Fly Paper and Other Stories Read online

“Not unless Jordan’s a bum doctor.”

  A policewoman came in with Peggy Carroll.

  The blonde girl was tired. Her eyelids, mouth corners and body drooped, and when I pushed a chair out toward her she sagged down in it.

  O’Gar ducked his grizzled bullet head at me.

  “Now, Peggy,” I said, “tell us where you fit into this mess.”

  “I don’t fit into it.” She didn’t look up. Her voice was tired. “Joe dragged me into it. He told you.”

  “You his girl?”

  “If you want to call it that,” she admitted.

  “You jealous?”

  “What,” she asked, looking up at me, her face puzzled, “has that got to do with it?”

  “Sue Hambleton was getting ready to go away with him when she was murdered.”

  The girl sat up straight in the chair and said deliberately:

  “I swear to God I didn’t know she was murdered.”

  “But you did know she was dead,” I said positively.

  “I didn’t,” she replied just as positively.

  I nudged O’Gar with my elbow. He pushed his undershot jaw at her and barked:

  “What are you trying to give us? You knew she was dead. How could you kill her without knowing it?”

  While she looked at him I waved the others in. They crowded close around her and took up the chorus of the sergeant’s song. She was barked, roared, and snarled at plenty in the next few minutes.

  The instant she stopped trying to talk back to them I cut in again.

  “Wait,” I said, very earnestly. “Maybe she didn’t kill her.”

  “The hell she didn’t,” O’Gar stormed, holding the center of the stage so the others could move away from the girl without their retreat seeming too artificial. “Do you mean to tell me this baby—”

  “I didn’t say she didn’t,” I remonstrated. “I said maybe she didn’t.”

  “Then who did?”

  I passed the question to the girl: “Who did?”

  “Babe,” she said immediately.

  O’Gar snorted to make her think he didn’t believe her.

  I asked, as if I were honestly perplexed:

  “How do you know that if you didn’t know she was dead?”

  “It stands to reason he did,” she said. “Anybody can see that. He found out she was going away with Joe, so he killed her and then came to Joe’s and killed him. That’s just exactly what Babe would do when he found it out.”

  “Yeah? How long have you known they were going away together?”

  “Since they decided to. Joe told me a month or two ago.”

  “And you didn’t mind?”

  “You’ve got this all wrong,” she said. “Of course I didn’t mind. I was being cut in on it. You know her father had the bees. That’s what Joe was after. She didn’t mean anything to him but an in to the old man’s pockets. And I was to get my dib. And you needn’t think I was crazy enough about Joe or anybody else to step off in the air for them. Babe got next and fixed the pair of them. That’s a cinch.”

  “Yeah? How do you figure Babe would kill her?”

  “That guy? You don’t think he’d—”

  “I mean, how would he go about killing her?”

  “Oh!” She shrugged. “With his hands, likely as not.”

  “Once he’d made up his mind to do it, he’d do it quick and violent?” I suggested.

  “That would be Babe,” she agreed.

  “But you can’t see him slow-poisoning her—spreading it out over a month?”

  Worry came into the girl’s blue eyes. She put her lower lip between her teeth, then said slowly:

  “No, I can’t see him doing it that way. Not Babe.”

  “Who can you see doing it that way?”

  She opened her eyes wide, asking:

  “You mean Joe?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Joe might have,” she said persuasively. “God only knows what he’d want to do it for, why he’d want to get rid of the kind of meal ticket she was going to be. But you couldn’t always guess what he was getting at. He pulled plenty of dumb ones. He was too slick without being smart. If he was going to kill her, though, that would be about the way he’d go about it.”

  “Were he and Babe friendly?”

  “No.”

  “Did he go to Babe’s much?”

  “Not at all that I know about. He was too leary of Babe to take a chance on being caught there. That’s why I moved upstairs, so Sue could come over to our place to see him.”

  “Then how could Joe have hidden the fly paper he poisoned her with in her apartment?”

  “Fly paper!” Her bewilderment seemed honest enough.

  “Show it to her,” I told O’Gar.

  He got a sheet from the desk and held it close to the girl’s face.

  She stared at it for a moment and then jumped up and grabbed my arm with both hands.

  “I didn’t know what it was,” she said excitedly. “Joe had some a couple of months ago. He was looking at it when I came in. I asked him what it was for, and he smiled that wisenheimer smile of his and said, ‘You make angels out of it,’ and wrapped it up again and put it in his pocket. I didn’t pay much attention to him: he was always fooling with some kind of tricks that were supposed to make him wealthy, but never did.”

  “Ever see it again?”

  “No.”

  “Did you know Sue very well?”

  “I didn’t know her at all. I never even saw her. I used to keep out of the way so I wouldn’t gum Joe’s play with her.”

  “But you know Babe?”

  “Yes, I’ve been on a couple of parties where he was. That’s all I know him.”

