“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 and 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