The Continental Op (Novelettes and short stories)

Originally appeared in The Black Mask, August 1929

I

It was a wandering daughter job.

The Hambletons had been for several generations a wealthy and decently prominent New York family. There was nothing in the Hambleton history to account for Sue, the youngest member of the clan. She grew out of childhood with a kink that made her dislike the polished side of life, like the rough. By the time she was twenty-one, in 1926, she definitely preferred Tenth Avenue to Fifth, grifters to bankers, and Hymie the Riveter to the Honorable Cecil Windown, who had asked her to marry him.

The Hambletons tried to make Sue behave, but it was too late for that. She was legally of age. When she finally told them to go to hell and walked out on them there wasn’t much they could do about it. Her father, Major Waldo Hambleton, had given up all the hopes he ever had of salvaging her, but he didn’t want her to run into any grief that could be avoided. So he came into the Continental Detective Agency’s New York office and asked to have an eye kept on her.

Hymie the Riveter was a Philadelphia racketeer who had moved north to the big city, carrying a Thompson submachine-gun wrapped in blue-checkered oil cloth, after a disagreement with his partners. New York wasn’t so good a field as Philadelphia for machine-gun work. The Thompson lay idle for a year or so while Hymie made expenses with an automatic, preying on small-time crap games in Harlem.

Three or four months after Sue went to live with Hymie he made what looked like a promising connection with the first of the crew that came into New York from Chicago to organize the city on the western scale. But the boys from Chi didn’t want Hymie; they wanted the Thompson. When he showed it to them, as the big item in his application for employment, they shot holes in the top of Hymie’s head and went away with the gun.

Sue Hambleton buried Hymie, had a couple of lonely weeks in which she hocked a ring to eat, and then got a job as hostess in a speakeasy run by a Greek named Vassos.

One of Vassos’ customers was Babe McCloor, two hundred and fifty pounds of hard Scotch-Irish-Indian bone and muscle, a black-haired, blue-eyed, swarthy giant who was resting up after doing a fifteen-year hitch in Leavenworth for ruining most of the smaller post offices between New Orleans and Omaha. Babe was keeping himself in drinking money while he rested by playing with pedestrians in dark streets.

Babe liked Sue. Vassos liked Sue. Sue liked Babe. Vassos didn’t like that. Jealousy spoiled the Greek’s judgment. He kept the speakeasy door locked one night when Babe wanted to come in. Babe came in, bringing pieces of the door with him. Vassos got his gun out, but couldn’t shake Sue off his arm. He stopped trying when Babe hit him with the part of the door that had the brass knob on it. Babe and Sue went away from Vassos’ together.

Up to that time the New York office had managed to keep in touch with Sue. She hadn’t been kept under constant surveillance. Her father hadn’t wanted that. It was simply a matter of sending a man around every week or so to see that she was still alive, to pick up whatever information he could from her friends and neighbors, without, of course, letting her know she was being tabbed. All that had been easy enough, but when she and Babe went away after wrecking the gin mill, they dropped completely out of sight.

After turning the city upside-down, the New York office sent a journal on the job to the other Continental branches throughout the country, giving the information above and enclosing photographs and descriptions of Sue and her new playmate. That was late in 1927.

We had enough copies of the photographs to go around, and for the next month or so whoever had a little idle time on his hands spent it looking through San Francisco and Oakland for the missing pair. We didn’t find them. Operatives in other cities, doing the same thing, had the same luck.

Then, nearly a year later, a telegram came to us from the New York office. Decoded, it read:

II

The Old Man gave me the telegram and a check, saying:

“You know the situation. You’ll know how to handle it.”

I pretended I agreed with him, went down to the bank, swapped the check for a bundle of bills of several sizes, caught a street car, and went up to 601 Eddis Street, a fairly large apartment building on the corner of Larkin.

The name on Apartment 206’s vestibule mail box was J. M. Wales.

I pushed 206’s button. When the locked door buzzed off I went into the building, past the elevator to the stairs, and up a flight. 206 was just around the corner from the stairs.

The apartment door was opened by a tall, slim man of thirty-something in neat dark clothes. He had narrow dark eyes set in a long pale face. There was some gray in the dark hair brushed flat to his scalp.

“Miss Hambleton,” I said.

“Uh — what about her?” His voice was smooth, but not too smooth to be agreeable.

“I’d like to see her.”

His upper eyelids came down a little and the brows over them came a little closer together. He asked, “Is it—?” and stopped, watching me steadily.

I didn’t say anything. Presently he finished his question:

“Something to do with a telegram?”

“Yeah.”

His long face brightened immediately. He asked:

“You’re from her father?”

“Yeah.”

He stepped back and swung the door wide open, saying:

“Come in. Major Hambleton’s wire came to her only a few minutes ago. He said someone would call.”

We went through a small passageway into a sunny living-room that was cheaply furnished, but neat and clean enough.

“Sit down,” the man said, pointing at a brown rocking chair.

I sat down. He sat on the burlap-covered sofa facing me. I looked around the room. I didn’t see anything to show that a woman was living there.

He rubbed the long bridge of his nose with a longer forefinger and asked slowly:

“You brought the money?”

I said I’d feel more like talking with her there.

He looked at the finger with which he had been rubbing his nose, and then up at me, saying softly:

“But I’m her friend.”

I said, “Yeah?” to that.

“Yes,” he repeated. He frowned slightly, drawing back the corners of his thin-lipped mouth. “I’ve only asked whether you’ve brought the money.”

I didn’t say anything.

“The point is,” he said quite reasonably, “that if you brought the money she doesn’t expect you to hand it over to anybody except her. If you didn’t bring it she doesn’t want to see you. I don’t think her mind can be changed about that. That’s why I asked if you had brought it.”

“I brought it.”

He looked doubtfully at me. I showed him the money I had got from the bank. He jumped up briskly from the sofa.

“I’ll have her here in a minute or two,” he said over his shoulder as his long legs moved him toward the door. At the door he stopped to ask: “Do you know her? Or shall I have her bring means of identifying herself?”

“That would be best,” I told him.

He went out, leaving the corridor door open.

III

In five minutes he was back with a slender blonde girl of twenty-three in pale green silk. The looseness of her small mouth and the puffiness around her blue eyes weren’t yet pronounced enough to spoil her prettiness.

I stood up.

“This is Miss Hambleton,” he said.

She gave me a swift glance and then lowered her eyes again, nervously playing with the strap of a handbag she held.

“You can identify yourself?” I asked.

“Sure,” the man said. “Show them to him, Sue.”

She opened the bag, brought out some papers and things, and held them up for me to take.

“Sit down, sit down,” the man said as I took them.

They sat on the sofa. I sat in the rocking chair again and examined the things she had given me. There were two letters addressed to Sue Hambleton here, her father’s telegram welcoming her home, a couple of receipted department store bills, an automobile driver’s license, and a savings account pass book that showed a balance of less than ten dollars.

