The Thin Man (10 page)

His trial on the charge of murdering Israel Swan in Hinsdale County on March 1, 1874, was begun on April 3, 1883. It was proven that each member of the party except Packer possessed considerable money. The defendant repeated his former statement, wherein he claimed that he had only killed Bell, and had done so in self-defense. On April 13, the jury found the defendant guilty with the death penalty attached. A stay of execution was granted to Packer, who immediately appealed to the Supreme Court. In the meantime he was transferred to the Gunnison jail to save him from mob violence.

In October, 1885, the Supreme Court granted a new trial and it was then decided to bring him to trial on five charges of manslaughter. He was found guilty on each charge and was sentenced
to serve eight years for each offense, making a total of forty years. He was pardoned on January 1, 1901, and died on a ranch near Denver on April 24, 1907.

While Gilbert was reading this, I got myself a drink. Dorothy stopped dancing to join me. “Do you like him?” she asked, jerking her head to indicate Quinn.

“He’s all right.”

“Maybe, but he can be terribly silly. You didn’t ask me where I stayed last night. Don’t you care?”

“It’s none of my business.”

“But I found out something for you.”

“What?”

“I stayed at Aunt Alice’s. She’s not exactly right in the head, but she’s awfully sweet. She told me she had a letter from Father today warning her against Mamma.”

“Warning her how? Just what did he say?”

“I didn’t see it. Aunt Alice had been mad with him for several years and she tore it up. She says he’s become a Communist and she’s sure the Communists killed Julia Wolf and will kill him in the end. She thinks it’s all over some secret they betrayed.”

I said: “Oh my God!”

“Well, don’t blame me. I’m just telling you what she told me. I told you she wasn’t exactly right in the head.”

“Did she tell you that junk was in the letter?”

Dorothy shook her head. “No. She only said the warning was. As near as I remember she said he wrote her not to trust anybody connected with her, which I suppose means all of us.”

“Try to remember more.”

“But there wasn’t any more. That’s all she told me.”

“Where was the letter from?” I asked.

“She didn’t know—except that it had come airmail. She said she wasn’t interested.”

“What did she think of it? I mean, did she take the warning seriously?”

“She said he was a dangerous radical—they’re her very words—and she wasn’t interested in anything he had to say.”

“How seriously do you take it?”

She stared at me for a long moment and she moistened her lips before she spoke. “I think he—”

Gilbert, book in hand, came over to us. He seemed disappointed in the story I had given him. “It’s very interesting,” he said, “but, if you know what I mean, it’s not a pathological case.” He put an arm around his sister’s waist. “It was more a matter of that or starving.”

“Not unless you want to believe him,” I said.

Dorothy asked: “What is it?”

“A thing in the book,” Gilbert replied.

“Tell him about the letter your aunt got,” I said to Dorothy. She told him.

When she had finished, he grimaced impatiently. “That’s silly. Mamma’s not really dangerous. She’s just a case of arrested development. Most of us have outgrown ethics and morals and so on. Mamma’s just not grown up to them yet.” He frowned and corrected himself thoughtfully: “She might be dangerous, but it would be like a child playing with matches.”

Nora and Quinn were dancing. “And what do you think of your father?” I asked.

Gilbert shrugged. “I haven’t seen him since I was a child. I’ve got a theory about him, but a lot of it’s guesswork. I’d like—the chief thing I’d like to know is if he’s impotent.”

I said: “He tried to kill himself today, down in Allentown.”

Dorothy cried, “He didn’t,” so sharply that Quinn and Nora stopped dancing, and she turned and thrust her face up at her brother’s. “Where’s Chris?” she demanded.

Gilbert looked from her face to mine and quickly back to hers. “Don’t be an ass,” he said coldly. “He’s off with that girl of his, that Fenton girl.”

Dorothy did not look as if she believed him. “She’s jealous of him,” he explained to me. “It’s that mother fixation.”

I asked: “Did either of you ever see the Victor Rosewater your father had trouble with back when I first knew you?”

Dorothy shook her head. Gilbert said: “No. Why?”

“Just an idea I had. I never saw him either, but the description they gave me, with some easy changes, could be made to fit your Chris Jorgensen.”

That night Nora and I went to the opening of the Radio City Music Hall, decided we had had enough of the performance after an hour, and left. “Where to?” Nora asked.

“I don’t care. Want to hunt up that Pigiron Club that Morelli told us about? You’ll like Studsy Burke. He used to be a safe-burglar. He claims to’ve cracked the safe in the Hagerstown jail while he was doing thirty days there for disorderly conduct.”

“Let’s,” she said.

We went down to Forty-ninth Street and, after asking two taxi-drivers, two newsboys, and a policeman, found the place. The doorman said he didn’t know about any Burkes, but he’d see. Studsy came to the door. “How are you, Nick?” he said. “Come on in.”

He was a powerfully built man of medium height, a little fat now, but not soft. He must have been at least fifty, but looked ten years younger than that. He had a broad, pleasantly ugly, pockmarked face under not much hair of no particular color, and even his baldness could not make his forehead seem large. His voice was a deep bass growl. I shook hands with him and introduced him to Nora.

“A wife,” he said. “Think of that. By God, you’ll drink champagne or you’ll fight me.” I said we wouldn’t fight and we went
inside. His place had a comfortably shabby look. It was between hours: there were only three customers in the place. We sat at a table in a corner and Studsy told the waiter exactly which bottle of wine to bring. Then he examined me carefully and nodded. “Marriage done you good.” He scratched his chin. “It’s a long time I don’t see you.”

