Tangled Trails Part 23

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. n.o.body was in the line of vision except an occasional pedestrian pa.s.sing 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 ma.s.sacrees 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 circ.u.mstance. 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 bra.s.s posts of the bedstead. A handkerchief encircled each arm and bound it to the bra.s.s 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 j.a.panese 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.

"G.o.d!" 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 j.a.p 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 b.u.mped 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 circ.u.mstances. Say, to make a long shot, that the j.a.p 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 j.a.p 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.