By the time I had finished my examination the girl’s embarrassment was gone. She looked levelly at me, as did the man beside her. I felt in my pocket, found my copy of the photograph New York had sent us at the beginning of the hunt, and looked from it to her.

“Your mouth could have shrunk, maybe,” I said, “but how could your nose have got that much longer?”

“If you don’t like my nose,” she said, “how’d you like to go to hell?” Her face had turned red.

“That’s not the point. It’s a swell nose, but it’s not Sue’s.” I held the photograph out to her. “See for yourself.”

She glared at the photograph and then at the man.

“What a smart guy you are,” she told him.

He was watching me with dark eyes that had a brittle shine to them between narrow-drawn eyelids. He kept on watching me while he spoke to her out the side of his mouth, crisply:

“Pipe down.”

She piped down. He sat and watched me. I sat and watched him. A clock ticked seconds away behind me. His eyes began shifting their focus from one of my eyes to the other. The girl sighed.

He said in a low voice: “Well?”

I said: “You’re in a hole.”

“What can you make out of it?” he asked casually.

“Conspiracy to defraud.”

The girl jumped up and hit one of his shoulders angrily with the back of a hand, crying:

“What a smart guy you are, to get me in a jam like this. It was going to be duck soup — yeh! Eggs in the coffee — yeh! Now look at you. You haven’t even got guts enough to tell this guy to go chase himself.” She spun around to face me, pushing her red face down at me — I was still sitting in the rocker — snarling: “Well, what are you waiting for? Waiting to be kissed good-by? We don’t owe you anything, do we? We didn’t get any of your lousy money, did we? Outside, then. Take the air. Dangle.”

“Stop it, sister,” I growled. “You’ll bust something.”

The man said:

“For God’s sake stop that bawling, Peggy, and give somebody else a chance.” He addressed me: “Well, what do you want?”

“How’d you get into this?” I asked.

He spoke quickly, eagerly:

“A fellow named Kenny gave me that stuff and told me about this Sue Hambleton, and her old man having plenty. I thought I’d give it a whirl. I figured the old man would either wire the dough right off the reel or wouldn’t send it at all. I didn’t figure on this send-a-man stuff. Then when his wire came, saying he was sending a man to see her, I ought to have dropped it.

“But hell! Here was a man coming with a grand in cash. That was too good to let go of without a try. It looked like there still might be a chance of copping, so I got Peggy to do Sue for me. If the man was coming today, it was a cinch he belonged out here on the Coast, and it was an even bet he wouldn’t know Sue, would only have a description of her. From what Kenny had told me about her, I knew Peggy would come pretty close to fitting her description. I still don’t see how you got that photograph. Television? I only wired the old man yesterday. I mailed a couple of letters to Sue, here, yesterday, so we’d have them with the other identification stuff to get the money from the telegraph company on.”

“Kenny gave you the old man’s address?”

“Sure he did.”

“Did he give you Sue’s?”

“No.”

“How’d Kenny get hold of the stuff?”

“He didn’t say.”

“Where’s Kenny now?”

“I don’t know. He was on his way east, with something else on the fire, and couldn’t fool with this. That’s why he passed it on to me.”

“Big-hearted Kenny,” I said. “You know Sue Hambleton?”

“No,” emphatically. “I’d never even heard of her till Kenny told me.”

“I don’t like this Kenny,” I said, “though without him your story’s got some good points. Could you tell it leaving him out?”

He shook his head slowly from side to side, saying:

“It wouldn’t be the way it happened.”

“That’s too bad. Conspiracies to defraud don’t mean as much to me as finding Sue. I might have made a deal with you.”

He shook his head again, but his eyes were thoughtful, and his lower lip moved up to overlap the upper a little.

The girl had stepped back so she could see both of us as we talked, turning her face, which showed she didn’t like us, from one to the other as we spoke our pieces. Now she fastened her gaze on the man, and her eyes were growing angry again.

I got up on my feet, telling him:

“Suit yourself. But if you want to play it that way I’ll have to take you both in.”

He smiled with indrawn lips and stood up.

The girl thrust herself in between us, facing him.

“This is a swell time to be dummying up,” she spit at him. “Pop off, you lightweight, or I will. You’re crazy if you think I’m going to take the fall with you.”

“Shut up,” he said in his throat.

“Shut me up,” she cried.

He tried to, with both hands. I reached over her shoulders and caught one of his wrists, knocked the other hand up.

She slid out from between us and ran around behind me, screaming:

“Joe does know her. He got the things from her. She’s at the St. Martin on O’Farrell Street — her and Babe McCloor.”

While I listened to this I had to pull my head aside to let Joe’s right hook miss me, had got his left arm twisted behind him, had turned my hip to catch his knee, and had got the palm of my left hand under his chin. I was ready to give his chin the Japanese tilt when he stopped wrestling and grunted:

“Let me tell it.”

“Hop to it,” I consented, taking my hands away from him and stepping back.

He rubbed the wrist I had wrenched, scowling past me at the girl. He called her four unlovely names, the mildest of which was “a dumb twist,” and told her:

“He was bluffing about throwing us in the can. You don’t think old man Hambleton’s hunting for newspaper space, do you?” That wasn’t a bad guess.

He sat on the sofa again, still rubbing his wrist. The girl stayed on the other side of the room, laughing at him through her teeth.

I said: “All right, roll it out, one of you.”

“You’ve got it all,” he muttered. “I glaumed that stuff last week when I was visiting Babe, knowing the story and hating to see a promising layout like that go to waste.”

“What’s Babe doing now?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Is he still puffing them?”

“I don’t know.”

“Like hell you don’t.”

“I don’t,” he insisted. “If you know Babe you know you can’t get anything out of him about what he’s doing.”

“How long have he and Sue been here?”

“About six months that I know of.”

“Who’s he mobbed up with?”

“I don’t know. Any time Babe works with a mob he picks them up on the road and leaves them on the road.”

“How’s he fixed?”

“I don’t know. There’s always enough grub and liquor in the joint.”

Half an hour of this convinced me that I wasn’t going to get much information about my people here.

I went to the phone in the passageway and called the Agency. The boy on the switchboard told me MacMan was in the operatives’ room. I asked to have him sent up to me, and went back to the living-room. Joe and Peggy took their heads apart when I came in.

MacMan arrived in less than ten minutes. I let him in and told him:

“This fellow says his name’s Joe Wales, and the girl’s supposed to be Peggy Carroll who lives upstairs in 421. We’ve got them cold for conspiracy to defraud, but I’ve made a deal with them. I’m going out to look at it now. Stay here with them, in this room. Nobody goes in or out, and nobody but you gets to the phone. There’s a fire-escape in front of the window. The window’s locked now. I’d keep it that way. If the deal turns out O.K. we’ll let them go, but if they cut up on you while I’m gone there’s no reason why you can’t knock them around as much as you want.”

