Read Online Fly Paper and Other Stories by Dashiell Hammett - Free Book Online

you think smashed kneecaps are a lot of fun, give it a whirl.”
    â€œHell with that,” he said and charged.
    I shot his right knee.
    He lurched toward me.
    I shot his left knee.
    He tumbled down.
    â€œYou would have it,” I complained.
    He twisted around, and with his arms pushed himself into a sitting position facing me.
    â€œI 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.
    â€œYou sure devastated me, bo,” he said when I came in.
    â€œSorry,” I said, “but—”
    â€œI ain’t beefing. I asked for it.”
    â€œWhy’d you kill Holy Joe?” I asked, off-hand, as I pulled a chair up beside the bed.
    â€œUh-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:
    â€œI 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.”
    â€œWhy’d you kill him?”
    He pursed his lips, screwed up his eyes at me, thought something over, and said:
    â€œHe killed a broad I knew.”
    â€œHe killed Sue Hambleton?” I asked.
    He studied my face a while before he replied: “Yep.”
    â€œHow do you figure that out?”
    â€œHell,” 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:
    â€œThat 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:
    â€œI 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:
    â€œWell, she went under. But before she went she told me she’d been poisoned by Holy Joe.”
    â€œShe say how he’d given it to her?”
    McCloor shook his head.
    â€œI’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.”
    â€œYeah? Then what’d you do?”
    â€œI 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