Oddments Read Free

his leave.
    The law offices of James Scarlett were on the southern fringe of Chinatown, less than half a mile from the Hall of Justice. Quincannon had visited the dingy, two-story building earlier in the day, after leaving Andrea Scarlett with Sabina. The place had been dark and locked up tight then; the same was true when he arrived there a few minutes past midnight.
    He paid the hansom driver at the corner, walked back through heavy shadows to the entranceway. Brooding the while, as he had in the cab, about the incident in Ross Alley. How had the gunman known enough to lie in ambush as he had? If he'd been following Scarlett, why not simply enter the opium resort and shoot him there? Witnesses were never a worry to highbinders. The other explanation was that it was Quincannon who had been followed, though it seemed impossible that anyone in Chinatown could know that Carpenter and Quincannon, Professional Detective Services, had been hired by Mrs. Scarlett to find and protect her husband.
    Then there was the fact that the assassin had fired three shots, the last two of which had come perilously close to sending Quincannon to join his ancestors. Poor and hurried shooting caused by darkness? Or had he also been a target? Something about the gunman fretted him, too, something he could not quite put his finger on.
    The whole business smacked of hidden motives, for a fact.
    And hidden dangers. He did not like to be made a pawn in any piece of intrigue. He liked it almost as little as being shot at, intentionally or otherwise, and failing at a job he had been retained to do. He meant to get to the bottom of it, with or without official sanction.
    Few door latches had ever withstood his ministrations, and the one on James Scarlett's building was no exception. Another attorney occupied the downstairs rooms; Quincannon climbed a creaky staircase to the second floor. The pebbled-glass door imprinted with the words J. H. Scarlett, Attorney-at-Law was not locked. This puzzled him slightly, though not for long.
    Inside, he struck a sulphur match, found the gas outlet—the building was too old and shabby to have been wired for electricity—and lit the flame. Its pale glow showed him a dusty anteroom containing two desks whose bare surfaces indicated that it had been some while since they had been occupied by either law clerk or secretary. He proceeded through a doorway into Scarlett's private sanctum.
    His first impression was that the lawyer had been a remarkably untidy individual. A few seconds later he revised this opinion; the office had been searched in a hurried but rather thorough fashion. Papers littered the top of a large oak desk, the floor around it, and the floor under a bank of wooden file cases. Two of the file drawers were partly open. A wastebasket behind the desk had been overturned and its contents gone through. A shelf of law books showed signs of having been examined as well.
    The fine hand of a highbinder? Possibly, though the methods used here were a good deal less destructive than those usually employed by the boo how doy.
    The smell of must and mildew wrinkled his nostrils as he crossed to the desk, giving him to wonder just how much time Scarlett had spent in these premises. The office wanted a good airing, if not a match to purge it completely. Scowling, he sifted through the papers on and below the desk. They told him nothing except that almost all of Scarlett's recent clients had been Chinese; none of the names was familiar and none of the addresses was on Fowler Alley. The desk drawers yielded even less of interest, and the slim accumulation of briefs, letters, and invoices in the file drawers was likewise unproductive. None bore any direct reference to either the Hip Sing or Kwong Dock tongs, or to Fong Ching under his own name or any of his known aliases.
    The only interesting thing about the late Mr. Scarlett's office, in fact, was the state in which Quincannon had found it. What had the previous