MacMan nodded his hard round head and pulled a chair out between them and the door. I picked up my hat.

Joe Wales called:

“Hey, you’re not going to uncover me to Babe, are you? That’s got to be part of the deal.”

“Not unless I have to.”

“I’d just as leave stand the rap,” he said. “I’d be safer in jail.”

“I’ll give you the best break I can,” I promised, “but you’ll have to take what’s dealt you.”

IV

Walking over to the St. Martin — only half a dozen blocks from Wales’s place — I decided to go up against McCloor and the girl as a Continental op who suspected Babe of being in on a branch bank stick-up in Alameda the previous week. He hadn’t been in on it — if the bank people had described half-correctly the men who had robbed them — so it wasn’t likely my supposed suspicions would frighten him much. Clearing himself, he might give me some information I could use. The chief thing I wanted, of course, was a look at the girl, so I could report to her father that I had seen her. There was no reason for supposing that she and Babe knew her father was trying to keep an eye on her. Babe had a record. It was natural enough for sleuths to drop in now and then and try to hang something on him.

The St. Martin was a small three-story apartment house of red brick between two taller hotels. The vestibule register showed, R. K. McCloor, 313, as Wales and Peggy had told me.

I pushed the bell button. Nothing happened. Nothing happened any of the four times I pushed it. I pushed the button labeled Manager.

The door clicked open. I went indoors. A beefy woman in a pink-striped cotton dress that needed pressing stood in an apartment doorway just inside the street door.

“Some people named McCloor live here?” I asked.

“Three-thirteen,” she said.

“Been living here long?”

She pursed her fat mouth, looked intently at me, hesitated, but finally said: “Since last June.”

“What do you know about them?”

She balked at that, raising her chin and her eyebrows.

I gave her my card. That was safe enough; it fit in with the pretext I intended using upstairs.

Her face, when she raised it from reading the card, was oily with curiosity.

“Come in here,” she said in a husky whisper, backing through the doorway.

I followed her into her apartment. We sat on a Chesterfield and she whispered:

“What is it?”

“Maybe nothing.” I kept my voice low, playing up to her theatricals. “He’s done time for safe-burglary. I’m trying to get a line on him now, on the off chance that he might have been tied up in a recent job. I don’t know that he was. He may be going straight for all I know.” I took his photograph — front and profile, taken at Leavenworth — out of my pocket. “This him?”

She seized it eagerly, nodded, said, “Yes, that’s him, all right,” turned it over to read the description on the back, and repeated, “Yes, that’s him, all right.”

“His wife is here with him?” I asked.

She nodded vigorously.

“I don’t know her,” I said. “What sort of looking girl is she?”

She described a girl who could have been Sue Hambleton. I couldn’t show Sue’s picture, that would have uncovered me if she and Babe heard about it.

I asked the woman what she knew about the McCloors. What she knew wasn’t a great deal: paid their rent on time, kept irregular hours, had occasional drinking parties, quarreled a lot.

“Think they’re in now?” I asked. “I got no answer on the bell.”

“I don’t know,” she whispered. “I haven’t seen either of them since night before last, when they had a fight.”

“Much of a fight?”

“Not much worse than usual.”

“Could you find out if they’re in?” I asked.

She looked at me out of the ends of her eyes.

“I’m not going to make any trouble for you,” I assured her. “But if they’ve blown I’d like to know it, and I reckon you would too.”

“All right, I’ll find out.” She got up, patting a pocket in which keys jingled. “You wait here.”

“I’ll go as far as the third floor with you,” I said, “and wait out of sight there.”

“All right,” she said reluctantly.

On the third floor, I remained by the elevator. She disappeared around a corner of the dim corridor, and presently a muffled electric bell rang. It rang three times. I heard her keys jingle and one of them grate in a lock. The lock clicked. I heard the doorknob rattle as she turned it.

Then a long moment of silence was ended by a scream that filled the corridor from wall to wall.

I jumped for the corner, swung around it, saw an open door ahead, went through it, and slammed the door shut behind me.

The scream had stopped.

I was in a small dark vestibule with three doors besides the one I had come through. One door was shut. One opened into a bathroom. I went to the other.

The fat manager stood just inside it, her round back to me. I pushed past her and saw what she was looking at.

Sue Hambleton, in pale yellow pajamas trimmed with black lace, was lying across a bed. She lay on her back. Her arms were stretched out over her head. One leg was bent under her, one stretched out so that its bare foot rested on the floor. That bare foot was whiter than a live foot could be. Her face was white as her foot, except for a mottled swollen area from the right eyebrow to the right cheek-bone and dark bruises on her throat.

“Phone the police,” I told the woman, and began poking into corners, closets and drawers.

It was late afternoon when I returned to the Agency. I asked the file clerk to see if we had anything on Joe Wales and Peggy Carroll, and then went into the Old Man’s office.

He put down some reports he had been reading, gave me a nodded invitation to sit down, and asked:

“You’ve seen her?”

“Yeah. She’s dead.”

The Old Man said, “Indeed,” as if I had said it was raining, and smiled with polite attentiveness while I told him about it — from the time I had rung Wales’s bell until I had joined the fat manager in the dead girl’s apartment.

“She had been knocked around some, was bruised on the face and neck,” I wound up. “But that didn’t kill her.”

“You think she was murdered?” he asked, still smiling gently.

“I don’t know. Doc Jordan says he thinks it could have been arsenic. He’s hunting for it in her now. We found a funny thing in the joint. Some thick sheets of dark gray paper were stuck in a book — The Count of Monte Cristo — wrapped in a month-old newspaper and wedged into a dark corner between the stove and the kitchen wall.”

“Ah, arsenical fly paper,” the Old Man murmured. “The Maybrick-Seddons trick. Mashed in water, four to six grains of arsenic can be soaked out of a sheet — enough to kill two people.”

I nodded, saying:

“I worked on one in Louisville in 1916. The mulatto janitor saw McCloor leaving at half-past nine yesterday morning. She was probably dead before that. Nobody’s seen him since. Earlier in the morning the people in the next apartment had heard them talking, her groaning. But they had too many fights for the neighbors to pay much attention to that. The landlady told me they had a fight the night before that. The police are hunting for him.”

“Did you tell the police who she was?”

“No. What do we do on that angle? We can’t tell them about Wales without telling them all.”

“I dare say the whole thing will have to come out,” he said thoughtfully. “I’ll wire New York.”

I went out of his office. The file clerk gave me a couple of newspaper clippings. The first told me that, fifteen months ago, Joseph Wales, alias Holy Joe, had been arrested on the complaint of a farmer named Toomey that he had been taken for twenty-five hundred dollars on a phoney “Business Opportunity” by Wales and three other men. The second clipping said the case had been dropped when Toomey failed to appear against Wales in court — bought off in the customary manner by the return of part or all of his money. That was all our files held on Wales, and they had nothing on Peggy Carroll.

