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Hambleton. I couldn’t show Sue’s picture, that would have uncovered me if she and Babe heard about it.
    I asked the woman what she knew about the McCloors. What she knew wasn’t a great deal: paid their rent on time, kept irregular hours, had occasional drinking parties, quarreled a lot.
    â€œThink they’re in now?” I asked. “I got no answer on the bell.”
    â€œI don’t know,” she whispered. “I haven’t seen either of them since night before last, when they had a fight.”
    â€œMuch of a fight?”
    â€œNot much worse than usual.”
    â€œCould you find out if they’re in?” I asked.
    She looked at me out of the ends of her eyes.
    â€œI’m not going to make any trouble for you,” I assured her. “But if they’ve blown I’d like to know it, and I reckon you would too.”
    â€œAll right, I’ll find out.” She got up, patting a pocket in which keys jingled. “You wait here.”
    â€œI’ll go as far as the third floor with you,” I said, “and wait out of sight there.”
    â€œAll right,” she said reluctantly.
    On the third floor, I remained by the elevator. She disappeared around a corner of the dim corridor, and presently a muffled electric bell rang. It rang three times. I heard her keys jingle and one of them grate in a lock. The lock clicked. I heard the doorknob rattle as she turned it.
    Then a long moment of silence was ended by a scream that filled the corridor from wall to wall.
    I jumped for the corner, swung around it, saw an open door ahead, went through it, and slammed the door shut behind me.
    The scream had stopped.
    I was in a small dark vestibule with three doors besides the one I had come through. One door was shut. One opened into a bathroom. I went to the other.
    The fat manager stood just inside it, her round back to me. I pushed past her and saw what she was looking at.
    Sue Hambleton, in pale yellow pajamas trimmed with black lace, was lying across a bed. She lay on her back. Her arms were stretched out over her head. One leg was bent under her, one stretched out so that its bare foot rested on the floor. That bare foot was whiter than a live foot could be. Her face was white as her foot, except for a mottled swollen area from the right eyebrow to the right cheek-bone and dark bruises on her throat.
    â€œPhone the police,” I told the woman, and began poking into corners, closets and drawers.
    It was late afternoon when I returned to the Agency. I asked the file clerk to see if we had anything on Joe Wales and Peggy Carroll, and then went into the Old Man’s office.
    He put down some reports he had been reading, gave me a nodded invitation to sit down, and asked:
    â€œYou’ve seen her?”
    â€œYeah. She’s dead.”
    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.
    â€œShe had been knocked around some, was bruised on the face and neck,” I wound up. “But that didn’t kill her.”
    â€œYou think she was murdered?” he asked, still smiling gently.
    â€œI 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.”
    â€œAh, arsenical fly paper,” 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:
    â€œI worked on one in Louisville in 1916. The mulatto janitor saw McCloor leaving at half-past nine