! A new occupational hazard. Good. And you say there’s thousands of these halls in America? Why—say—there’s a field in which to sell a million dollars or more in special insurance.” He was writing fervently, yet meticulously, in a little alligator leather notebook as he spoke.
But at this juncture the green door opened and Hump appeared, only to step aside.
“Right in there, child. The gentleman at the desk.”
CHAPTER XXV
My Lady of Nickel Land
If one had expected to see a new form of female athlete, or Amazon, capable of standing a gruelling comparable only to that carried by professional marathon runners, one would have been disappointed indeed in the young lady, yclept Robinson, of Chicago’s Blue Moon Dance Hall for Orientals. She was a somewhat pert, although just manifestly subdued young specimen of femininity, appearing to be scarcely 15 years of age despite the possibility of her real years being one, or maybe one and a half, in excess of that. Tiny, indeed, petite as well, she seemed to be more of a minikin edition of a young girl than did even the Jap himself appear in that assemblage to be only a male Lilliputian. She was, as might be expected of one whose charms were to be accentuated along the specific lines considered most desirable by all yellow men from across the Pacific, a peroxide blonde, for her luxuriant yellow hair was not only unnaturally fluffy in texture, and quite sheenless in its lights, but of a whitish-corntossel hue whose authenticity was quite belied by her discerning orbs which held a mixture of green and brown. Quite unadorned by any hat, the practical uses of which its owner evidently scorned, her xanthic mane fell gracefully to her shoulders on every side, curling up all around at its ends in a neat fillip, and giving her the appearance of some whimsical Alice who had stepped forth from one of John Tenniel’s woodcuts in an old Alice-in-Wonderland into the world of Modernia. An inevitable artistic discrimination, however, had made her mate her artificially tinted tresses with their logical color red, for she was clad in perfect keeping with blondness, and in a mode that would have surprised even Lewis Carroll, for not only was her pleated skirt an emphatic crimson in color but it was sufficiently short and scant as to display generously a neatly rounded pair of knees as well as a pair of silken clad limbs whose graceful lines made one marvel at the miles and miles those legs must travel nightly. Her feet were encased in red leather shoes with tall heels, studded with cheap brilliants which, tripping and gliding at night under the myriad lights of a dance hall, must pour forth a veritable cascade of fire to make the original Will-o’-the-Wisp, with his simple glow lights, jealous. She wore a dark scarlet coat—perhaps even wine colored—of cheap plush, garnished along the bottom, edge and cuffs with some trumperish fur consisting of white rabbit pelt which had been spotted with vivid black here and there by an adroit furrier’s brush, converting it into that which it was not! The small braid fastening at the collar of her coat, however, had been left unfastened, purposefully no doubt, for there was displayed, about her slender—almost pipe-stem!—throat, a necklace of huge but cheap imitation pearls, pellucid blown globules as big as cherries, a veritable culminating triumph of Woolworthian make-believe.
She was, nevertheless, in spite of all her bedizenments, undeniably pretty, if only for her extreme youth and diminutiveness alone, although here again her mouth was rouged too red with lip salve, and her eyelashes had been hastily mascaraed so that they looked as though some giant puff of soot had enveloped her for a second, remaining to rest only on those delicate ciliae. In her hand, adorned on two of its fingers with great imitation dinner rings of leaden alloy, studded with quicksilvered paste stones which might have been plucked indeed from her very heels, she clasped a black silk purse, with an ivory clasp to which was pressed, by one thumb, perhaps as a matter of emergency, a small felt cornucopia representing a rolled-up crimson hat which held in its texture an interlacing of gold braid.
She gazed about her, somewhat fearfully.
“I’m—I’m Marie Robinson,” she said.
“Step over here, Marie,” commanded Callahan. “Want to ask you a question or two about—” He nodded toward the Jap who stared hopelessly and fixedly toward the girl as though to convey some desperate message.