V

MacMan opened the door for me when I returned to Wales’s apartment.

“Anything doing?” I asked him.

“Nothing — except they’ve been belly-aching a lot.”

Wales came forward, asking eagerly:

“Satisfied now?”

The girl stood by the window, looking at me with anxious eyes.

I didn’t say anything.

“Did you find her?” Wales asked, frowning. “She was where I told you?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Well, then.” Part of his frown went away. “That lets Peggy and me out, doesn’t—” He broke off, ran his tongue over his lower lip, put a hand to his chin, asked sharply: “You didn’t give them the tip-off on me, did you?”

I shook my head, no.

He took his hand from his chin and asked irritably:

“What’s the matter with you, then? What are you looking like that for?”

Behind him the girl spoke bitterly.

“I knew damned well it would be like this,” she said. “I knew damned well we weren’t going to get out of it. Oh, what a smart guy you are!”

“Take Peggy into the kitchen, and shut both doors,” I told MacMan. “Holy Joe and I are going to have a real heart-to-heart talk.”

The girl went out willingly, but when MacMan was closing the door she put her head in again to tell Wales:

“I hope he busts you in the nose if you try to hold out on him.”

MacMan shut the door.

“Your playmate seems to think you know something,” I said.

Wales scowled at the door and grumbled: “She’s more help to me than a broken leg.” He turned his face to me, trying to make it look frank and friendly. “What do you want? I came clean with you before. What’s the matter now?”

“What do you guess?”

He pulled his lips in between his teeth.

“What do you want to make me guess for?” he demanded. “I’m willing to play ball with you. But what can I do if you won’t tell me what you want? I can’t see inside your head.”

“You’d get a kick out of it if you could.”

He shook his head wearily and walked back to the sofa, sitting down bent forward, his hands together between his knees.

“All right,” he sighed. “Take your time about asking me. I’ll wait for you.”

I went over and stood in front of him. I took his chin between my left thumb and fingers, raising his head and bending my own down until our noses were almost touching. I said:

“Where you stumbled, Joe, was in sending the telegram right after the murder.”

“He’s dead?” It popped out before his eyes had even had time to grow round and wide.

The question threw me off balance. I had to wrestle with my forehead to keep it from wrinkling, and I put too much calmness in my voice when I asked:

“Is who dead?”

“Who? How do I know? Who do you mean?”

“Who did you think I meant?” I insisted.

“How do I know? Oh, all right! Old man Hambleton, Sue’s father.”

“That’s right,” I said, and took my hand away from his chin.

“And he was murdered, you say?” He hadn’t moved his face an inch from the position into which I had lifted it. “How?”

“Arsenic — fly paper.”

“Arsenic fly paper.” He looked thoughtful. “That’s a funny one.”

“Yeah, very funny. Where’d you go about buying some if you wanted it?”

“Buying it? I don’t know. I haven’t seen any since I was a kid. Nobody uses fly paper here in San Francisco anyway. There aren’t enough flies.”

“Somebody used some here,” I said, “on Sue.”

“Sue?” He jumped so that the sofa squeaked under him.

“Yeah. Murdered yesterday morning — arsenical fly paper.”

“Both of them?” he asked incredulously.

“Both of who?”

“Her and her father.”

“Yeah.”

He put his chin far down on his chest and rubbed the back of one hand with the palm of the other.

“Then I am in a hole,” he said slowly.

“That’s what,” I cheerfully agreed. “Want to try talking yourself out of it?”

“Let me think.”

I let him think, listening to the tick of the clock while he thought. Thinking brought drops of sweat out on his gray-white face. Presently he sat up straight, wiping his face with a fancily colored handkerchief.

“I’ll talk,” he said. “I’ve got to talk now. Sue was getting ready to ditch Babe. She and I were going away. She— Here, I’ll show you.”

He put his hand in his pocket and held out a folded sheet of thick notepaper to me. I took it and read:

The handwriting was a nervous woman’s, tall, angular, and piled up.

“That’s why I made the play for Hambleton’s grand,” he said. “I’ve been shatting on my uppers for a couple of months, and when that letter came yesterday I just had to raise dough somehow to get her away. She wouldn’t have stood for tapping her father though, so I tried to swing it without her knowing.”

“When did you see her last?”

“Day before yesterday, the day she mailed that letter. Only I saw her in the afternoon — she was here — and she wrote it that night.”

“Babe suspect what you were up to?”

“We didn’t think he did. I don’t know. He was jealous as hell all the time, whether he had any reason to be or not.”

“How much reason did he have?”

Wales looked me straight in the eye and said:

“Sue was a good kid.”

I said: “Well, she’s been murdered.”

He didn’t say anything.

Day was darkening into evening. I went to the door and pressed the light button. I didn’t lose sight of Holy Joe Wales while I was doing it.

As I took my finger away from the button, something clicked at the window. The click was loud and sharp.

I looked at the window.

A man crouched there on the fire-escape, looking in through glass and lace curtain. He was a thick-featured dark man whose size identified him as Babe McCloor. The muzzle of a big black automatic was touching the glass in front of him. He had tapped the glass with it to catch our attention.

He had our attention.

There wasn’t anything for me to do just then. I stood there and looked at him. I couldn’t tell whether he was looking at me or at Wales. I could see him clearly enough, but the lace curtain spoiled my view of details like that. I imagined he wasn’t neglecting either of us, and I didn’t imagine the lace curtain hid much from him. He was closer to the curtain than we, and I had turned on the room’s lights.

Wales, sitting dead still on the sofa, was looking at McCloor. Wales’s face wore a peculiar, stiffly sullen expression. His eyes were sullen. He wasn’t breathing.

McCloor flicked the nose of his pistol against the pane, and a triangular piece of glass fell out, tinkling apart on the floor. It didn’t, I was afraid, make enough noise to alarm MacMan in the kitchen. There were two closed doors between here and there.

Wales looked at the broken pane and closed his eyes. He closed them slowly, little by little, exactly as if he were falling asleep. He kept his stiffly sullen blank face turned straight to the window.

McCloor shot him three times.

The bullets knocked Wales down on the sofa, back against the wall. Wales’s eyes popped open, bulging. His lips crawled back over his teeth, leaving them naked to the gums. His tongue came out. Then his head fell down and he didn’t move any more.

When McCloor jumped away from the window I jumped to it. While I was pushing the curtain aside, unlocking the window and raising it, I heard his feet land on the cement paving below.

MacMan flung the door open and came in, the girl at his heels.

“Take care of this,” I ordered as I scrambled over the sill. “McCloor shot him.”

