_ CHAPTER XX. 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. _