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line only to run into another bad break. I wouldn’t of flagged that taxi if the For Hire flag hadn’t been up.”
    â€œYou knew Sue was planning to take a run-out on you with Joe?”
    â€œI don’t know it yet,” he said. “I knew damned well she was cheating on me, but I didn’t know who with.”
    â€œWhat would you have done if you had known that?” I asked.
    â€œMe?” He grinned wolfishly. “Just what I did.”
    â€œKilled the pair of them,” I said.
    He rubbed his lower lip with a thumb and asked calmly:
    â€œYou think I killed Sue?”
    â€œYou did.”
    â€œServes 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:
    â€œHow is MacMan?”
    â€œHe lost two teeth, but his skull wasn’t cracked. He’ll be out in a couple of days.”
    The Old Man nodded and asked:
    â€œWhat remains to be done?”
    â€œNothing. 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.”
    â€œAnd what do you make of it?”
    I squirmed in my chair and said: “Suicide.”
    The Old Man smiled at me, politely but skeptically.
    â€œI 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.
    â€œAccording 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.
    â€œWhen 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.
    â€œShe 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.”
    â€œDoes your suicide hypothesis take care of that?” the Old Man asked.
    â€œIt 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.”
    â€œNo real proof,” the Old Man protested mildly, “except the autopsy’s finding—chronic poisoning.”
    I was never one to let