Dashiell Hammett: The Thin Man

There were spots of color in Nora's cheeks and her eyes were dark. “The idiot!”

“Now, now,” I said. “Maybe I should have warned you—he was heading in that direction last night. I think it's likely my old pal Mimi gave him a prod or two. What else did he turn the searchlight on?”

“He wanted to know about—what he asked was: 'Do you figure Charles and the Wolf dame was still playing around together? Or was that all washed up?'”

“That's the Mimi touch, all right,” I said. “What'd you tell him?”

“I told him I didn't know whether you were 'still' playing around together because I didn't know that you had even played around together, and reminded him that you hadn't been living in New York for a long time anyway.”

Nora asked me: “Did you?”

I said: “Don't try to make a liar out of Mac. What'd he say to that?”

“Nothing. He asked me if I thought Jorgensen knew about you and Mimi and, when I asked him what about you and Mimi, he accused me of acting the innocent—they were his words—so we didn't get very far. He was interested in the times I had seen you, also, where and when to the exact inch and second.”

“That's nice,” I said. “I've got lousy alibis.”

A waiter came in with our breakfast. We talked about this and that until he had set the table and gone away.

Then Macaulay said: “You've nothing to be afraid of. I'm going to turn Wynant over to the police.” His voice was unsteady and a little choked.

“Are you sure he did it?” I asked. “I'm not.”

He said simply: “I know.” He cleared his throat. “Even if there was a chance in a thousand of my being wrong—and there isn't—he's a madman, Charles. He shouldn't be loose.”

“That's probably right enough,” I began, “and if you know—”

“I know,” he repeated. “I saw him the afternoon he killed her; it couldn't've been half an hour after he'd killed her, though I didn't know that, didn't even know she'd been killed. I—well—I know it now.”

“You met him in Hermann's office?”

“What?”

“You were supposed to have been in the office of a man named Hermann, on Fifty-seventh Street, from around three o'clock till around four that afternoon. At least, that's what the police told me.”

“That's right,” he said. “I mean that's the story they got. What really happened: after I failed to find Wynant or any news of him at the Plaza and phoned my office and Julia with no better results, I gave him up and started walking down to Hermann's. He's a mining engineer, a client of mine; I had just finished drawing up some articles of incorporation for him, and there were some minor changes to be made in them. When I got to Fifty-seventh Street I suddenly got a feeling that I was being followed—you know the feeling. I couldn't think of any reason for anybody shadowing me, but, still, I'm a lawyer and there might be. Anyhow, I wanted to find out, so I turned east on Fifty-seventh and wahked over to Madison and still wasn't sure. There was a small sallow man I thought I'd seen around the Plaza, but— The quickest way to find out seemed to be by taking a taxi, so I did that and told the driver to drive east. There was too much traffic there for me to see whether this small man or anybody else took a taxi after me, so I had my driver turn south at Third, east again on Fifty-sixth, and south again on Second Avenue, and by that time I was pretty sure a yellow taxi was following me. I couldn't see whether my small man was in it, of course; it wasn't close enough for that. And at the next corner, when a red light stopped us, I saw Wynant. He was in a taxicab going west on Fifty-fifth Street. Naturally, that didn't surprise me very much: we were only two blocks from Julia's and I took it for granted she hadn't wanted me to know he was there when I phoned and that he was now on his way over to meet me at the Plaza. He was never very punctual. So I told my driver to turn west, but at Lexington Avenue—we were half a block behind him—Wynant's taxicab turned south. That wasn't the way to the Plaza and wasn't even the way to my office, so I said to hell with him and turned my attention back to the taxi following me—and it wasn't there any more. I kept a look-out behind all the way over to Hermann's and saw no sign at all of anybody following me.”

“What time was it when you saw Wynant?” I asked.

“It must've been fifteen or twenty minutes past three. It was twenty minutes to four when I got to Hermann's and I imagine that was twenty or twenty-five minutes later. Well, Hermann's secretary—Louise Jacobs, the girl I was with when I saw you last night—told me he had been locked up in a conference all afternoon, but would probably be through in a few minutes, and he was, and I got through with him in ten or fifteen minutes and went back to my office.”

“I take it you weren't close enough to Wynant to see whether he looked excited, was wearing his watch-chain, smelled of gunpowder— things like that.”

“That's right. All I saw was his profile going past, but don't think I'm not sure it was Wynant.”

“I won't. Go ahead,” I said.

“He didn't phone again. I'd been back about an hour when the police phoned—Julia was dead. Now you must understand that I didn't think Wynant had killed her—not for a minute. You can understand that—you still don't think he did. So when I went over there and the police began to ask me questions about him and I could see they suspected him, I did what ninety-nine out of a hundred lawyers would've done for their clients—I said nothing about having seen him in that neighborhood at about the time that the murder must have been committed. I told them what I told you—about having the date with him and him not showing up—and let them understand that I had gone over to Hermann's straight from the Plaza.”

“That's understandable enough,” I agreed. “There was no sense in your saying anything until you had heard his side of the story.”

“Exactly and, well, the catch is I never heard his side of the story. I'd expected him to show up, phone me, something, but he didn't—until Tuesday, when I got that letter from him from Philadelphia, and there was not a word in it about his failure to meet me Friday, nothing about—but you saw the letter. What'd you think of it?”

“You mean did it sound guilty?”

“Yes.”

“Not particularly,” I said. “It's about what could be expected from him if he didn't kill her—no great alarm over the police suspecting him except as it might interfere with his work, a desire to have it all cleaned up with no inconvenience to him—not too bright a letter to have come from anybody else, but in line with his particular form of goofiness. I can see him sending it off without the faintest notion that the best thing he could do would be to account for his own actions on the day of the murder. How sure are you he was coming from Julia's when you saw him?”

“I'm sure now. I thought it likely at first. Then I thought he may have been to his shop. It's on First Avenue, just a few blocks from where I saw him, and, though it's been closed since he went away, we renewed the lease last month and everything's there waiting for him to come back to it, and he could have been there that afternoon. The police couldn't find anything there to show whether he had or hadn't.”

“I meant to ask you: there was some talk about his having grown whiskers. Was he—”

“No—the same long bony face with the same ragged near-white mustache.”

“Another thing: there was a fellow named Nunheim killed yesterday, a small—”

“I'm coming to that,” he said.

“I was thinking about the little fellow you thought might be shadowing you.”

Macaulay stared at me. “You mean that might've been Nunheim?”