“A long time,” I agreed.

“He sent me up the river,” he told Nora.

She clucked sympathetically. “Was he a good detective?”

Studsy wrinkled what forehead he had. “Folks say, but I don’t know. The once he caught me was a accident: I led with my right.”

“How come you sicked this wild man Morelli on me?” I asked.

“You know how foreigners are,” he said; “they’re hysterical. I don’t know he’s going to do nothing like that. He’s worrying about the coppers trying to hang that Wolf dame’s killing on him and we see in the paper you got something to do with it and I say to him, ‘Nick might not maybe sell his own mother out and you feel like you got to talk to somebody,’ so he says he will. What’d you do, make faces at him?”

“He let himself be spotted sneaking in and then blamed me for it. How’d he find me?”

“He’s got friends, and you wasn’t hiding, was you?”

“I’d only been in town a week and there was nothing in the paper saying where I was staying.”

“Is that so?” Studsy asked with interest. “Where you been?”

“I live in San Francisco now. How’d he find me?”

“That’s a swell town. I ain’t been there in years, but it’s one swell town. I oughtn’t tell you, Nick. Ask him. It’s his business.”

“Except that you sent him to me.”

“Well, yes,” he said, “except that, of course; but then, see, I was putting in a boost for you.” He said it seriously.

I said: “My pal.”

“How did I know he was going to blow his top? Anyways, he didn’t hurt you much, did he?”

“Maybe not, but it didn’t do me any good and I—” I stopped
as the waiter arrived with the champagne. We tasted it and said it was swell. It was pretty bad. “Think he killed the girl?” I asked.

Studsy shook his head sidewise with certainty. “No chance.”

“He’s a fellow you can persuade to shoot,” I said.

“I know—these foreigners are hysterical—but he was around here all that afternoon.”

“All?”

“All. I’ll take my oath to it. Some of the boys and girls were celebrating upstairs and I know for a fact he wasn’t off his hip, let alone out of here, all afternoon. No kidding, that’s a thing he can prove.”

“Then what was he worried about?”

“Do I know? Ain’t that what I been asking him myself? But you know how these foreigners are.”

I said: “Uh-huh. They’re hysterical. He wouldn’t’ve sent a friend around to see her, would he?”

“I think you got the boy wrong,” Studsy said. “I knew the dame. She used to come in here with him sometimes. They was just playing. He wasn’t nuts enough about her that he’d have any reason for weighting her down like that. On the level.”

“Was she on the stuff too?”

“I don’t know. I seen her take it sometimes, but maybe she was just being sociable, taking a shot because he did.”

“Who else did she play around with?”

“Nobody I know,” Studsy replied indifferently. “There was a rat named Nunheim used to come in here that was on the make for her, but he didn’t get nowhere that I could see.”

“So that’s where Morelli got my address.”

“Don’t be silly. All Morelli’d want of him would be a crack at him. What’s it to him telling the police Morelli knew the dame? A friend of yours?”

I thought it over and said: “I don’t know him. I hear he does chores for the police now and then.”

“M-m-m. Thanks.”

“Thanks for what? I haven’t said anything.”

“Fair enough. Now you tell me something: what’s all this fiddlededee about, huh? That guy Wynant killed her, didn’t he?”

“A lot of people think so,” I said, “but fifty bucks’ll get you a hundred he didn’t.”

He shook his head. “I don’t bet with you in your own racket”—his face brightened—“but I tell you what I will do and we can put some dough on it if you want. You know that time you copped me, I did lead with my right like I said, and I always wondered if you could do it again. Some time when you’re feeling well I’d like—”

I laughed and said: “No, I’m all out of condition.”

“I’m hog-fat myself,” he insisted.

“Besides, that was a fluke: you were off balance and I was set.”

“You’re just trying to let me down easy,” he said, and then more thoughtfully, “though I guess you did get the breaks at that. Well, if you won’t— Here, let me fill your glasses.”

Nora decided that she wanted to go home early and sober, so we left Studsy and his Pigiron Club at a little after eleven o’clock. He escorted us to a taxicab and shook our hands vigorously. “This has been a fine pleasure,” he told us. We said equally polite things and rode away.

Nora thought Studsy was marvelous. “Half his sentences I can’t understand at all.”

“He’s all right.”

“You didn’t tell him you’d quit gum-shoeing.”

“He’d’ve thought I was trying to put something over on him,” I explained. “To a mugg like him, once a sleuth always a sleuth, and I’d rather lie to him than have him think I’m lying. Have you got a cigarette? He really trusts me, in a way.”

“Were you telling the truth when you said Wynant didn’t kill her?”

“I don’t know. My guess is I was.”

At the Normandie there was a telegram for me from Macaulay in Allentown:

I had a stenographer in the next morning and got rid of most of the mail that had been accumulating; had a telephone conversation with our lawyer in San Francisco—we were trying to keep one of the mill’s customers from being thrown into bankruptcy; spent an hour going over a plan we had for lowering our state taxes; was altogether the busy business man, and felt pretty virtuous by two o’clock, when I knocked off work for the day and went out to lunch with Nora. She had a date to play bridge after lunch. I went down to see Guild: I had talked with him on the telephone earlier in the day.

“So it was a false alarm?” I said after we had shaken hands and made ourselves comfortable in chairs.