“Yes,” the broker said.  “He had us right—­not only me, but Jack and Phyllis, too.  I couldn’t let him drag her into it.  The day you saw me with the strained tendon I had been with him and Horikawa in the apartment next to the one Uncle James rented.  We quarreled.  I got furious and caught Shibo by the throat to shake the little scoundrel.  He gave my arm some kind of a jiu-jitsu twist.  He was at me every day.  He never let up.  He meant to bleed me heavily.  We couldn’t come to terms.  I hated to yield to him.”

“And did you?”

“I promised him an answer soon.”

“No doubt he came to-day thinkin’ he was goin’ to get it.”  Kirby went back to the previous question.  “Next time I saw Shibo I took a look at his feet.  He was wearin’ a pair o’ shoes that looked to me mighty like those worn by the man that ambushed me.  They didn’t have any cap pieces across the toes.  I’d noticed that even while he was shootin’ at me.  It struck me that it would be a good idea to look over his quarters in the basement.  Shibo has one human weakness.  He’s a devotee of the moving pictures.  Nearly every night he takes in a show on Curtis Street.  The Chief lent me a man, an’ last night we went through his room at the Paradox.  We found there a flashlight, a bandanna handkerchief with holes cut in it for the eyes, an’ in the mattress two thousand dollars in big bills.  We left them where we found them, for we didn’t want to alarm Shibo.”

The janitor looked at him without emotion.  “You plenty devil man,” he said.

“We hadn’t proved yet that Shibo was goin’ it alone,” Kirby went on, paying no attention to the interruption.  “Some one might be usin’ him as a tool.  Horikawa’s confession clears that up.”

Kirby handed to the Chief of Police the sheets of paper found in the apartment where the valet was killed.  Attached to these by a clip was the translation.  The Chief read this last aloud.

Horikawa, according to the confession, had been in Cunningham’s rooms sponging and pressing a suit of clothes when the promoter came home on the afternoon of the day of his death.  Through a half-open door he had seen his master open his pocket-book and count a big roll of bills.  The figures on the outside one showed that it was a treasury note for fifty dollars.  The valet had told Shibo later and they had talked it over, but with no thought in Horikawa’s mind of robbery.

He was helping Shibo fix a window screen at the end of the hall that evening when they saw the Hulls come out of Cunningham’s apartment.  Something furtive in their manner struck the valet’s attention.  It was in the line of his duties to drop in and ask whether the promoter’s clothes needed any attention for the next day.  He discovered after he was in the living-room that Shibo was at his heels.  They found Cunningham trussed up to a chair in the smaller room.  He was unconscious, evidently from a blow in the head.