VI

Wales’s apartment was on the second floor. The fire-escape ended there with a counter-weighted iron ladder that a man’s weight would swing down into a cement-paved court.

I went down as Babe McCloor had gone, swinging down on the ladder till within dropping distance of the court, and then letting go.

There was only one street exit to the court. I took it.

A startled looking, smallish man was standing in the middle of the sidewalk close to the court, gaping at me as I dashed out.

I caught his arm, shook it.

“A big guy running.” Maybe I yelled. “Where?”

He tried to say something, couldn’t, and waved his arm at billboards standing across the front of a vacant lot on the other side of the street.

I forgot to say, “Thank you,” in my hurry to get over there.

I got behind the billboards by crawling under them instead of going to either end, where there were openings. The lot was large enough and weedy enough to give cover to anybody who wanted to lie down and bushwhack a pursuer — even anybody as large as Babe McCloor.

While I considered that, I heard a dog barking at one corner of the lot. He could have been barking at a man who had run by. I ran to that corner of the lot. The dog was in a board-fenced backyard, at the corner of a narrow alley that ran from the lot to a street.

I chinned myself on the board fence, saw a wire-haired terrier alone in the yard, and ran down the alley while he was charging my part of the fence.

I put my gun back into my pocket before I left the alley for the street.

A small touring car was parked at the curb in front of a cigar store some fifteen feet from the alley. A policeman was talking to a slim dark-faced man in the cigar store doorway.

“The big fellow that come out of the alley a minute ago,” I said. “Which way did he go?”

The policeman looked dumb. The slim man nodded his head down the street, said, “Down that way,” and went on with his conversation.

I said, “Thanks,” and went on down to the corner. There was a taxi phone there and two idle taxis. A block and a half below, a street car was going away.

“Did the big fellow who came down here a minute ago take a taxi or the street car?” I asked the two taxi chauffeurs who were leaning against one of the taxis.

The rattier looking one said:

“He didn’t take a taxi.”

I said:

“I’ll take one. Catch that street car for me.”

The street car was three blocks away before we got going. The street wasn’t clear enough for me to see who got on and off it. We caught it when it stopped at Market Street.

“Follow along,” I told the driver as I jumped out.

On the rear platform of the street car I looked through the glass. There were only eight or ten people aboard.

“There was a great big fellow got on at Hyde Street,” I said to the conductor. “Where’d he get off?”

The conductor looked at the silver dollar I was turning over in my fingers and remembered that the big man got off at Taylor Street. That won the silver dollar.

I dropped off as the street car turned into Market Street. The taxi, close behind, slowed down, and its door swung open.

“Sixth and Mission,” I said as I hopped in.

McCloor could have gone in any direction from Taylor Street. I had to guess. The best guess seemed to be that he would make for the other side of Market Street.

It was fairly dark by now. We had to go down to Fifth Street to get off Market, then over to Mission, and back up to Sixth. We got to Sixth Street without seeing McCloor. I couldn’t see him on Sixth Street — either way from the crossing.

“On up to Ninth,” I ordered, and while we rode told the driver what kind of man I was looking for.

We arrived at Ninth Street. No McCloor. I cursed and pushed my brains around.

The big man was a yegg. San Francisco was on fire for him. The yegg instinct would be to use a rattler to get away from trouble. The freight yards were in this end of town. Maybe he would be shifty enough to lie low instead of trying to powder. In that case, he probably hadn’t crossed Market Street at all. If he stuck, there would still be a chance of picking him up tomorrow. If he was high-tailing, it was catch him now or not at all.

“Down to Harrison,” I told the driver.

We went down to Harrison Street, and down Harrison to Third, up Bryant to Eighth, down Brannan to Third again, and over to Townsend — and we didn’t see Babe McCloor.

“That’s tough, that is,” the driver sympathized as we stopped across the street from the Southern Pacific passenger station.

“I’m going over and look around in the station,” I said. “Keep your eyes open while I’m gone.”

When I told the copper in the station my trouble he introduced me to a couple of plain-clothes men who had been planted there to watch for McCloor. That had been done after Sue Hambleton’s body was found. The shooting of Holy Joe Wales was news to them.

I went outside again and found my taxi in front of the door, its horn working over-time, but too asthmatically to be heard indoors. The ratty driver was excited.

“A guy like you said come up out of King Street just now and swung on a No. 16 car as it pulled away,” he said.

“Going which way?”

“That-away,” pointing southeast.

“Catch him,” I said, jumping in.

The street car was out of sight around a bend in Third Street two blocks below. When we rounded the bend, the street car was slowing up, four blocks ahead. It hadn’t slowed up very much when a man leaned far out and stepped off. He was a tall man, but didn’t look tall on account of his shoulder spread. He didn’t check his momentum, but used it to carry him across the sidewalk and out of sight.

We stopped where the man had left the car.

I gave the driver too much money and told him:

“Go back to Townsend Street and tell the copper in the station that I’ve chased Babe McCloor into the S. P. yards.”

VII

I thought I was moving silently down between two strings of box cars, but I had gone less than twenty feet when a light flashed in my face and a sharp voice ordered:

“Stand still, you.”

I stood still. Men came from between cars. One of them spoke my name, adding: “What are you doing here? Lost?” It was Harry Pebble, a police detective.

I stopped holding my breath and said:

“Hello, Harry. Looking for Babe?”

“Yes. We’ve been going over the rattlers.”

“He’s here. I just tailed him in from the street.”

Pebble swore and snapped the light off.

“Watch, Harry,” I advised. “Don’t play with him. He’s packing plenty of gun and he’s cut down one boy tonight.”

“I’ll play with him,” Pebble promised, and told one of the men with him to go over and warn those on the other side of the yard that McCloor was in, and then to ring for reinforcements.

“We’ll just sit on the edge and hold him in till they come,” he said.

That seemed a sensible way to play it. We spread out and waited. Once Pebble and I turned back a lanky bum who tried to slip into the yard between us, and one of the men below us picked up a shivering kid who was trying to slip out. Otherwise nothing happened until Lieutenant Duff arrived with a couple of carloads of coppers.

Most of our force went into a cordon around the yard. The rest of us went through the yard in small groups, working it over car by car. We picked up a few hoboes that Pebble and his men had missed earlier, but we didn’t find McCloor.

We didn’t find any trace of him until somebody stumbled over a railroad bull huddled in the shadow of a gondola. It took a couple of minutes to bring him to, and he couldn’t talk then. His jaw was broken. But when we asked if McCloor had slugged him, he nodded, and when we asked in which direction McCloor had been headed, he moved a feeble hand to the east.

We went over and searched the Santa Fe yards.

We didn’t find McCloor.

VIII

I Rode up to the Hall of Justice with Duff. MacMan was in the captain of detectives’ office with three or four police sleuths.

“Wales die?” I asked.

“Yep.”

“Say anything before he went?”

