At nine the next morning, Tuesday, I was talking to Cipriano in the lobby of the apartment building that employs him. His eyes were black drops of ink in white saucers. He thought he had got something.
“Yes, sir! Strange Chinaboys are in town, some of them. They sleep in a house on Waverly Place—on the western side, four houses from the house of Jair Quon, where I sometimes play dice. And there is more—I talk to a white man who knows they are hatchet-men from Portland and Eureka and Sacramento. They are Hip Sing men—a tong war starts—pretty soon, maybe.”
“Do these birds look like gunmen to you?”
Cipriano scratched his head.
“No, sir, maybe not. But a fellow can shoot sometimes if he don’t look like it. This man tells me they are Hip Sing men.”
“Who was this white man?”
“I don’t know the name, but he lives there. A short man—snowbird.”
“Grey hair, yellowish eyes?”
“Yes, sir.”
That, as likely as not, would be Dummy Uhl. One of my men was stringing the other. The tong stuff hadn’t sounded right to me anyhow. Once in a while they mix things, but usually they are blamed for somebody else’s crimes. Most wholesale killings in Chinatown are the result of family or clan feuds—such as the ones the “Four Brothers” used to stage.