  “Who killed Sue?”

  “Joe,” she said. “Didn’t he have that paper you say she was killed with?”

  “Why did he kill her?”

  “I don’t know. He pulled some awful dumb tricks sometimes.”

  “You didn’t kill her?”

  “No, no, no!”

  I jerked the corner of my mouth at O’Gar.

  “You’re a liar,” he bawled, shaking the fly paper in her face. “You killed her.” The rest of the team closed in, throwing accusations at her. They kept it up until she was groggy and the policewoman beginning to look worried.

  Then I said angrily:

  “All right. Throw her in a cell and let her think it over.” To her: “You know what you told Joe this afternoon: this is no time to dummy up. Do a lot of thinking tonight.”

  “Honest to God I didn’t kill her,” she said.

  I turned my back to her. The policewoman took her away.

  “Ho-hum,” O’Gar yawned. “We gave her a pretty good ride at that, for a short one.”

  “Not bad,” I agreed. “If anybody else looked likely, I’d say she didn’t kill Sue. But if she’s telling the truth, then Holy Joe did it. And why should he poison the goose that was going to lay nice yellow eggs for him? And how and why did he cache the poison in their apartment? Babe had the motive, but damned if he looks like a slow-poisoner to me. You can’t tell, though; he and Holy Joe could even have been working together on it.”

  “Could,” Duff said. “But it takes a lot of imagination to get that one down. Anyway you twist it, Peggy’s our best bet so far. Go up against her again, hard, in the morning?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “And we’ve got to find Babe.”

  The others had had dinner. MacMan and I went out and got ours. When we returned to the detective bureau an hour later it was practically deserted of the regular operatives.

  “All gone to Pier 42 on a tip that McCloor’s there,” Steve Ward told us.

  “How long ago?”

  “Ten minutes.”

  MacMan a
nd I got a taxi and set out for Pier 42. We didn’t get to Pier 42.

  On First Street, half a block from the Embarcadero, the taxi suddenly shrieked and slid to a halt.

  “What—?” I began, and saw a man standing in front of the machine. He was a big man with a big gun. “Babe,” I grunted, and put my hand on MacMan’s arm to keep him from getting his gun out.

  “Take me to—” McCloor was saying to the frightened driver when he saw us. He came around to my side and pulled the door open, holding the gun on us.

  He had no hat. His hair was wet, plastered to his head. Little streams of water trickled down from it. His clothes were dripping wet.

  He looked surprised at us and ordered:

  “Get out.”

  As we got out he growled at the driver:

  “What the hell you got your flag up for if you had fares?”

  The driver wasn’t there. He had hopped out the other side and was scooting away down the street. McCloor cursed him and poked his gun at me, growling:

  “Go on, beat it.”

  Apparently he hadn’t recognized me. The light here wasn’t good, and I had a hat on now. He had seen me for only a few seconds in Wales’s room.

  I stepped aside. MacMan moved to the other side.

  McCloor took a backward step to keep us from getting him between us and started an angry word.

  MacMan threw himself on McCloor’s gun arm.

  I socked McCloor’s jaw with my fist. I might just as well have hit somebody else for all it seemed to bother him.

  He swept me out of his way and pasted MacMan in the mouth. MacMan fell back till the taxi stopped him, spit out a tooth, and came back for more.

  I was trying to climb up McCloor’s left side.

  MacMan came in on his right, failed to dodge a chop of the gun, caught it square on the top of the noodle, and went down hard. He stayed down.

  I kicked McCloor’s ankle, but couldn’t get his foot from under him. I rammed my right fist into the small of his back and got a left-handful of his wet hair, swinging on it. He shook his head, dragging me off my feet.

  He punched me in the side and I could feel my ribs and guts flattening together like leaves in a book.

  I swung my fist against the back of his neck. That bothered him. He made a rumbling noise down in his chest, crunched my shoulder in his left hand, and chopped at me with the gun in his right.

  I kicked him somewhere and punched his neck again.

  Down the street, at the Embarcadero, a police whistle was blowing. Men were running up First Street toward us.

  McCloor snorted like a locomotive and threw me away from him. I didn’t want to go. I tried to hang on. He threw me away from him and ran up the street.

  I scrambled up and ran after him, dragging my gun out.

  At the first corner he stopped to squirt metal at me—three shots. I squirted one at him. None of the four connected.

  He disappeared around the corner. I swung wide around it, to make him miss if he were flattened to the wall waiting for me. He wasn’t. He was a hundred feet ahead, going into a space between two warehouses. I went in after him, and out after him at the other end, making better time with my hundred and ninety pounds than he was making with his two-fifty.

  He crossed a street, turning up, away from the waterfront. There was a light on the corner. When I came into its glare he wheeled and leveled his gun at me. I didn’t hear it click, but I knew it had when he threw it at me. The gun went past with a couple of feet to spare and raised hell against a door behind me.

