Gregory stood away from him, searched his ashy face.
“It’s not so good,” he repeated. “Look here, Brad! You and I have been friends for a good many years. The best I could ever do for you wouldn’t be too good. You know it. You’ve helped me when I needed help, and I’m not forgetting it.
“But there can be times, Brad, when a man’s best doesn’t mean much. Times when he hasn’t any choice. This is one of them. All I can advise you to do is come clean. And that’s a friend’s advice, remember. There’s been a killing here, and I’ve got a policeman’s duty ahead of me. No matter how it hurts, there’s no getting away from it.”
Easier dropped into a chair, and threw out his hands.
“I’m through,” he said. “What’s the use of going all over it again? You’re as cuckoo, Gregory, as any of the rest of ’em. I don’t know what it’s all about. I didn’t see anybody but Hammett in this house since I got here. I didn’t see anybody coming in or anybody leaving, front or back. I didn’t shoot Hammett. Didn’t raise a hand to him. When he was shot, I was sitting right in this same chair where I’m sitting now. If the back of the house is all locked, maybe nobody skipped that way. If a lot of people were watching the front and say that nobody went out — well, maybe nobody did. You’ll have to figure it out for yourself. I’m licked!”
Gregory sighed and shrugged, and turned to Brill.
“I suppose, sergeant,” he said stiffly, “that I ought to congratulate you on another piece of good work. Mr. Easier seems to be your prisoner. It’s time, I think, to warn him that anything he says in regard to this matter may be used against him.”
Avoiding Easier’s startled eyes, he passed a thin hand wearily over his forehead.
“Now, Brill,” he said, “we’ll have a look upstairs. And you come along, too, Hawley!”
IV
At the door of the lighted room with the drawn shade, Gregory stopped to ask a curt question:
“Everything’s been left the way it was?”
“Exactly,” said Brill.
The spectacled medical examiner, who had followed them upstairs, answered with a nod.
“Naturally,” he said. “I opened the man’s coat. That was all.”
Gregory gnawed the dry cigar while his eyes roved.
“Looks as if Hammett put up a fight,” he observed. “See that lamp?”
Jim Hawley was looking at it.
“Strong, isn’t it?” he asked. “It’s a wonder the filament didn’t break when it went over. I never saw one of those high-power lamps that’d stand a lot of jar.”
Gregory, without comment, walked into the room and picked up the revolver that lay beyond Hammett’s sprawled feet. He held it close to the upset reading lamp. From the crowd on the sidewalk a strident voice came up as he bent to examine it:
“Look! The cops are up there now!”
The inspector saw the shadow of his head on the shade, magnified to giant proportions.
“That’s how it was, eh?” he murmured. He moved back out of the light stream, and turned the gun over. “Not a sign of a finger-print,” he said. “The revolver won’t tell us anything — unless we can trace it.”
Sergeant Brill patted a complacent yawn.
“Do we need to have it tell us anything, inspector?” he queried. “Did you ever see so many witnesses to a murder in your life? Or a case so open-and-shut?”
Gregory said nothing. He put down the gun carefully upon the exact spot where it had lain and picked up the pencil with which he had marked its proper place. A glint of white under Hammett’s body caught his eye then. He stooped, and gingerly plucked at the edge of it. A moment afterward he was by the lamp again, examining a rumpled silk handkerchief.
“Now, that’s sort of funny,” he reflected, aloud.
Hawley saw what he meant by that. The handkerchief was knotted at either end. He looked hard at it, and then harder still at the reading lamp, on its side at the near end of the mission table.
“No!” he said suddenly. “It isn’t?”
Gregory straightened and stared at him.
“What’s that?” he demanded. “What are you saying, Hawley?”
Brill interpolated, severely:
“Better keep your oar out, young fella! I guess the inspector can get along without your advice. If you don’t think it’s queer for anybody to knot up a handkerchief that way, that’s no license for you to chip in.”
There was a strain of stubbornness in Hawley. It came hotly to the surface.
“It’s not so queer,” he insisted, coloring as Gregory’s eyes narrowed upon him.
But the inspector wasn’t rebuking him with that steady regard; his mind had flashed back to the incident of Bradley Easier’s hat — to his observation that what Hawley’s shoulders supported was a human, reasoning head.
“Why isn’t it queer?” he presently wished to be told.
Jim Hawley, so swiftly and directly caught up, had an impulse to temporize. He looked away toward the lamp and blinked in its glare. Was somebody, pretty soon, going to be telling him he was crazy?
“I mean,” he said lamely, “it is and it isn’t. If it was just the handkerchief, maybe I wouldn’t have thought anything. But — take that lamp there, now!”
Gregory transferred his stare to the lamp.
“Well?” His voice was crisp.
“It’s a reading lamp,” said Hawley.
Brill burst into an explosive and uncomplimentary laugh.
“That’s keen! Goes to show you, inspector, that we’ve got a lot of talent harnessed up in the precincts! Hawley’s found out that it’s a reading lamp! Can you beat him?”
Gesturing Brill to silence, Gregory popped out another, “Well?”
Hawley squared his shoulders and his jaw.
“There’s something funnier about the lamp than about the handkerchief,” he asserted doggedly. “Could a man read under a light like that without being blinded? It’s a hundred-watt bulb, inspector! There it is, marked on it. The glare of it off a book or paper would start your eyes watering in a jiffy. Nobody’d use more than a sixty-watt lamp for reading, at the outside.”
Gregory nodded absently. Brill was grinning.
“You must burn better than a hundred watts yourself, under your hat, Hawley,” he sneered. “But what’s the lamp got to do with the handkerchief? What has watts got to do with knots?”
Hawley wheeled on him, his eyes blazing.
“Don’t you remember anything at all,” he demanded, “from the days when you were a kid? Didn’t you ever—”
Again Brill laughed, and the sneer was caught up in the laugh, giving a cutting edge to it.
“Hey!” he cried. “What’s that got to do with — anything?”
With an effort, Hawley caught back two things that had been ready to slip. One was the latter part of an uncompleted question, the other a right fist that ached for contact with Brill’s sardonic mouth. But his defy was out before he could check it.
“I’ll show you!”
There were danger signals in his eyes, and Brill did not misread them. He looked away to Gregory, who asked quietly:
“What do you mean, Hawley? What’ll you show?”
Hawley drew a deep breath, and caught up the challenge.
“Just what happened up here,” said he. “My idea of it, anyhow.”
Again Gregory was studying him.
“Go ahead,” he invited shortly.
But Hawley shook his head.
“I can’t do it; not with both of you here,” he demurred.