“He was gone before you were through the window.”

“You held on to the girl?”

“She’s here.”

“She say anything?”

“We were waiting for you before we tapped her,” detective-sergeant O’Gar said, “not knowing the angle on her.”

“Let’s have her in. I haven’t had any dinner yet. How about the autopsy on Sue Hambleton?”

“Chronic arsenic poisoning.”

“Chronic? That means it was fed to her little by little, and not in a lump?”

“Uh-huh. From what he found in her kidney, intestines, liver, stomach and blood, Jordan figures there was less than a grain of it in her. That wouldn’t be enough to knock her off. But he says he found arsenic in the tips of her hair, and she’d have to be given some at least a month ago for it to have worked out that far.”

“Any chance that it wasn’t arsenic that killed her?”

“Not unless Jordan’s a bum doctor.”

A policewoman came in with Peggy Carroll.

The blonde girl was tired. Her eyelids, mouth corners and body drooped, and when I pushed a chair out toward her she sagged down in it.

O’Gar ducked his grizzled bullet head at me.

“Now, Peggy,” I said, “tell us where you fit into this mess.”

“I don’t fit into it.” She didn’t look up. Her voice was tired. “Joe dragged me into it. He told you.”

“You his girl?”

“If you want to call it that,” she admitted.

“You jealous?”

“What,” she asked, looking up at me, her face puzzled, “has that got to do with it?”

“Sue Hambleton was getting ready to go away with him when she was murdered.”

The girl sat up straight in the chair and said deliberately:

“I swear to God I didn’t know she was murdered.”

“But you did know she was dead,” I said positively.

“I didn’t,” she replied just as positively.

I nudged O’Gar with my elbow. He pushed his undershot jaw at her and barked:

“What are you trying to give us? You knew she was dead. How could you kill her without knowing it?”

While she looked at him I waved the others in. They crowded close around her and took up the chorus of the sergeant’s song. She was barked, roared, and snarled at plenty in the next few minutes.

The instant she stopped trying to talk back to them I cut in again.

“Wait,” I said, very earnestly. “Maybe she didn’t kill her.”

“The hell she didn’t,” O’Gar stormed, holding the center of the stage so the others could move away from the girl without their retreat seeming too artificial. “Do you mean to tell me this baby—”

“I didn’t say she didn’t,” I remonstrated. “I said maybe she didn’t.”

“Then who did?”

I passed the question to the girl: “Who did?”

“Babe,” she said immediately.

O’Gar snorted to make her think he didn’t believe her.

I asked, as if I were honestly perplexed:

“How do you know that if you didn’t know she was dead?”

“It stands to reason he did,” she said. “Anybody can see that. He found out she was going away with Joe, so he killed her and then came to Joe’s and killed him. That’s just exactly what Babe would do when he found it out.”

“Yeah? How long have you known they were going away together?”

“Since they decided to. Joe told me a month or two ago.”

“And you didn’t mind?”

“You’ve got this all wrong,” she said. “Of course I didn’t mind. I was being cut in on it. You know her father had the bees. That’s what Joe was after. She didn’t mean anything to him but an in to the old man’s pockets. And I was to get my dib. And you needn’t think I was crazy enough about Joe or anybody else to step off in the air for them. Babe got next and fixed the pair of them. That’s a cinch.”

“Yeah? How do you figure Babe would kill her?”

“That guy? You don’t think he’d—”

“I mean, how would he go about killing her?”

“Oh!” She shrugged. “With his hands, likely as not.”

“Once he’d made up his mind to do it, he’d do it quick and violent?” I suggested.

“That would be Babe,” she agreed.

“But you can’t see him slow-poisoning her — spreading it out over a month?”

Worry came into the girl’s blue eyes. She put her lower lip between her teeth, then said slowly:

“No, I can’t see him doing it that way. Not Babe.”

“Who can you see doing it that way?”

She opened her eyes wide, asking:

“You mean Joe?”

I didn’t say anything.

“Joe might have,” she said persuasively. “God only knows what he’d want to do it for, why he’d want to get rid of the kind of meal ticket she was going to be. But you couldn’t always guess what he was getting at. He pulled plenty of dumb ones. He was too slick without being smart. If he was going to kill her, though, that would be about the way he’d go about it.”

“Were he and Babe friendly?”

“No.”

“Did he go to Babe’s much?”

“Not at all that I know about. He was too leary of Babe to take a chance on being caught there. That’s why I moved upstairs, so Sue could come over to our place to see him.”

“Then how could Joe have hidden the fly paper he poisoned her with in her apartment?”

“Fly paper!” Her bewilderment seemed honest enough.

“Show it to her,” I told O’Gar.

He got a sheet from the desk and held it close to the girl’s face.

She stared at it for a moment and then jumped up and grabbed my arm with both hands.

“I didn’t know what it was,” she said excitedly. “Joe had some a couple of months ago. He was looking at it when I came in. I asked him what it was for, and he smiled that wisenheimer smile of his and said, ‘You make angels out of it,’ and wrapped it up again and put it in his pocket. I didn’t pay much attention to him: he was always fooling with some kind of tricks that were supposed to make him wealthy, but never did.”

“Ever see it again?”

“No.”

“Did you know Sue very well?”

“I didn’t know her at all. I never even saw her. I used to keep out of the way so I wouldn’t gum Joe’s play with her.”

“But you know Babe?”

“Yes, I’ve been on a couple of parties where he was. That’s all I know him.”

“Who killed Sue?”

“Joe,” she said. “Didn’t he have that paper you say she was killed with?”

“Why did he kill her?”

“I don’t know. He pulled some awful dumb tricks sometimes.”

“You didn’t kill her?”

“No, no, no!”

I jerked the corner of my mouth at O’Gar.

“You’re a liar,” he bawled, shaking the fly paper in her face. “You killed her.” The rest of the team closed in, throwing accusations at her. They kept it up until she was groggy and the policewoman beginning to look worried.

Then I said angrily:

“All right. Throw her in a cell and let her think it over.” To her: “You know what you told Joe this afternoon: this is no time to dummy up. Do a lot of thinking tonight.”

“Honest to God I didn’t kill her,” she said.

I turned my back to her. The policewoman took her away.

“Ho-hum,” O’Gar yawned. “We gave her a pretty good ride at that, for a short one.”

“Not bad,” I agreed. “If anybody else looked likely, I’d say she didn’t kill Sue. But if she’s telling the truth, then Holy Joe did it. And why should he poison the goose that was going to lay nice yellow eggs for him? And how and why did he cache the poison in their apartment? Babe had the motive, but damned if he looks like a slow-poisoner to me. You can’t tell, though; he and Holy Joe could even have been working together on it.”

“Could,” Duff said. “But it takes a lot of imagination to get that one down. Anyway you twist it, Peggy’s our best bet so far. Go up against her again, hard, in the morning?”

