"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."