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:
“How is MacMan?”
“He lost two teeth, but his skull wasn’t cracked. He’ll be out in a couple of days.”
The Old Man nodded and asked:
“What remains to be done?”
“Nothing. 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.”
“And what do you make of it?”
I squirmed in my chair and said: “Suicide.”
The Old Man smiled at me, politely but skeptically.
“I 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 flypaper 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.
“According to Peggy, Holy Joe had the flypaper. If Sue hid it, she got it from him. For what? They were planning to go away together, and were