  McCloor turned and ran up the street. I ran up the street after him.

  I put a bullet past him to let the others know where we were. At the next corner he started to turn to the left, changed his mind, and went straight on.

  I sprinted, cutting the distance between us to forty or fifty feet, and yelped:

  “Stop or I’ll drop you.”

  He jumped sidewise into a narrow alley.

  I passed it on the jump, saw he wasn’t waiting for me, and went in. Enough light came in from the street to let us see each other and our surroundings. The alley was blind—walled on each side and at the other end by tall concrete buildings with steel-shuttered windows and doors.

  McCloor faced me, less than twenty feet away. His jaw stuck out. His arms curved down free of his sides. His shoulders were bunched.

  “Put them up,” I ordered, holding my gun level.

  “Get out of my way, little man,” he grumbled, taking a stiff-legged step toward me. “I’ll eat you up.”

  “Keep coming,” I said, “and I’ll put you down.”

  “Try it.” He took another step, crouching a little. “I can still get to you with slugs in me.”

  “Not where I’ll put them.” I was wordy, trying to talk him into waiting till the others came up. I didn’t want to have to kill him. We could have done that from the taxi. “I’m no Annie Oakley, but if I can’t pop your kneecaps with two shots at this distance, you’re welcome to me. And if you think smashed kneecaps are a lot of fun, give it a whirl.”

  “Hell with that,” he said and charged.

  I shot his right knee.

  He lurched toward me.

  I shot his left knee.

  He tumbled down.

  “You would have it,” I complained.

  He twisted around, and with his arms pushed himself into a sitting position facing me.

  “I didn’t think you had sense enough to do it,” he said through his teeth.

  IX

  I talked to McCloor in the hospital. He lay on his back in bed with a couple of pillows slanting his head up. The skin was pale and tight around his mouth and eyes, but there was nothing else to show he was in pain.

  “You sure devastated me, bo,” he said when I came in.

  “Sorry,” I said, “but—”

  “I ain’t beefing. I asked for it.”

  “Why’d you kill Holy Joe?” I asked, off-hand, as I pulled a chair up beside the bed.

  “Uh-uh—you’re tooting the wrong ringer.”

  I laughed and told him I was the man in the room with Joe when it happened.

  McCloor grinned and said:

  “I thought I’d seen you somewheres before. So that’s where it was. I didn’t pay no attention to your mug, just so your hands didn’t move.”

  “Why’d you kill him?”

  He pursed his lips, screwed up his eyes at me, thought something over, and said:

  “He killed a broad I knew.”

  “He killed Sue Hambleton?” I asked.

  He studied my face a while before he replied: “Yep.”

  “How do you figure that out?”

  “Hell,” he said, “I don’t have to. Sue told me. Give me a butt.”

  I gave him a cigarette, held a lighter under it, and objected:

  “That doesn’t exactly fit in with other things I know. Just what happened and what did she say? You might start back with the night you gave her the goog.”

  He looked thoughtful, letting smoke sneak slowly out of his nose, then said:

  “I hadn’t ought to hit her in the eye, that’s a fact. But, see, she had been out all afternoon and wouldn’t tell me where she’d been, and we had a row over it. What’s this—Thursday morning? That was Monday, then. After the row I went out and spent the night in a dump over on Army Street. I got home about seven the next morning. Sue was sick as hell, but she wouldn’t let me get a croaker for her. That was kind of funny, because she was scared stiff.”

  McCloor scratched his head meditatively and suddenly drew in a great lungful of smoke, practically eating up the rest of the cigarette. He let the smoke leak out of mouth and nose together, looking dully through the cloud at me. Then he said bruskly:

  “Well, she went under. But before she went
she told me she’d been poisoned by Holy Joe.”

  “She say how he’d given it to her?”

  McCloor shook his head.

  “I’d been asking her what was the matter, and not getting anything out of her. Then she starts whining that she’s poisoned. ‘I’m poisoned, Babe,’ she whines. ‘Arsenic. That damned Holy Joe,’ she says. Then she won’t say anything else, and it’s not a hell of a while after that that she kicks off.”

  “Yeah? Then what’d you do?”

  “I went gunning for Holy Joe. I knew him but didn’t know where he jungled up, and didn’t find out till yesterday. You was there when I came. You know about that. I had picked up a boiler and parked it over on Turk Street, for the getaway. When I got back to it, there was a copper standing close to it. I figured he might have spotted it as a hot one and was waiting to see who came for it, so I let it alone, and caught a street car instead, and cut for the yards. Down there I ran into a whole flock of hammer and saws and had to go overboard in China Basin, swimming up to a pier, being ranked again by a watchman there, swimming off to another, and finally getting through the line only to run into another bad break. I wouldn’t of flagged that taxi if the For Hire flag hadn’t been up.”

  “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?”