Dashiell Hammett - The Thin Man

“A few hours more oughtn't to matter much,” I said. “Did either of you say anything about his not keeping the date at the Plaza?”

“No. I didn't get a chance to ask him. Well, if you say wait, I'll wait, but—”

“Let's wait till tonight, anyhow, till he phones you—if he does—and then we can make up our minds whether to take the police along.”

“You don't think he'll phone?”

“I'm not too sure,” I said. “He didn't keep his last date with you, and he seems to have gone pretty vague on you as soon as he learned that Mimi had turned in the watch-chain and knife. I wouldn't be too optimistic about it. We'll see, though. I'd better get out to your house at about nine o'clock, hadn't I?”

“Come for dinner.”

“I can't, but I'll make it as early as I can, in case he's ahead of time. We'll want to move fast. Where do you live?”

Macaulay gave me his address, in Scarsdale, and stood up. “Will you say good-by to Mrs. Charles for me and thank— Oh, by the way, I hope you didn't misunderstand me about Harrison Quinn last night. I meant only just what I said, that I'd had bad luck taking his advice on the market. I didn't mean to insinuate that there was anything—you know—or that he might not've made money for his other customers.”

“I understand,” I said, and called Nora.

She and Macaulay shook hands and made polite speeches to each other and he pushed Asta around a little and said, “Make it as early as you can,” to me and went away.

“There goes the hockey game,” I said, “unless you find somebody else to go with.”

“Did I miss anything?” Nora asked.

“Not much.” I told her what Macaulay had told me. “And don't ask me what I think of it. I don't know. I know Wynant's crazy, but he's not acting like a crazy man and he's not acting like a murderer. He's acting like a man playing some kind of game. God only knows what the game is.”

“I think,” she said, “that he's shielding somebody else.”

“Why don't you think he did it?”

She looked surprised. “Because you don't.”

I said that was a swell reason. “Who is the somebody else?”

“I don't know yet. Now don't make fun of me: I've thought about it a lot. It wouldn't be Macaulay, because he's using him to help shield whoever it is and—”

“And it wouldn't be me,” I suggested, “because he wants to use me.”

“That's right,” she said, “and you're going to feel very silly if you make fun of me and then I guess who it is before you do. And it wouldn't be either Mimi or Jorgensen, because he tried to throw suspicion on them. And it wouldn't be Nunheim, because he was most likely killed by the same person and, furthermore, wouldn't have to be shielded now. And it wouldn't be Morelli, because Wynant was jealous of him and they'd had a row.” She frowned at me. “I wish you'd found out more about that big fat man they called Sparrow and that big red-haired woman.”

“But how about Dorothy and Gilbert?”

“I wanted to ask you about them. Do you think he's got any very strong paternal feeling for them?”

“No.”

“You're probably just trying to discourage me,” she said. “Well, knowing them, it's hard to think either of them might've been guilty, but I tried to throw out my personal feelings and stick to logic. Before I went to sleep last night I made a list of all the—”

“There's nothing like a little logic-sticking to ward off insomnia. It's like—”

“Don't be so damned patronizing. Your performance so far has been a little less than dazzling.”

“I didn't mean no harm,” I said and kissed her. “That a new dress?”

“Ah! Changing the subject, you coward.”

I went to see Guild early in the afternoon and went to work on him as soon as we had shaken hands. “I didn't bring my lawyer along. I thought it looked better if I came by myself.”

He wrinkled his forehead and shook his head as if I had hurt him. “Now it was nothing like that,” he said patiently.

“It was too much like that.”

He sighed. “I wouldn't've thought you'd make the mistake that a lot of people make thinking just because we— You know we got to look at every angle, Mr. Charles.”

“That sounds familiar. Well, what do you want to know?”

“All I want to know is who killed her—and him.”

“Try asking Gilbert,” I suggested.

Guild pursed his lips. “Why him exactly?”

“He told his sister he knew who did it, told her he got it from Wynant.”

“You mean he's been seeing the old man?”

“So she says he said. I haven't had a chance to ask him about it.”

He squinted his watery eyes at me. “Just what is that lay-out over there, Mr. Charles?”

“The Jorgensen family? You probably know as much about it as I do.”

“I don't,” he said, “and that's a fact. I just can't size them up at all. This Mrs. Jorgensen, now, what is she?”

“A blonde.”

He nodded gloomily. “Uh-huh, and that's all I know. But look,. you've known them a long time and from what she says you and her—”

“And me and her daughter,” I said, “and me and Julia Wolf and me and Mrs. Astor. I'm hell with the women.”

He held up a hand. “I'm not saying I believe everything she says, and there's nothing to get sore about. You're taking the wrong attitude, if you don't mind me saying it. You're acting like you thought we were out to get you, and that's all wrong, absolutely all wrong.”

“Maybe, but you've been talking double to me ever since last—” He looked at me with steady pale eyes and said calmly: “I'm a copper and I got my work to do.”

“That's reasonable enough. You told me to come in today. What do you want?”

“I didn't tell you to come in, I asked you.”

“All right. What do you want?”

“I don't want this,” he said. “I don't want anything like this. We've 'been talking man to man up to this time and I'd kind of like to go on thataway.”

“You made the change.”

“I don't think that's a fact. Look here, Mr. Charles, would you take your oath, or even just tell me straight out, that you've been emptying your pockets to me right along?”

There was no use saying yes—he would not have believed me. I said: “Practically.”

“Practically, yes,” he grumbled. “Everybody's been telling me practically the whole truth. 'What I want's some impractical son of a gun that'll shoot the works.”

I could sympathize with him: I knew how he felt. I said: “Maybe nobody you've found knows the whole truth.”

He made an unpleasant face. “That's very likely, ain't it? Listen, Mr. Charles, I've talked to everybody I could find. If you can find any more for me, I'll talk to them too. You mean Wynant? Don't you suppose we got every facility the department's got working night and day trying to turn him up?”

“There's his son,” I suggested.

“There's his son,” he agreed. He called in Andy and a swarthy bowlegged man named Kline. “Get me that Wynant kid—the punk—I want to talk to him.” They went out. He said: “See, I want people to talk to.”

I said: “Your nerves are in pretty bad shape this afternoon, aren't they? Are you bringing Jorgensen down from Boston?”

He shrugged his big shoulders. “His story listens all right to we. I don't know. Want to tell me what you think of it?”

“Sure.”

“I'm kind of jumpy this afternoon, for a fact,” he said. “I didn't get a single solitary wink of sleep last night. It's a hell of a life. I don't know why I stick at it. A fellow can get a piece of land and some wire fencing and a few head of silver fox and— Well, anyways, when you people scared Jorgensen off back in '25, he says he hit out for Germany, leaving his wife in the lurch—though he don't say much about that—and changing his name to give you more trouble finding him, and on the same account he's afraid to work at his regular job—he calls himself some kind of a technician or something—so pickings are kind of slim. He says he worked at one thing and another, whatever he could get, but near as I can figure out he was mostly gigohoing, if you know what I mean, and not finding too many heavy-money dames. Well, along about '27 or '28 he's in Milan—that's a 'city in Italy—and he sees in the Paris Herald where this Mimi, recently divorced wife of Clyde Miller Wynant, has arrived in Paris. He don't know her personally and she don't know him, but he knows she's a dizzy blonde that likes men and fun and hasn't got much sense. He figures a bunch of Wynant's dough must've come to her with the divorce and, the way he looks at it, any of it he could take away from her wouldn't be any more than what Wynant had gypped him out of—he'd only be getting some of what belonged to him. So he scrapes up the fare to Paris and goes up there. All right so far?”