Fly Paper and Other Stories (5 page)

“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.

Sue

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.”

I said:

“I'll take one. Catch that street car for me.”

The street car was three blocks away before we got going. The street wasn't clear enough for me to see who got on and off it. We caught it when it stopped at Market Street.

“Follow along,” I told the driver as I jumped out.

On the rear platform of the street car I looked through the glass. There were only eight or ten people aboard.

“There was a great big fellow got on at Hyde Street,” I said to the conductor. “Where'd he get off?”

The conductor looked at the silver dollar I was turning over in my fingers and remembered that the big man got off at Taylor Street. That won the silver dollar.

I dropped off as the street car turned into Market Street. The taxi, close behind, slowed down, and its door swung open.

“Sixth and Mission,” I said as I hopped in.

McCloor could have gone in any direction from Taylor Street. I had to guess. The best guess seemed to be that he would make for the other side of Market Street.

It was fairly dark by now. We had to go down to Fifth Street to get off Market, then over to Mission, and back up to Sixth. We got to Sixth Street without seeing McCloor. I couldn't see him on Sixth Street—either way from the crossing.

“On up to Ninth,” I ordered, and while we rode told the driver what kind of man I was looking for.

We arrived at Ninth Street. No McCloor. I cursed and pushed my brains around.

The big man was a yegg. San Francisco was on fire for him. The yegg instinct would be to use a rattler to get away from trouble. The freight yards were in this end of town. Maybe he would be shifty enough to lie low instead of trying to powder. In that case, he probably hadn't crossed Market Street at all. If he stuck, there would still be a chance of picking him up tomorrow. If he was high-tailing, it was catch him now or not at all.

“Down to Harrison,” I told the driver.

We went down to Harrison Street, and down Harrison to Third, up Bryant to Eighth, down Brannan to Third again, and over to Townsend—and we didn't see Babe McCloor.

“That's tough, that is,” the driver sympathized as we stopped across the street from the Southern Pacific passenger station.

“I'm going over and look around in the station,” I said. “Keep your eyes open while I'm gone.”

When I told the copper in the station my trouble he introduced me to a couple of plain-clothes men who had been planted there to watch for McCloor. That had been done after Sue Hambleton's body was found. The shooting of Holy Joe Wales was news to them.

I went outside again and found my taxi in front of the door, its horn working over-time, but too asthmatically to be heard indoors. The ratty driver was excited.

“A guy like you said come up out of King Street just now and swung on a No. 16 car as it pulled away,” he said.

“Going which way?”

“That-away,” pointing southeast.

“Catch him,” I said, jumping in.

The street car was out of sight around a bend in Third Street two blocks below. When we rounded the bend, the street car was slowing up, four blocks ahead. It hadn't slowed up very much when a man leaned far out and stepped off. He was a tall man, but didn't look tall on account of his shoulder spread. He didn't check his momentum, but used it to carry him across the sidewalk and out of sight.

We stopped where the man had left the car.

I gave the driver too much money and told him:

“Go back to Townsend Street and tell the copper in the station that I've chased Babe McCloor into the S. P. yards.”

VII

I thought I was moving silently down between two strings of box cars, but I had gone less than twenty feet when a light flashed in my face and a sharp voice ordered:

“Stand still, you.”

I stood still. Men came from between cars. One of them spoke my name, adding: “What are you doing here? Lost?” It was Harry Pebble, a police detective.

I stopped holding my breath and said:

“Hello, Harry. Looking for Babe?”

“Yes. We've been going over the rattlers.”

“He's here. I just tailed him in from the street.”

Pebble swore and snapped the light off.

“Watch, Harry,” I advised. “Don't play with him. He's packing plenty of gun and he's cut down one boy tonight.”

“I'll play with him,” Pebble promised, and told one of the men with him to go over and warn those on the other side of the yard that McCloor was in, and then to ring for reinforcements.

“We'll just sit on the edge and hold him in till they come,” he said.

That seemed a sensible way to play it. We spread out and waited. Once Pebble and I turned back a lanky bum who tried to slip into the yard between us, and one of the men below us picked up a shivering kid who was trying to slip out. Otherwise nothing happened until Lieutenant Duff arrived with a couple of carloads of coppers.

Most of our force went into a cordon around the yard. The rest of us went through the yard in small groups, working it over car by car. We picked up a few hoboes that Pebble and his men had missed earlier, but we didn't find McCloor.

We didn't find any trace of him until somebody stumbled over a railroad bull huddled in the shadow of a gondola. It took a couple of minutes to bring him to, and he couldn't talk then. His jaw was broken. But when we asked if McCloor had slugged him, he nodded, and when we asked in which direction McCloor had been headed, he moved a feeble hand to the east.

We went over and searched the Santa Fe yards.

We didn't find McCloor.

VIII

I Rode up to the Hall of Justice with Duff. MacMan was in the captain of detectives' office with three or four police sleuths.

“Wales die?” I asked.

“Yep.”

“Say anything before he went?”

“He was gone before you were through the window.”

“You held on to the girl?”

“She's here.”

“She say anything?”

“We were waiting for you before we tapped her,” detective-sergeant O'Gar said, “not knowing the angle on her.”

“Let's have her in. I haven't had any dinner yet. How about the autopsy on Sue Hambleton?”

“Chronic arsenic poisoning.”

“Chronic? That means it was fed to her little by little, and not in a lump?”

“Uh-huh. From what he found in her kidney, intestines, liver, stomach and blood, Jordan figures there was less than a grain of it in her. That wouldn't be enough to knock her off. But he says he found arsenic in the tips of her hair, and she'd have to be given some at least a month ago for it to have worked out that far.”