only waiting till Joe, who was on the nut, raised enough dough. Maybe they were afraid of Babe, and had the poison there to slip him if he tumbled to their plan before they went. Maybe they meant to slip it to him before they went anyway.
“When I started talking to Holy Joe about murder, he thought Babe was the one who had been bumped off. He was surprised, maybe, but as if he was surprised that it had happened so soon. He was more surprised when he heard that Sue had died too, but even then he wasn’t so surprised as when he saw McCloor alive at the window.
“She died cursing Holy Joe, and she knew she was poisoned, and she wouldn’t let McCloor get a doctor. Can’t that mean that she had turned against Joe, and had taken the poison herself instead of feeding it to Babe? The poison was hidden from Babe. But even if he found it, I can’t figure him as a poisoner. He’s too rough. Unless he caught her trying to poison him and made her swallow the stuff. But that doesn’t account for the month-old arsenic in her hair.”
“Does your suicide hypothesis take care of that?” the Old Man asked.
“It could,” I said. “Don’t be kicking holes in my theory. It’s got enough as it stands. But, if she committed suicide this time, there’s no reason why she couldn’t have tried it once before—say after a quarrel with Joe a month ago—and failed to bring it off. That would have put the arsenic in her. There’s no real proof that she took any between a month ago and day before yesterday.”
“No real proof,” the Old Man protested mildly, “except the autopsy’s finding—chronic poisoning.”
I was never one to let experts’ guesses stand in my way. I said:
“They 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