“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—flypaper.”
“Arsenic flypaper.” 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 flypaper 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 flypaper.”
“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:
Dear Joe—
I can’t stand this much longer—we’ve simply got to go soon. Babe beat me again tonight. Please, if you really love me, let’s make it soon.
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
