THE BRASS BED
The rough riders gravitated back to the fire escape. Kirby had studied
the relation of his uncle's apartment to the building opposite. He had
not yet examined it with reference to the adjoining rooms.
"While we're cuttin' trail might as well be thorough," he said to his
friend. "The miscreant that did this killin' might 'a' walked out the
door or he might 'a' come through the window here. If he did that
last, which fork of the road did he take? He could go down the ladder
or swing across to the Wyndham an' slip into the corridor. Let's make
sure we've got all the prospects figured out at that."
Before he had finished the sentence, Lane saw another way of flight.
The apartment in front of Cunningham's was out of reach of the fire
escape. But the nearest window of the one to the rear was closer.
Beneath it ran a stone ledge. An active man could swing himself from
the railing of the platform to the coping and force an entrance into
that apartment through the window.
Kirby glanced up and down the alley. A department store delivery auto
was moving out of sight. Nobody was in the line of vision except an
occasional pedestrian passing on the sidewalk at the entrances to the
alley.
"I'm gonna take a whirl at it," Lane said, nodding toward the window.
"How much do they give for burglary in this state?" asked Sanborn, his
eyes dancing. "I'd kinda hate to see you do twenty years."
"They have to catch the rabbit before they cook it, old-timer. Here
goes. Keep an eye peeled an' gimme the office if any cop shows up."
"Mebbe the lady's at home. I don't allow to rescue you none if she
massacrees you," the world's champion announced, grinning.
"Wrong guess, Cole. The boss of this hacienda is a man, an' he's in
Chicago right now."
"You're the dawg-gonedest go-getter I ever threw in with," Sanborn
admitted. "All right. Go to it. If I gotta go to the calaboose I
gotta go, that's all."
Kirby stepped lightly to the railing, edged far out with his weight on
the ledge, and swung to the window-sill. The sash yielded to the
pressure of his hands and moved up. A moment later he disappeared from
Sanborn's view into the room.
It was the living-room of the apartment into which Lane had stepped.
The walls were papered with blue and the rug was a figured yellow and
blue. The furniture was of fumed oak, the chairs leather-padded.
The self-invited guest met his first surprise on the table. It was
littered with two or three newspapers. The date of the uppermost
caught his eye. It was a copy of the "Post" of the twenty-fifth. He
looked at the other papers. One was the "Times" and another the
"News," dated respectively the twenty-fourth and the twenty-sixth.
There was an "Express" of the twenty-eighth. Each contained long
accounts of the developments in the Cunningham murder mystery.
How did these papers come here? The apartment was closed, its tenant
in Chicago. The only other persons who had a key and the right of
entry were Horikawa and the Paradox janitor, and the house servant had
fled to parts unknown. Who, then, had brought these papers here? And
why? Some one, Lane guessed, who was vitally interested in the murder.
He based his presumption on one circumstance. The sections of the
newspapers which made no reference to the Cunningham affair had been
jammed into the waste-paper basket close to an adjoining desk.
The apartment held two rooms, a buffet kitchen and a bathroom. Kirby
opened the door into the bedroom.
He stood paralyzed on the threshold. On the bed, fully dressed, his
legs stretched in front of him and his feet crossed, was the missing
man Horikawa. His torso was propped up against the brass posts of the
bedstead. A handkerchief encircled each arm and bound it to the brass
upright behind.
In the forehead, just above the slant, oval eyes, was a bullet hole.
The man had probably been dead for a day, at least for a good many
hours.
The cattleman had no doubt that it was Horikawa. His picture, a good
snapshot taken by a former employer at a picnic where the Japanese had
served the luncheon, had appeared in all the papers and on handbills
sent out by James Cunningham, Junior. There was a scar, Y-shaped and
ragged, just above the left eye, that made identification easy.
Kirby stepped to the window of the living-room and called to his friend.
"Want me to help you gather the loot?" chaffed Cole.
"Serious business, old man," Kirby told him, and the look on his face
backed the words.
Sanborn swung across to the window and came through.
"What is it?" he asked quickly.
"I've found Horikawa."
"Found him--where?"
The eyes of the men met and Cole guessed that grim tragedy was in the
air. He followed Kirby to the bedroom.
"God!" he exclaimed.
His gaze was riveted to the bloodless, yellow face of the Oriental.
Presently he broke the silence to speak again.
"The same crowd that killed Cunningham must 'a' done this, too."
"Prob'ly."
"Sure they must. Same way exactly."
"Unless tyin' him up here was an afterthought--to make it look like the
other," suggested Lane. He added, after a moment, "Or for revenge,
because Horikawa killed my uncle. If he did, fate couldn't have sent a
retribution more exactly just."
"Sho, that's a heap unlikely. You'd have to figure there were _two_
men that are Apache killers, both connected with this case, both with
minds just alike, one of 'em a Jap an' the other prob'ly a white man.
