The Old Man said, “Indeed,” as if I had said it was raining, and smiled with polite attentiveness while I told him about it—from the time I had rung Wales’s bell until I had joined the fat manager in the dead girl’s apartment.
“She had been knocked around some, was bruised on the face and neck,” I wound up. “But that didn’t kill her.”
“You think she was murdered?” he asked, still smiling gently.
“I don’t know. Doc Jordan says he thinks it could have been arsenic. He’s hunting for it in her now. We found a funny thing in the joint. Some thick sheets of dark gray paper were stuck in a book— The Count of Monte Cristo —wrapped in a month-old newspaper and wedged into a dark corner between the stove and the kitchen wall.”
“Ah, arsenical flypaper,” the Old Man murmured. “The Maybrick-Seddons trick. Mashed in water, four to six grains of arsenic can be soaked out of a sheet—enough to kill two people.”
I nodded, saying:
“I worked on one in Louisville in 1916. The mulatto janitor saw McCloor leaving at half-past nine yesterday morning. She was probably dead before that. Nobody’s seen him since. Earlier in the morning the people in the next apartment had heard them talking, her groaning. But they had too many fights for the neighbors to pay much attention to that. The landlady told me they had a fight the night before that. The police are hunting for him.”
“Did you tell the police who she was?”
“No. What do we do on that angle? We can’t tell them about Wales without telling them all.”