"Let's go find out."
We found out. It didn't take long and we got a citation. We hit Garver with one question—"Who was in the bar just before Davis entered?" and he collapsed right in our laps. We got all he knew and it wasn't hard to trace down two guys named Kinder and Walpole.
They were both drunk when they came in and Walpole had some arsenic with him that he was going to make a bug spray with. He got sore at Kinder for some drunken reason and poured some of the stuff into his drink while Kinder was in the washroom. Then something pulled them back into the street before they had their drinks. Garver heard metal grind and thought that was probably it. Once outside, they probably forgot what tavern they'd been in because they didn't return.
Garver was glad to get rid of them. He hadn't seen the poison-pouring bit and dumped the shots into the bottle. When Davis keeled over as a result of the next shot out of the bottle, Garver was scared. He could lose his job and his boss could have lost his license for serving drunks and for pouring the whisky back.
So that was the case. A tragic incident, with Walpole not even remembering what he'd done. And with Davis dead.
We would have been better off leaving it there—charging Dalrymple off as a crackpot who had made a lucky guess and taking the credit for breaking the case. We did take the credit, but it was hard to believe, once he'd gone, that Dalrymple was actually for real. So one afternoon a couple of weeks later we were passing the Crestwood Hotel. Donovan braked the car and squinted at the building.
"This is where he said he lived."
I knew who Donovan meant. "Uh-huh."
"Let's go up."