A hundred to one shot, I'd call it. No, sir. Chances are the same man
bossed both jobs."
"Yes," agreed Kirby. "The odds are all that way."
He stepped closer and looked at the greenish-yellow flesh. "May have
been dead a couple o' days," he continued.
"What was the sense in killin' him? What for? How did he come into
it?" Cole's boyish face wrinkled in perplexity. "I don't make head or
tail of this thing. Cunningham's enemies couldn't be his enemies, too,
do you reckon?"
"More likely he knew too much an' had to be got out of the road."
"Yes, but--" Sanborn stopped, frowning, while he worked out what he
had to say. "He wasn't killed right after yore uncle. Where was he
while the police were huntin' for him everywhere? If he knew somethin'
why didn't he come to bat with it? What was he waitin' for? An' if
the folks that finally bumped him off knew he didn't aim to tell what
he knew, whyfor did they figure they had to get rid of him?"
"I can't answer your questions right off the reel, Cole. Mebbe I could
guess at one or two answers, but they likely wouldn't be right. F'r
instance, I could guess that he was here in this room from the time my
uncle was killed till he met his own death."
"In this room?"
"In these apartments. Never left 'em, most likely. What's more, some
one knew he was here an' kept him supplied with the daily papers."
"Who?"
"If I could tell you that I could tell you who killed him," answered
Kirby with a grim, mirthless smile.
"How do you know all that?"
Lane told him of the mute testimony of the newspapers in the
living-room. "Some one brought those papers to him every day," he
added.
"And then killed him. Does that look reasonable to you?"
"We don't know the circumstances. Say, to make a long shot, that the
Jap had been hired to kill my uncle by this other man, and say he was
beginnin' to get ugly an' make threats. Or say Horikawa knew about the
killin' of my uncle an' was hired by the other man to keep away. Then
he learns from the papers that he's suspected, an' he gets anxious to
go to the police with what he knows. Wouldn't there be reason enough
then to kill him? The other man would have to do it to save himself."
"I reckon." Cole harked back to a preceding suggestion. "The revenge
theory won't hold water. If some friend of yore uncle knew the Jap had
killed him he'd sick the law on him. He wouldn't pull off any private
execution like this."
Kirby accepted this. "That's true. There's another possibility.
We've been forgettin' the two thousand dollars my uncle drew from the
bank the day he was killed. If Horikawa an' some one else are guilty
of the murder an' the theft, they might have quarreled later over the
money. Perhaps the accomplice saw a chance to get away with the whole
of it by gettin' rid of Horikawa."
"Mebbeso. By what you tell me yore uncle was a big, two-fisted
scrapper. It was a two-man job to handle him. This li'l' Jap never in
the world did it alone. What it gets back to is that he was prob'ly in
on it an' later for some reason his pardner gunned him."
"Well, we'd better telephone for the police an' let them do some of the
worryin'."
Kirby stepped into the living-room, followed by his friend. He was
about to reach for the receiver when an exclamation stopped him.
Sanborn was standing before a small writing-desk, of which he had just
let down the top. He had lifted idly a piece of blotting-paper and was
gazing down at a sheet of paper with writing on it.
"Looky here, Kirby," he called.
In three strides Lane was beside him. His eyes, too, fastened on the
sheet and found there the pot-hooks we have learned to associate with
Chinese and Japanese chirography.
"Shows he'd been makin' himself at home," the champion rough rider said.
Lane picked up the paper. There were two or three sheets of the
writing. "Might be a letter to his folks--or it might be--" His
sentence flickered out. He was thinking. "I reckon I'll take this
along with me an' have it translated, Cole."
He put the sheets in his pocket after he had folded them. "You never
can tell. I might as well know what this Horikawa was thinkin' about
first off as the police. There's just an off chance he might 'a' seen
Rose that night an' tells about it here."
A moment later he was telephoning to the City Hall for the police.
There was the sound of a key in the outer door. It opened, and the
janitor of the Paradox stood in the doorway.
"What you do here?" asked the little Japanese quickly.
"We came in through the window," explained Kirby. "Thought mebbe the
man that killed my uncle slipped in here."
"I hear you talk. I come in. You no business here."
"True enough, Shibo. But we're not burglars an' we're here. Lucky we
are too. We've found somethin'."
"Mr. Jennings he in Chicago. He no like you here."
"I want to show you somethin', Shibo. Come."
Kirby led the way into the bedroom. Shibo looked at his countryman
without a muscle of his impassive face twitching.
"Some one killum plenty dead," he said evenly.
"Quite plenty," Kirby agreed, watching his imperturbable Oriental face.
The cattleman admitted to himself that what he did not know about
Japanese habits of mind would fill a great many books.