“Yeah,” I said. “And we’ve got to find Babe.”

The others had dinner. MacMan and I went out and got ours. When we returned to the detective bureau an hour later it was practically deserted of the regular operatives.

“All gone to Pier 42 on a tip that McCloor’s there,” Steve Ward told us.

“How long ago?”

“Ten minutes.”

MacMan and I got a taxi and set out for Pier 42. We didn’t get to Pier 42.

On First Street, half a block from the Embarcadero, the taxi suddenly shrieked and slid to a halt.

“What—?” I began, and saw a man standing in front of the machine. He was a big man with a big gun. “Babe,” I grunted, and put my hand on MacMan’s arm to keep him from getting his gun out.

“Take me to—” McCloor was saying to the frightened driver when he saw us. He came around to my side and pulled the door open, holding the gun on us.

He had no hat. His hair was wet, plastered to his head. Little streams of water trickled down from it. His clothes were dripping wet.

He looked surprised at us and ordered:

“Get out.”

As we got out he growled at the driver:

“What the hell you got your flag up for if you had fares?”

The driver wasn’t there. He had hopped out the other side and was scooting away down the street. McCloor cursed him and poked his gun at me, growling:

“Go on, beat it.”

Apparently he hadn’t recognized me. The light here wasn’t good, and I had a hat on now. He had seen me for only a few seconds in Wales’s room.

I stepped aside. MacMan moved to the other side.

McCloor took a backward step to keep us from getting him between us and started an angry word.

MacMan threw himself on McCloor’s gun arm.

I socked McCloor’s jaw with my fist. I might just as well have hit somebody else for all it seemed to bother him.

He swept me out of his way and pasted MacMan in the mouth. MacMan fell back till the taxi stopped him, spit out a tooth, and came back for more.

I was trying to climb up McCloor’s left side.

MacMan came in on his right, failed to dodge a chop of the gun, caught it square on the top of the noodle, and went down hard. He stayed down.

I kicked McCloor’s ankle, but couldn’t get his foot from under him. I rammed my right fist into the small of his back and got a left-handful of his wet hair, swinging on it. He shook his head, dragging me off my feet.

He punched me in the side and I could feel my ribs and guts flattening together like leaves in a book.

I swung my fist against the back of his neck. That bothered him. He made a rumbling noise down in his chest, crunched my shoulder in his left hand, and chopped at me with the gun in his right.

I kicked him somewhere and punched his neck again.

Down the street, at the Embarcadero, a police whistle was blowing. Men were running up First Street toward us.

McCloor snorted like a locomotive and threw me away from him. I didn’t want to go. I tried to hang on. He threw me away from him and ran up the street.

I scrambled up and ran after him, dragging my gun out.

At the first corner he stopped to squirt metal at me — three shots. I squirted one at him. None of the four connected.

He disappeared around the corner. I swung wide around it, to make him miss if he were flattened to the wall waiting for me. He wasn’t. He was a hundred feet ahead, going into a space between two warehouses. I went in after him, and out after him at the other end, making better time with my hundred and ninety pounds than he was making with his two-fifty.

He crossed a street, turning up, away from the waterfront. There was a light on the corner. When I came into its glare he wheeled and leveled his gun at me. I didn’t hear it click, but I knew it had when he threw it at me. The gun went past with a couple of feet to spare and raised hell against a door behind me.

McCloor turned and ran up the street. I ran up the street after him.

I put a bullet past him to let the others know where we were. At the next corner he started to turn to the left, changed his mind, and went straight on.

I sprinted, cutting the distance between us to forty or fifty feet, and yelped:

“Stop or I’ll drop you.”

He jumped sidewise into a narrow alley.

I passed it on the jump, saw he wasn’t waiting for me, and went in. Enough light came in from the street to let us see each other and our surroundings. The alley was blind — walled on each side and at the other end by tall concrete buildings with steel-shuttered windows and doors.

McCloor faced me, less than twenty feet away. His jaw stuck out. His arms curved down free of his sides. His shoulders were bunched.

“Put them up,” I ordered, holding my gun level.

“Get out of my way, little man,” he grumbled, taking a stiff-legged step toward me. “I’ll eat you up.”

“Keep coming,” I said, “and I’ll put you down.”

“Try it.” He took another step, crouching a little. “I can still get to you with slugs in me.”

“Not where I’ll put them.” I was wordy, trying to talk him into waiting till the others came up. I didn’t want to have to kill him. We could have done that from the taxi. “I’m no Annie Oakley, but if I can’t pop your kneecaps with two shots at this distance, you’re welcome to me. And if you think smashed kneecaps are a lot of fun, give it a whirl.”

“Hell with that,” he said and charged.

I shot his right knee.

He lurched toward me.

I shot his left knee.

He tumbled down.

“You would have it,” I complained.

He twisted around, and with his arms pushed himself into a sitting position facing me.

“I didn’t think you had sense enough to do it,” he said through his teeth.

IX

I talked to McCloor in the hospital. He lay on his back in bed with a couple of pillows slanting his head up. The skin was pale and tight around his mouth and eyes, but there was nothing else to show he was in pain.

“You sure devastated me, bo,” he said when I came in.

“Sorry,” I said, “but—”

“I ain’t beefing. I asked for it.”

“Why’d you kill Holy Joe?” I asked, off-hand, as I pulled a chair up beside the bed.

“Uh-uh — you’re tooting the wrong ringer.”

I laughed and told him I was the man in the room with Joe when it happened.

McCloor grinned and said:

“I thought I’d seen you somewheres before. So that’s where it was. I didn’t pay no attention to your mug, just so your hands didn’t move.”

“Why’d you kill him?”

He pursed his lips, screwed up his eyes at me, thought something over, and said:

“He killed a broad I knew.”

“He killed Sue Hambleton?” I asked.

He studied my face a while before he replied: “Yep.”

“How do you figure that out?”

“Hell,” he said, “I don’t have to. Sue told me. Give me a butt.”

I gave him a cigarette, held a lighter under it, and objected:

“That doesn’t exactly fit in with other things I know. Just what happened and what did she say? You might start back with the night you gave her the goog.”

He looked thoughtful, letting smoke sneak slowly out of his nose, then said:

“I hadn’t ought to hit her in the eye, that’s a fact. But, see, she had been out all afternoon and wouldn’t tell me where she’d been, and we had a row over it. What’s this — Thursday morning? That was Monday, then. After the row I went out and spent the night in a dump over on Army Street. I got home about seven the next morning. Sue was sick as hell, but she wouldn’t let me get a croaker for her. That was kind of funny, because she was scared stiff.”

McCloor scratched his head meditatively and suddenly drew in a great lungful of smoke, practically eating up the rest of the cigarette. He let the smoke leak out of mouth and nose together, looking dully through the cloud at me. Then he said bruskly:

“Well, she went under. But before she went she told me she’d been poisoned by Holy Joe.”

