He had identification--an Arthur Davis, with nothing at all sinister in his wallet. The lab men came and there was a lot of activity for an hour or so and then we padlocked the joint and took the barkeep downtown with us. His on-the-spot story was simple. Davis had come in and ordered a drink. The barkeep served it up. Davis knocked it off. The drink, in turn, knocked Davis off. The barkeep's name was Timothy Garver. He was a middle-aged cork puller who had been in the business most of his life. We ran him through R and I and found him clean. Then we sat him down in the interrogation room and started digging into him. "What did you have against Davis?" Garver looked like a flabby-jowled ghost. His hands shook. "Nothing. So help me. I never seen the guy before." "You think we'll swallow that?" Donovan asked. "You think you're playing with school kids? Telling us you poison a guy you never saw before?" I said, "Maybe he did it for laughs." "I didn't poison him!" Garver pleaded. "You got to believe me!" "You mean there wasn't any poison in that bottle?" "Sure there was--if you say so. What I mean is I didn't put it there. I didn't know it was there. I--" "What you mean is you'd planned to get the guy out into the alley after he was dead and you lost your nerve after he keeled over." "No--no! Nothing like that." "You had that bottle spiked, waiting for Davis to come in." "No--no! It was just an ordinary bar bottle." "What do you mean by that?" "Every tavern has a brand of whisky they push--their bar whisky. When a customer isn't particular about his brand we give him the bar liquor." It seemed to me the guy was gaining courage. He wasn't quite as nervous as he'd been. "You served other people out of that same bottle?" I asked. He licked his lips and dropped his eyes before he answered. "Sure I did." "But that was before you put the arsenic in it." "I didn't put any poison in that bottle. And you guys can't pin this on me!" "What makes you think we can't?" "Because I never knew the fellow and you can't prove I did. So how are you going to make anybody believe I killed somebody I didn't know and had nothing against. You think I'm nuts or something?" "It's a possibility," I said. * * * * * Donovan narrowed his eyes at Garver and said, "You're holding something back. Come on! Out with it." Again that guilty look as Garver shook his head. But you can't send a guilty look to the chair and it seemed Garver had us stymied. At least for a while. We jugged him on suspicion but we knew unless we got something else to strengthen the case we wouldn't get an indictment against him. There just wasn't enough. Donovan and I chewed it over with the Captain and he couldn't give us any help except the advice to keep plugging. We told him we'd try to come up with something and went on back to the tavern.