Not sure why, but my googling yielded meaningful results. Apparently there are sewers that are home to crabs. There are also, apparently, people who fish for them.
I will pull out a few additional sentences from the sewer crab section of the book, to provide more context for the old man's answer:
I left by the coffeeshop door and walked down a hill to where the
last, loneliest reach of Puget Sound died and decomposed against a
line of disused wharves.
I set a box on end, sat down, filled my own pipe, lit it, puffed a
cloud of smoke. I waved a hand at the water and said: "You'd never
think that ever met the Pacific Ocean."
"Know anybody around here that keeps a lot of goldfish?"
Now, my interpretation of the Mackinaw man's answer ("Sewer crabs is all"): The conversation takes place at water's edge. The water in question is dirty, similar to the water in a sewer. There is a type of crab that is adapted to living in sewers, and it is able to live in the dirty water where the scene takes place. The man who answers the narrator's question tells the narrator that he doesn't know anyone who keeps a lot of goldfish, he only knows people who keep (or fish for?) sewer crabs.
I haven't read past this, so I don't know for sure, but I can say that the scene gave me the impression this particular avenue was a dead end in the narrator's investigations. It seemed to me that Chandler in this scene was simply creating an ambience, of dockside seediness. (I know enough of Chandler to know that he was into describing seediness.)
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