“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.”
“Yeah, very funny. Where’d you go about buying some if you wanted it?”
“Buying 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 what,” 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 gray-white face. Presently he sat up straight, wiping his face with a fancily colored handkerchief.
“I’ll talk,” he said. “I’ve got to talk now. Sue was getting ready to ditch Babe. 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. Babe beat me again tonight. Please, if you really love me, let’s make it soon.
The handwriting was a nervous woman’s, tall, angular, and piled up.
“That’s why I made the play for Hambleton’s grand,” he said. “I’ve been shatting on my uppers for a couple of months, and when that letter came yesterday I just had to raise dough somehow to get her away. She wouldn’t have stood for tapping her father though, so I tried to swing it without her knowing.”
“When did you see her last?”
“Day before yesterday, the day she mailed that letter. Only I saw her in the afternoon — she was here — and she wrote it that night.”
“Babe 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. I went to the door and pressed the light button. I didn’t lose sight of Holy Joe Wales while I was doing it.
As I took my finger away from the button, 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 Babe 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 I had turned on the room’s lights.
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.
McCloor shot him three times.
The bullets knocked Wales down on the sofa, back against the wall. Wales’s eyes popped open, bulging. His lips crawled back over his teeth, leaving them naked to the gums. His tongue came out. Then his head fell down and he didn’t move any more.
When McCloor jumped away from the window I jumped to it. While I was pushing the curtain aside, unlocking 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.”
VI
Wales’s apartment was on the second 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 Babe McCloor had gone, swinging down on the ladder till within dropping distance of the court, and then letting go.
There was only one street exit to the court. I took it.
A startled looking, smallish man was standing in the middle of the sidewalk close to the court, gaping at me as I dashed out.
I caught his arm, shook it.
“A big guy running.” Maybe I yelled. “Where?”
He tried to say something, couldn’t, and waved his arm at billboards standing across the front of a vacant lot on the other side of the street.
I forgot to say, “Thank you,” in my hurry to get over there.
I got behind the billboards by crawling under them instead of going to either end, where there were openings. The lot was large enough and weedy enough to give cover to anybody who wanted to lie down and bushwhack a pursuer — even anybody as large as Babe McCloor.
While I considered that, I heard a dog barking at one corner of the lot. He could have been barking at a man who had run by. I ran to that corner of the lot. The dog was in a board-fenced backyard, at the corner of a narrow alley that ran from the lot to a street.
I chinned myself on the board fence, saw a wire-haired terrier alone in the yard, and ran down the alley while he was charging my part of the fence.
I put my gun back into my pocket before I left the alley for the street.
A small touring car was parked at the curb in front of a cigar store some fifteen feet from the alley. A policeman was talking to a slim dark-faced man in the cigar store doorway.
“The big fellow that come out of the alley a minute ago,” I said. “Which way did he go?”
The policeman looked dumb. The slim man nodded his head down the street, said, “Down that way,” and went on with his conversation.
I said, “Thanks,” and went on down to the corner. There was a taxi phone there and two idle taxis. A block and a half below, a street car was going away.
“Did the big fellow who came down here a minute ago take a taxi or the street car?” I asked the two taxi chauffeurs who were leaning against one of the taxis.
The rattier looking one said:
“He didn’t take a taxi.”