Joe Wales called, “Hey, you’re not going to uncover me to Pat, 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 gaol.”
“I’ll give you the best break I can,” I promised, “but you’ll have to take what’s dealt you.”
The St. Martin was a small three-story apartment house of red brick between two taller hotels. The vestibule register showed P.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 labelled Manager.
The door clicked open. I went indoors. A beefy woman in a pink-striped cotton dress that needed pressing stood just inside the 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.”
“Think they’re in now?” I asked. “I got no answer on the bell.”
“I don’t know.” She talked in a husky whisper. “I haven’t seen either of them since the 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 corners of her eyes.
“I’m not going to make any trouble for you,” I assured her. “But if they’ve gone 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 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.
The fat manageress stood just inside, 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?”
“Yes. 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 manageress 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. Some thick sheets of dark grey 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. Soaked in water, four to six grains of arsenic can be got out of a sheet—enough to kill two people.”
“The cleaner saw McCloor leaving at half past nine yesterday morning. She was probably dead before that. Nobody’s seen him since. The police are hunting for him.”
“Did you tell the police who she was?”
“No. What do we do? 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. All they gave me was Wales’s working alias—Holy Joe.
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.
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.”
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.”
“Very funny. Where’d you buy some if you wanted it?”
“Buy 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 it,” 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 grey-white face. Presently he sat up straight, wiping his face with a fancy colored handkerchief.
“I’ll talk,” he said. “I’ve got to talk now. Sue was getting ready to ditch Pat. 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. Pat beat me again tonight. Please, if you really love me, let’s make it soon. Sue.
“When did you see her last?”
“Day before yesterday, the day she posted that letter. Only I saw her in the afternoon—she was here—and she wrote it that night.”
“Pat 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. The light switch was near the door, and I had to watch Holy Joe Wales. I flicked on my torch.
As I held it, trained on Wales, 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 Pat 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 the torch light had shown him all he wanted to know.
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. I’d flicked the torch off, but it was too late.
McCloor shot him three times.
When McCloor jumped away from the window I jumped to it. While I was pushing the curtain aside, unfastening 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.”
Wales’s apartment was on the first 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 McCloor had done, swinging on the ladder till within dropping distance of the court, and then letting go.
It was a wild-goose chase. McCloor had vanished. I checked around. No one had seen him, no one was talking.
I didn’t find McCloor.
I rode up to the Hall of Justice. 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?”
“From what he found in her kidneys, intestines, liver, stomach and blood, Jordan figures there was less than a grain of it in her. That wouldn’t be enough to kill her. 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 towards 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—”
“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?”
“Pat,” 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 Pat woul
d 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 money. That’s what Joe was after. She didn’t mean anything to him but a way into her old man’s pockets. And I was to get my cut. Pat found out and fixed the pair of them.”
“Yeah? How do you figure Pat would kill 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 Pat,” 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 Pat.”
“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 money she was going to mean. But you couldn’t always guess what he was getting at. If he was going to kill her, though, that would be the way he’d go about it.”
“Did he go to McCloor’s much?”
“Not at all that I know about. He was too scared of Pat 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 kitchen?”
“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 knowing 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.”
Crime Stories Page 74