This line of thinking brought me around to “Dummy” Uhl. Uhl was a dummerer who had lost his store. Five years before, he had been sitting on the world. Any day on which his sad face, his package of pins, and his I am deaf and dumb sign didn’t take twenty dollars out of the office buildings along his route was a rotten day. His big card was his ability to play the statue when skeptical people yelled or made sudden noises behind him. When the Dummy was right, a gun off beside his ear wouldn’t make him twitch an eyelid. But too much heroin broke his nerves until a whisper was enough to make him jump. He put away his pins and his sign—another man whose social life had ruined him.
Since then Dummy had become an errand boy for whoever would stake him to the price of his necessary nose-candy. He slept somewhere in Chinatown, and he didn’t care especially how he played the game. I had used him to get me some information on a window-smashing six months before. I decided to try him again.
I called “Loop” Pigatti’s place—a dive down on Pacific Street, where Chinatown fringes into the Latin Quarter. Loop is a tough citizen, who runs a tough hole, and who minds his own business, which is making his dive show a profit. Everybody looks alike to Loop. Whether you’re a yegg, stool-pigeon, detective, or settlement worker, you get an even break out of Loop and nothing else. But you can be sure that, unless it’s something that might hurt his business, anything you tell Loop will get no further. And anything he tells you is more than likely to be right.
He answered the phone himself.
“Can you get hold of Dummy Uhl for me?” I asked after I had told him who I was.
“Maybe.”
“Thanks. I’d like to see him tonight.”