Fly Paper and Other Stories (4 page)

She slid out from between us and ran around behind me, screaming:

“Joe does know her. He got the things from her. She's at the St. Martin on O'Farrell Street—her and Babe McCloor.”

While I listened to this I had to pull my head aside to let Joe's right hook miss me, had got his left arm twisted behind him, had turned my hip to catch his knee, and had got the palm of my left hand under his chin. I was ready to give his chin the Japanese tilt when he stopped wrestling and grunted:

“Let me tell it.”

“Hop to it,” I consented, taking my hands away from him and stepping back.

He rubbed the wrist I had wrenched, scowling past me at the girl. He called her four unlovely names, the mildest of which was “a dumb twist,” and told her:

“He was bluffing about throwing us in the can. You don't think old man Hambleton's hunting for newspaper space, do you?” That wasn't a bad guess.

He sat on the sofa again, still rubbing his wrist. The girl stayed on the other side of the room, laughing at him through her teeth.

I said: “All right, roll it out, one of you.”

“You've got it all,” he muttered. “I glaumed that stuff last week when I was visiting Babe, knowing the story and hating to see a promising layout like that go to waste.”

“What's Babe doing now?” I asked.

“I don't know.”

“Is he still puffing them?”

“I don't know.”

“Like hell you don't.”

“I don't,” he insisted. “If you know Babe you know you can't get anything out of him about what he's doing.”

“How long have he and Sue been here?”

“About six months that I know of.”

“Who's he mobbed up with?”

“I don't know. Any time Babe works with a mob he picks them up on the road and leaves them on the road.”

“How's he fixed?”

“I don't know. There's always enough grub and liquor in the joint.”

Half an hour of this convinced me that I wasn't going to get much information about my people here.

I went to the phone in the passageway and called the Agency. The boy on the switchboard told me MacMan was in the operatives' room. I asked to have him sent up to me, and went back to the living-room. Joe and Peggy took their heads apart when I came in.

MacMan arrived in less than ten minutes. I let him in and told him:

“This fellow says his name's Joe Wales, and the girl's supposed to be Peggy Carroll who lives upstairs in 421. We've got them cold for conspiracy to defraud, but I've made a deal with them. I'm going out to look at it now. Stay here with them, in this room. Nobody goes in or out, and nobody but you gets to the phone. There's a fire-escape in front of the window. The window's locked now. I'd keep it that way. If the deal turns out O.K. we'll let them go, but if they cut up on you while I'm gone there's no reason why you can't knock them around as much as you want.”

MacMan nodded his hard round head and pulled a chair out between them and the door. I picked up my hat.

Joe Wales called:

“Hey, you're not going to uncover me to Babe, 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 jail.”

“I'll give you the best break I can,” I promised, “but you'll have to take what's dealt you.”

IV

Walking over to the St. Martin—only half a dozen blocks from Wales's place—I decided to go up against McCloor and the girl as a Continental op who suspected Babe of being in on a branch bank stick-up in Alameda the previous week. He hadn't been in on it—if the bank people had described half-correctly the men who had robbed them—so it wasn't likely my supposed suspicions would frighten him much. Clearing himself, he might give me some information I could use. The chief thing I wanted, of course, was a look at the girl, so I could report to her father that I had seen her. There was no reason for supposing that she and Babe knew her father was trying to keep an eye on her. Babe had a record. It was natural enough for sleuths to drop in now and then and try to hang something on him.

The St. Martin was a small three-story apartment house of red brick between two taller hotels. The vestibule register showed,
R. 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 labeled Manager.

The door clicked open. I went indoors. A beefy woman in a pink-striped cotton dress that needed pressing stood in an apartment doorway just inside the street 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.”

“What do you know about them?”

She balked at that, raising her chin and her eyebrows.

I gave her my card. That was safe enough; it fit in with the pretext I intended using upstairs.

Her face, when she raised it from reading the card, was oily with curiosity.

“Come in here,” she said in a husky whisper, backing through the doorway.

I followed her into her apartment. We sat on a Chesterfield and she whispered:

“What is it?”

“Maybe nothing.” I kept my voice low, playing up to her theatricals. “He's done time for safe-burglary. I'm trying to get a line on him now, on the off chance that he might have been tied up in a recent job. I don't know that he was. He may be going straight for all I know.” I took his photograph—front and profile, taken at Leavenworth—out of my pocket. “This him?”

She seized it eagerly, nodded, said, “Yes, that's him, all right,” turned it over to read the description on the back, and repeated, “Yes, that's him, all right.”

“His wife is here with him?” I asked.

She nodded vigorously.

“I don't know her,” I said. “What sort of looking girl is she?”

She described a girl who could have been Sue Hambleton. I couldn't show Sue's picture, that would have uncovered me if she and Babe heard about it.

I asked the woman what she knew about the McCloors. What she knew wasn't a great deal: 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:

“Is who dead?”

“Who? How do I know? Who do you mean?”