“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 plainclothes 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 overtime, 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?”
“Thataway,” 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
