“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 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 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, 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 too, but even then he wasn’t so surprised as when he saw McCloor alive at the window.
“She 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 Babe? The poison was hidden from Babe. But even if he found it, I can’t figure him as a poisoner. He’s too rough. Unless he caught her trying to poison him and made her 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. “Don’t be kicking holes in my theory. It’s got enough as it stands. 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 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 purpose doing?”
“If there’s nothing else on tap, I’m going home, fumigate my brains with Fatimas, and try to get this thing straightened out in my head. 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, one pink finger marking a paragraph.
“Suppose you were to take a millegramme of this poison the first day, two millegrammes the second day, and so on. Well, at the end of ten days you would have taken a centigramme: at the end of twenty days, increasing another millegramme, you would have taken three hundred centigrammes; that is to say, a dose you would support without inconvenience, and 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 Babe, 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 shot in Babe’s food she could eat it with him without danger. She’d be taken sick, but wouldn’t die, and the police couldn’t hang his death on her because she too had eaten the poisoned food.
“That clicks. After the row Monday night, when she wrote Joe the note urging him to make the getaway soon, she tried to hurry up her immunity, and increased her preparatory doses too quickly, 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 with them, a matter of some constitutional peculiarity. Ordinarily, any one who tried it would do what Sue Hambleton did — slowly poison themselves until the cumulative effect was strong enough to cause death.”
Babe McCloor was hanged, for killing Holy Joe Wales, six months later.
The Farewell Murder
Originally appeared in The Black Mask, February 1930
I
I was the only one who left the train at Farewell.
A man came through the rain from the passenger shed. He was a small man. His face was dark and flat. He wore a gray waterproof cap and a gray coat cut in military style.
He didn’t look at me. He looked at the valise and gladstone bag in my hands. He came forward quickly, walking with short, choppy steps.
He didn’t say anything when he took the bags from me. I asked:
“Kavalov’s?”
He had already turned his back to me and was carrying my bags towards a tan Stutz coach that stood in the roadway beside the gravel station platform. In answer to my question he bowed twice at the Stutz without looking around or checking his jerky half-trot.