She came over closer to the desk, still clasping her hat and purse as though the latter at least were some sort of moral bulwark. Wide-eyed, she gazed ’round her, in both directions, at all the other faces.
“What’s your line of business, Marie?”
“Me? Why I’m—I’m a taxi-dancer. You—you know taxi-dancing, mister?” Her voice grew grave. “You’re—you’re the Law.”
From the awesome emphasis she gave that last word, it was evident that all authority in the world which bore any kind of uniform or brass button was “The Law,” some deep directing mainspring which at times regulated, and perhaps at others interfered with, the workings of the cosmos.
“You work in the Blue Moon, don’t you?”
“I’ll say I do, Mister. Work? Gee—but I work! If anybody tells you a taxi-dancer don’t work, don’t you believe ’em.”
“Well, we’ll take your word on that, my child. Know this fellow here?”
She nodded. “Sure. He dances with me. He’s danced—often—lots with me. Camera’s his name.” She turned to the Jap. “Gee, Camera, what you been doin’ to yourself?” She shook her head. A wrinkle that was far deeper than that of mere puzzlement, a wrinkle indeed of deep apprehension of some sort, appeared between her brows.
“What do you know about him, Marie? He’s here in a—well—it’s a manslaughter case. Did he ever tell you anything about himself?”
She gazed at the Jap horrified. He made a sort of wild gesture with his eyes, a facial contortion, a signal. “Mahree, don’ say not notting deez people ’bout me. I—”
But she turned on him with a fury that was quite unaccountable, a fury whose explanation lay far deeper than anyone in that room could glimpse, a fury that was that of a woman in whom some fundamental natural rights were being demolished by him. “Now listen here, you, you’ve—you’ve gone an’ did it. Manslaughter, heh? That means cuttin’ a man up with a knife. And that means the Dance’ll be closed up—just like O’Kelly’s Filipino Dancin’ Gardens was. Now—now you’ve went an’ did it. An’ me—we’re all out on the sidewalk lookin’ for new jobs again. An’ so you think I’m goin’ to protect you—me—with the Law here ready t’ close the doors on us. Well, I ain’t. I ain’t gonna get myself in no trouble for you, Camera. Be—be sure of that. An’ so you used a knife? Gee, but if you ain’t a—a—a dirty yellow rat, all right, all right.”
At the utter vehemence of her attack which seemed peculiarly uncalled for in the face of the existence of a city replete with dance-halls in which Terpsichore was measured off by perforate tickets, the Jap fell back as though inundated with a shower of cold water, but at the sobriquet of ‘dirty yellow rat,’ he flinched visibly as though struck squarely across the face with a whip. His yellow countenance literally went a shade whiter. He brought the back of his hand to his lips, in a gesture of deep pain. She regarded him, in turn, not so much in wrath now as in bewildered concern of some sort.
“All right, Marie,” Callahan was saying peremptorily, “What has he told you in confidence?”
As though wavering, the site of a conflict in which hundreds of emotions carried on a free-for-all within her, she contemplated the Jap, and then suddenly she became once more the visible personification of that one huge turbulent emotion which had first actuated her, which ever operated her puppetlike, from back of her own spiritual stage. She made a short gesture that was evidently condemnatory of her own sentimental vacillation in the matter.
“He’s closed The Dance—he’s closed The Dance!” she wailed. She turned to Callahan. “Gee—why’d he have to do that? Sure I’ll tell ya. Sure. We went to Sing Choy’s one night—a Chink dump—near The Dance—for chow mein. Naw, not after the Dance, Mister. Before. I—I never go out—after the Dance. Not with nobody, Mister. He brought some Oshee wine—that’s what he called it—Oshee wine—on his hip. He—he got terr’ble crocked. He said—he said—he said he wasn’t just a ord’nary houseman. He said he acted in the Yoka—Yoka—”
“Yokohama National Theatre, my child?” put in Trotter, elbow in hand.
