He studied my face a while before he replied: “Yep.”
“How do you figure that out?”
“Hell,” 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:
“That 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:
“I 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 brusquely:
“Well, she went under. But before she went she told me she’d been poisoned by Holy Joe.”
“She say how he’d given it to her?”
McCloor shook his head.