Black Dove by Steve Hockensmith

become a great favorite of the
Morning Call
.”
    “Oh,” I said. “I see.”
    The
Call
was one of the local papers Old Red and I didn’t bother with, as it tended to run stuff that made the sandwich man’s rants against the Chinese sound like the Sermon on the Mount. If Cathal Mahoney was a favorite of theirs, he’d likely be no favorite of ours.
    I peeked over at the big Chinaman, wondering what his take on all this might be. But it was hard to tell if he was even awake to have one. His heavy-lidded eyes were closed to mere slits, and his face was utterly blank.
    Diana turned toward him, too.
    “And this is . . . ?”
    Mahoney answered before the Chinaman could.
    “Wong Woon. He’s a sort of dick for hire. Like you, I guess.”
    Woon woke up enough to bow his head ever so slightly.
    “A colleague, hmmm?” Diana said, her eyes still on the Chinaman. “Working for whom?”
    “Excuse me,” Mahoney cut in, “but I still don’t know who
you
are, exactly.”
    “Oh, for god’s sake, haven’t we had enough how-do’s?” Gustav shook a pointed a finger at the bed. “There’s a dead feller under that sheet, and we’re standin’ around gabbin’ like we was at an ice-cream social!”
    “The Coolietown Crusader” gave my brother a glare that said his next crusade might be against loud-mouthed cowboys—and it could start any second.
    “I apologize if we seem a tad overanxious, Sergeant,” Diana said soothingly. “But you must understand—we’d become rather fond of Dr. Chan. You see, he recently met with some misfortune while traveling on a Southern Pacific special, and we’ve been in communication with him about the appropriate level of compensation. Finding out Chan’s dead . . . well, it’s quite a shock. As for who we are . . .”
    The lady gestured to each of us in turn, introducing us as “Gustav Amlingmeyer, Otto Amlingmeyer, and Diana Corvus of the Southern Pacific Railroad.”
    Which had at least some truth to it. Old Red and I were definitely
of
the S.P.’s past. As for Diana . . . I didn’t know what the truth was.
    “Alright,” my brother grumbled, “now that we’re all acquainted-like, why doesn’t somebody tell me what the heck supposedly happened here.”
    “There’s no ‘supposedly’ to it, Tex,” Mahoney scoffed. “Chan killed himself.”
    “Well, why don’t you lay it all out for us,
Frisco
,” Old Red said, “and then we’ll just see what supposin’ needs to be done.”
    “Please,” Diana threw in—and good thing, too, since Mahoney looked like he was thinking of throwing
us
out.
    “Fine,” Mahoney growled. “Here’s the story. One of Chan’s neighbors was passing by this morning and smelled gas. He came inside to investigate, but Chan was nowhere in sight. So he came up here and found Chan laid out like that, with the gas line for the lights opened up. Everyone in Chinatown knows Chan had money troubles. Obviously, the man gassed himself.” He shrugged. “To them, it’s the honorable thing to do.”
    Gustav listened intently to Mahoney’s report—while not sparing theman so much as a glance as he made it. In fact, my brother’s eyes were on everything
but
Mahoney.
    He was making a methodical study of Chan’s digs, inspecting everything from the floorboards to the ceiling and back again.
    The flat was narrow and gloomy—it could’ve been a sharecropper’s shotgun shack but for the smudged-up light fixtures jutting from the walls here and there. The only other adornments to the place were a birdcage hanging from a brass stand in one corner and what looked like a gaudily decorated shelf, almost like a miniature theater stage, on the floor in another. Lining the walls were pasteboard boxes and small crates in tidy rows.
    At the far end of the room was a door, ajar. It led to what appeared to be a dingy kitchenette. It, too, was chock-a-block with neatly stacked boxes. Over the grime-grayed sink, ragged yellow “curtains”—they looked more