“Sorry,” I said, “but—”
“I ain’t beefing. I asked for it.”
“Why’d you kill Holy Joe?” I asked, offhand, 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 brusquely:
“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 flypaper 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 flypaper. 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