“She say how he’d given it to her?”

McCloor shook his head.

“I’d been asking her what was the matter, and not getting anything out of her. Then she starts whining that she’s poisoned. ‘I’m poisoned, Babe,’ she whines. ‘Arsenic. That damned Holy Joe,’ she says. Then she won’t say anything else, and it’s not a hell of a while after that that she kicks off.”

“Yeah? Then what’d you do?”

“I went gunning for Holy Joe. I knew him but didn’t know where he jungled up, and didn’t find out till yesterday. You was there when I came. You know about that. I had picked up a boiler and parked it over on Turk Street, for the getaway. When I got back to it, there was a copper standing close to it. I figured he might have spotted it as a hot one and was waiting to see who came for it, so I let it alone, and caught a street car instead, and cut for the yards. Down there I ran into a whole flock of hammer and saws and had to go overboard in China Basin, swimming up to a pier, being ranked again by a watchman there, swimming off to another, and finally getting through the line only to run into another bad break. I wouldn’t of flagged that taxi if the For Hire flag hadn’t been up.”

“You knew Sue was planning to take a run-out on you with Joe?”

“I don’t know it yet,” he said. “I knew damned well she was cheating on me, but I didn’t know who with.”

“What would you have done if you had known that?” I asked.

“Me?” He grinned wolfishly. “Just what I did.”

“Killed the pair of them,” I said.

He rubbed his lower lip with a thumb and asked calmly:

“You think I killed Sue?”

“You did.”

“Serves me right,” he said. “I must be getting simple in my old age. What the hell am I doing barbering with a lousy dick? That never got nobody nothing but grief. Well, you might just as well take it on the heel and toe now, my lad. I’m through spitting.”

And he was. I couldn’t get another word out of him.

X

The Old Man sat listening to me, tapping his desk lightly with the point of a long yellow pencil, staring past me with mild blue, rimless-spectacled, eyes. When I had brought my story up to date, he asked pleasantly:

“How is MacMan?”

“He lost two teeth, but his skull wasn’t cracked. He’ll be out in a couple of days.”

The Old Man nodded and asked:

“What remains to be done?”

“Nothing. We can put Peggy Carroll on the mat again, but it’s not likely we’ll squeeze much more out of her. Outside of that, the returns are pretty well all in.”

“And what do you make of it?”

I squirmed in my chair and said: “Suicide.”

The Old Man smiled at me, politely but skeptically.

“I don’t like it either,” I grumbled. “And I’m not ready to write it in a report yet. But that’s the only total that what we’ve got will add up to. That fly paper was hidden behind the kitchen stove. Nobody would be crazy enough to try to hide something from a woman in her own kitchen like that. But the woman might hide it there.

“According to Peggy, Holy Joe had the fly paper. If Sue hid it, she got it from him. For what? They were planning to go away together, and were only waiting till Joe, who was on the nut, raised enough dough. Maybe they were afraid of Babe, and had the poison there to slip him if he tumbled to their plan before they went. Maybe they meant to slip it to him before they went anyway.

“When I started talking to Holy Joe about murder, he thought Babe was the one who had been bumped off. He was surprised, maybe, but as if he was surprised that it had happened so soon. He was more surprised when he heard that Sue had died too, but even then he wasn’t so surprised as when he saw McCloor alive at the window.

“She died cursing Holy Joe, and she knew she was poisoned, and she wouldn’t let McCloor get a doctor. Can’t that mean that she had turned against Joe, and had taken the poison herself instead of feeding it to Babe? The poison was hidden from Babe. But even if he found it, I can’t figure him as a poisoner. He’s too rough. Unless he caught her trying to poison him and made her swallow the stuff. But that doesn’t account for the month-old arsenic in her hair.”

“Does your suicide hypothesis take care of that?” the Old Man asked.

“It could,” I said. “Don’t be kicking holes in my theory. It’s got enough as it stands. But, if she committed suicide this time, there’s no reason why she couldn’t have tried it once before — say after a quarrel with Joe a month ago — and failed to bring it off. That would have put the arsenic in her. There’s no real proof that she took any between a month ago and day before yesterday.”

“No real proof,” the Old Man protested mildly, “except the autopsy’s finding — chronic poisoning.”

I was never one to let experts’ guesses stand in my way. I said:

“They base that on the small amount of arsenic they found in her remains — less than a fatal dose. And the amount they find in your stomach after you’re dead depends on how much you vomit before you die.”

The Old Man smiled benevolently at me and asked:

“But you’re not, you say, ready to write this theory into a report? Meanwhile what do you purpose doing?”

“If there’s nothing else on tap, I’m going home, fumigate my brains with Fatimas, and try to get this thing straightened out in my head. I think I’ll get a copy of The Count of Monte Cristo and run through it. I haven’t read it since I was a kid. It looks like the book was wrapped up with the fly paper to make a bundle large enough to wedge tightly between the wall and stove, so it wouldn’t fall down. But there might be something in the book. I’ll see anyway.”

“I did that last night,” the Old Man murmured.

I asked: “And?”

He took a book from his desk drawer, opened it where a slip of paper marked a place, and held it out to me, one pink finger marking a paragraph.

“Suppose you were to take a millegramme of this poison the first day, two millegrammes the second day, and so on. Well, at the end of ten days you would have taken a centigramme: at the end of twenty days, increasing another millegramme, you would have taken three hundred centigrammes; that is to say, a dose you would support without inconvenience, and which would be very dangerous for any other person who had not taken the same precautions as yourself. Well, then, at the end of the month, when drinking water from the same carafe, you would kill the person who had drunk this water, without your perceiving otherwise than from slight inconvenience that there was any poisonous substance mingled with the water.”

“That does it,” I said. “That does it. They were afraid to go away without killing Babe, too certain he’d come after them. She tried to make herself immune from arsenic poisoning by getting her body accustomed to it, taking steadily increasing doses, so when she slipped the big shot in Babe’s food she could eat it with him without danger. She’d be taken sick, but wouldn’t die, and the police couldn’t hang his death on her because she too had eaten the poisoned food.

“That clicks. After the row Monday night, when she wrote Joe the note urging him to make the getaway soon, she tried to hurry up her immunity, and increased her preparatory doses too quickly, took too large a shot. That’s why she cursed Joe at the end: it was his plan.”

“Possibly she overdosed herself in an attempt to speed it along,” the Old Man agreed, “but not necessarily. There are people who can cultivate an ability to take large doses of arsenic without trouble, but it seems to be a sort of natural gift with them, a matter of some constitutional peculiarity. Ordinarily, any one who tried it would do what Sue Hambleton did — slowly poison themselves until the cumulative effect was strong enough to cause death.”

Babe McCloor was hanged, for killing Holy Joe Wales, six months later.