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

experts’ guesses stand in my way. I said:
    â€œThey base that on the small amount of arsenic they found in her remains—less than a fatal dose. And the amount they find in your stomach after you’re dead depends on how much you vomit before you die.”
    The Old Man smiled benevolently at me and asked:
    â€œBut you’re not, you say, ready to write this theory into a report? Meanwhile what do you purpose doing?”
    â€œIf there’s nothing else on tap, I’m going home, fumigate my brains with Fatimas, and try to get this thing straightened out in my head. I think I’ll get a copy of The Count of Monte Cristo and run through it. I haven’t read it since I was a kid. It looks like the book was wrapped up with the fly paper to make a bundle large enough to wedge tightly between the wall and stove, so it wouldn’t fall down. But there might be something in the book. I’ll see anyway.”
    â€œI did that last night,” the Old Man murmured.
    I asked: “And?”
    He took a book from his desk drawer, opened it where a slip of paper marked a place, and held it out to me, one pink finger marking a paragraph.
    â€œSuppose you were to take a millegramme of this poison the first day, two millegrammes the second day, and so on. Well, at the end of ten days you would have taken a centigramme: at the end of twenty days, increasing another millegramme, you would have taken three hundred centigrammes; that is to say, a dose you would support without inconvenience, and which would be very dangerous for any other person who had not taken the same precautions as yourself. Well, then, at the end of the month, when drinking water from the same carafe, you would kill the person who had drunk this water, without your perceiving otherwise than from slight inconvenience that there was any poisonous substance mingled with the water.”
    â€œThat does it,” I said. “That does it. They were afraid to go away without killing Babe, too certain he’d come after them. She tried to make herself immune from arsenic poisoning by getting her body accustomed to it, taking steadily increasing doses, so when she slipped the big shot in Babe’s food she could eat it with him without danger. She’d be taken sick, but wouldn’t die, and the police couldn’t hang his death on her because she too had eaten the poisoned food.
    â€œThat clicks. After the row Monday night, when she wrote Joe the note urging him to make the getaway soon, she tried to hurry up her immunity, and increased her preparatory doses too quickly, took too large a shot. That’s why she cursed Joe at the end: it was his plan.”
    â€œPossibly she overdosed herself in an attempt to speed it along,” the Old Man agreed, “but not necessarily. There are people who can cultivate an ability to take large doses of arsenic without trouble, but it seems to be a sort of natural gift with them, a matter of some constitutional peculiarity. Ordinarily, any one who tried it would do what Sue Hambleton did—slowly poison themselves until the cumulative effect was strong enough to cause death.”
    Babe McCloor was hanged, for killing Holy Joe Wales, six months later.

The Farewell Murder
    Black Mask , February 1930
    The Continental Op is called in to protect a man and runs into plenty grief.
    I
    I was the only one who left the train at Farewell.
    A man came through the rain from the passenger shed. He was a small man. His face was dark and flat. He wore a gray waterproof cap and a gray coat cut in military style.
    He didn’t look at me. He looked at the valise and gladstone bag in my hands. He came forward quickly, walking with short, choppy steps.
    He didn’t say anything when he took the bags from me. I asked:
    â€œKavalov’s?”
    He had already turned his back to me and was carrying my bags towards a tan Stutz coach that stood in the roadway beside the gravel station