I asked the woman what she knew about the McCloors. What she knew wasn’t a great deaclass="underline" paid their rent on time, kept irregular hours, had occasional drinking parties, quarreled a lot.
“Think they’re in now?” I asked. “I got no answer on the bell.”
“I don’t know,” she whispered. “I haven’t seen either of them since 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 ends of her eyes.
“I’m not going to make any trouble for you,” I assured her. “But if they’ve blown 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, I remained by the elevator. 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.
I was in a small dark vestibule with three doors besides the one I had come through. One door was shut. One opened into a bathroom. I went to the other.
The fat manager stood just inside it, 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?”
“Yeah. 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 manager 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 in the joint. Some thick sheets of dark gray 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. Mashed in water, four to six grains of arsenic can be soaked out of a sheet — enough to kill two people.”
I nodded, saying:
“I worked on one in Louisville in 1916. The mulatto janitor saw McCloor leaving at half-past nine yesterday morning. She was probably dead before that. Nobody’s seen him since. Earlier in the morning the people in the next apartment had heard them talking, her groaning. But they had too many fights for the neighbors to pay much attention to that. The landlady told me they had a fight the night before that. The police are hunting for him.”
“Did you tell the police who she was?”
“No. What do we do on that angle? 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. The first told me that, fifteen months ago, Joseph Wales, alias Holy Joe, had been arrested on the complaint of a farmer named Toomey that he had been taken for twenty-five hundred dollars on a phoney “Business Opportunity” by Wales and three other men. The second clipping said the case had been dropped when Toomey failed to appear against Wales in court — bought off in the customary manner by the return of part or all of his money. That was all our files held on Wales, and they had nothing on Peggy Carroll.
V
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, no.
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.”
“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: