Pederson was peevish about it.
“I guess if he hadn’t got killed he’d of beat us out of a week’s bill! These guys that don’t carry anything to identify ’em, and that don’t leave their keys at the desk when they go out, ain’t to be trusted too much!”
We had just finished our search when a bellhop brought Detective Sergeant O’Gar, of the police department Homicide Detail, into the room.
“Been down to the agency?” I asked him.
“Yeah, just came from there.”
“What’s new?”
O’Gar pushed back his wide-brimmed black village-constable’s hat and scratched his bullet head.
“Not a heap. The doc says he was opened with a blade at least six inches long by a couple wide, and that he couldn’t of lived two hours after he got the blade—most likely not more’n one. We didn’t find any news on him. What’ve you got here?”
“His name is Rounds. He registered here yesterday from New York. His stuff is new, and there’s nothing on any of it to tell us anything except that he didn’t want to leave a trail. No letters, no memoranda, nothing. No blood, no signs of a row, in the room.”
O’Gar turned to Pederson.
“Any brown men been around the hotel? Hindus or the like?”
“Not that I saw,” the house copper said. “I’ll find out for you.”
“Then the red silk was a sarong?” I asked.
“And an expensive one,” the detective sergeant said. “I saw a lot of ’em the four years I was soldiering on the islands, but I never saw as good a one as that.”
“Who wears them?”
“Men and women in the Philippines, Borneo, Java, Sumatra, Malay Peninsula, parts of India.”
“Is it your idea that whoever did the carving advertised himself by running around in the streets in a red petticoat?”
“Don’t try to be funny!” he growled at me. “They’re often enough twisted or folded up into sashes or girdles. And how do I know he was knifed in the street? For that matter, how do I know he wasn’t cut down in your joint?”
“We always bury our victims without saying anything about ’em. Let’s go down and give Pete a hand in the search for your brown men.”
That angle was empty. Any brown men who had snooped around the hotel had been too good at it to be caught.
I telephoned the Old Man, telling him what I had learned—which didn’t cost me much breath—and O’Gar and I spent the rest of the evening sharpshooting around without ever getting on the target once. We questioned taxicab drivers, questioned the three Roundses listed in the telephone book, and our ignorance was as complete when we were through as when we started.
The morning papers, on the streets at a little after eight o’clock that evening, had the story as we knew it.
At eleven o’clock O’Gar and I called it a night, separating in the direction of our respective beds.
We didn’t stay apart long.
II
I opened my eyes sitting on the side of my bed in the dim light of a moon that was just coming up, with the ringing telephone in my hand.
O’Gar’s voice: “1856 Broadway! On the hump!”
“1856 Broadway,” I repeated, and he hung up.
I finished waking up while I phoned for a taxicab, and then wrestled my clothes on. My watch told me it was 12:55 a.m. as I went downstairs. I hadn’t been fifteen minutes in bed.
1856 Broadway was a three-story house set behind a pocket-size lawn in a row of like houses behind like lawns. The others were dark. 1856 shed light from every window, and from the open front door. A policeman stood in the vestibule.
“Hello, Mac! O’Gar here?”
“Just went in.”
I walked into a brown and buff reception hall, and saw the detective sergeant going up the wide stairs.
“What’s up?” I asked as I joined him.
“Don’t know.”
On the second floor we turned to the left, going into a library or sitting room that stretched across the front of the house.
A man in pajamas and bathrobe sat on a davenport there, with one bared leg stretched out on a chair in front of him. I recognized him when he nodded to me: Austin Richter, owner of a Market Street moving picture theater. He was a round-faced man of forty-five or so, partly bald, for whom the agency had done some work a year or so before in connection with a ticket-seller who had departed without turning in the day’s receipts.
In front of Richter a thin white-haired man with doctor written all over him stood looking at Richter’s leg, which was wrapped in a bandage just below the knee. Beside the doctor, a tall woman in a fur-trimmed dressing-gown stood, a roll of gauze and a pair of scissors in her hands. A husky police corporal was writing in a notebook at a long narrow table, a thick hickory walking stick laying on the bright blue table cover at his elbow.
All of them looked around at us as we came into the room. The corporal got up and came over to us.
“I knew you were handling the Rounds job, sergeant, so I thought I’d best get word to you as soon as I heard they was brown men mixed up in this.”
“Good work, Flynn,” O’Gar said. “What happened here?”
“Burglary, or maybe only attempted burglary. They was four of them—crashed the kitchen door.”
Richter was sitting up very straight, and his blue eyes were suddenly excited, as were the brown eyes of the woman.
“I beg your pardon,” he said, “but is there—you mentioned brown men in connection with another affair—is there another?”
O’Gar looked at me.
“You haven’t seen the morning papers?” I asked the theatre owner.
“No.”
“Well, a man came into the Continental office late this afternoon, with a stab in his chest, and died there. Pressed
