PAGE 4
The Opium Joint
by
It was in the middle of the morning when we were taking a snatch of sleep in our own rooms uptown that the telephone began to ring insistently. Kennedy, who was resting, I verily believe, merely out of consideration for my own human frailties, was at the receiver in an instant. It proved to be O’Connor. He had just gone back to his office at headquarters and there he had found a report of another murder.
“Who is it?” asked Kennedy, “and why do you connect it with this case?”
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.