“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.”
“But you know Pat McCloor?”
“Yes, I’ve been at a couple of parties where he was. That’s all I know of 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 nodded at O’Gar.
“You’re a liar,” he bawled, shaking the fly paper in her face. “You killed her.” The rest of them closed in, throwing accusations at her. They kept it up until she was looking sick 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 not to talk. 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. 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 kitchen? Pat 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,” O’Gar said. “But it takes a lot of imagination to get that one down. Any way you twist it, Peggy’s our best bet so far. Try her again in the morning?”
“Yes,” I said. “And we’ve got to find McCloor.”
The others had eaten. MacMan and I went out and got ours. When we returned an hour later the place was practically deserted.
“All gone to Pier 42 on a tip that McCloor’s there,” the desk sergeant 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.
Halfway there the taxi suddenly shrieked and slid to a halt. “What—?” I began, and saw a man standing close to the driver. He was a big man with a big gun. “Pat,” 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, pointing the gun.
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:
“Why the hell have you got your flag up?”
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, then 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 head, 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 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, a police whistle was blowing. Men were running towards us.
McCloor snorted 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 round the corner. I swung wide round 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 weight than he was making with his.
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 levelled 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. I ran 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 sideways 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.
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 stifflegged step towards 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. “If I can’t get 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 try.”
“Hell with that,” he said and charged.
I shot his right knee.
He lurched towards me.
I shot his left knee.
He tumbled down.
“You would have it,” I complained.
He twisted round, 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.
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,” 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 p
ulled a chair up beside the bed.
“Nothing doing. You’re on the wrong track.”
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 somewhere before. So that’s where it was. I didn’t pay no attention to your face, 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 smoke.”
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 black eye.”
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 spent the night out. I got home about seven next morning. Sue was sick as hell, but she wouldn’t let me get a doc for her. That was kind of funny, because she was scared stiff.”
McCloor shook his head meditatively and let the smoke leak out of his mouth, 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 says she’s poisoned. ‘I’m poisoned,’ she says. ‘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.”
“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 were there when I came. You know about that.”
“You knew Sue was planning to 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 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 talking 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.” And he was.
I couldn’t get another word out of him.
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 get much more out of her. Otherwise 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 herself 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 raised enough money. Maybe they were afraid of Pat, 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 Pat was the one who had been killed. He was surprised, 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.
“Sue 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 Pat? The poison was hidden from Pat. But even if he found it, I can’t see him as a poisoner. He’s too rough. Unless he caught her trying to poison him and forced her to 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. “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 the 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 propose doing?”
“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. “This is obviously where the idea came from,” he said.
“Suppose you were to take a milligram of this poison the first day, two milligrams the second day, and so on. Well, at the end of ten days you would have taken a dose of a whole centigram: at the end of twenty days, increasing another milligram each day, you would have taken a dose you would support without inconvenience, but 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 Pat, 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 dose into Pat’s food she could eat it with him without danger. She might be sick, but wouldn’t die, and the police couldn’t hang his death on her because she too had eaten the poisoned food.
“After the row on Monday night, when she wrote Joe the note urg
ing him to make the getaway soon, she tried to hurry up her immunity, and 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, a constitutional peculiarity. Ordinarily, anyone who tried it would do what Sue Hambleton did—slowly poison themselves until the cumulative effect was strong enough to cause death . . .”
Pat McCloor was executed, for killing Holy Joe, six months later.
THE DIAMOND WAGER
I
I always knew West was eccentric.
Ever since the days of our youth, in various universities—for we seemed destined to follow each other about the globe—I had known Alexander West to be a person of the most bizarre, though not unattractive, personality: At Heidelberg, where he renounced water as a beverage; at Pisa, where he affected a one-piece garment for months; at the Sorbonne, where he consorted with the most notorious characters, boasting an acquaintance with Le Grand Raoul, an unspeakable ruffian of La Villette.
And in later life, when we met in Constantinople, where West was American minister, I found that his idiosyncrasies were common topics in the diplomatic corps. In the then Turkish capital I naturally dined with West at the Legation, and except for his pointed beard and Prussian mustache being somewhat more gray, I found him the same tall, courtly figure, with a keen brown eye and the hands of generations, an aristocrat.
But his eccentricities were then of more refined fantasy. No more baths in snow, no more beer orgies, no more Libyan negroes opening the door, no more strange diets. At the Legation, West specialized in rugs and gems. He had a museum in carpets. He had even abandoned his old practice of having the valet call him every morning at eight o’clock with a gramophone record.
I left the Legation thinking West had reformed. “Rugs and precious stones,” I reflected; “that’s such a banal combination for West.” Although I did recall that he had told me he was doing something strange with a boat on the Bosporus; but I neglected to inquire about the details. It was something in connection with work, as he had said, “Everybody has a pleasure boat; I have a work boat, where I can be alone.” But that is all I retained concerning this freak of his mind.
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