The Thin Man (11 page)

“That’s what it was. He wasn’t any more Wynant than I am. You know how it is: we told the Philly police he’d sent a wire from there and broadcasted his description, and for the next week anybody that’s skinny and maybe got whiskers is Wynant to half of the State of Pennsylvania. This was a fellow named Barlow, a carpenter out of work as near as we can figure out, that got shot by a nigger trying to stick him up. He can’t talk much yet.”

“He couldn’t’ve been shot by somebody who made the same mistake the Allentown police did?” I asked.

“You mean thought he was Wynant? I guess that could be—if it helps any. Does it?”

I said I didn’t know. “Did Macaulay tell you about the letter he got from Wynant?”

“He didn’t tell me what was in it.” I told him. I told him what I knew about Rosewater. He said: “Now, that’s interesting.”

I told him about the letter Wynant had sent his sister.

He said: “He writes a lot of people, don’t he?”

“I thought of that.” I told him Victor Rosewater’s description with a few easy changes would fit Christian Jorgensen.

He said: “It don’t hurt any to listen to a man like you. Don’t let me stop you.” I told him that was the crop.

He rocked back in his chair and screwed his pale gray eyes up at the ceiling. “There’s some work to be done there,” he said presently.

“Was this fellow in Allentown shot with a .32?” I asked.

Guild stared curiously at me for a moment, then shook his head. “A .44. You got something on your mind?”

“No. Just chasing the set-up around in my head.”

He said, “I know what that is,” and leaned back to look at the ceiling some more. When he spoke again it was as if he was thinking of something else. “That alibi of Macaulay’s you was asking about is all right. He was late for a date then and we know for a fact he was in a fellow’s office named Hermann on Fifty-seventh Street from five minutes after three till twenty after, the time that counts.”

“What’s the five minutes after three?”

“That’s right, you don’t know about that. Well, we found a fellow named Caress with a cleaning and dyeing place on First Avenue that called her up at five minutes after three to ask her if she had any work for him, and she said no and told him she was liable to gp away. So that narrows the time down to from three five to three twenty. You ain’t really suspicious of Macaulay?”

“I’m suspicious of everybody,” I said. “Where were you between three five and three twenty?”

He laughed. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “I’m just about the only one of the lot that ain’t got an alibi. I was at the moving pictures.”

“The rest of them have?”

He wagged his head up and down. “Jorgensen left his place with Mrs. Jorgensen—that was about five minutes to three—and sneaked over on West Seventy-third Street to see a girl named Olga Fenton—we promised not to tell his wife—and stayed there till about five. We know what Mrs. Jorgensen did. The daughter was dressing when they left and she took a taxi at a quarter past and went straight to Bergdorf-Goodman’s. The son was in the Public Library all afternoon—Jesus, he reads funny books. Morelli was in a joint over in the Forties.” He laughed. “And where was you?”

“I’m saving mine till I really need it. None of those look too air-tight, but legitimate alibis seldom do. How about Nunheim?”

Guild seemed surprised. “What makes you think of him?”

“I hear he had a yen for the girl.”

“And where’d you hear it?”

“I heard it.”

He scowled. “Would you say it was reliable?”

“Yes.”

“Well,” he said slowly, “he’s one guy we can check up on. But look here, what do you care about these people? Don’t you think Wynant done it?”

I gave him the same odds I had given Studsy: “Twenty-five’ll get you fifty he didn’t.”

He scowled at me over that for a long silent moment, then said: “That’s an idea, anyways. Who’s your candidate?”

“I haven’t got that far yet. Understand, I don’t know anything. I’m not saying Wynant didn’t do it. I’m just saying everything doesn’t point at him.”

“And saying it two to one. What don’t point at him?”

“Call it a hunch, if you want,” I said, “but—”

“I don’t want to call it anything,” he said. “I think you’re a smart detective. I want to listen to what you got to say.”

“Mostly I’ve got questions to say. For instance, how long was it from the time the elevator boy let Mrs. Jorgensen off at the Wolf girl’s floor until she rang for him and said she heard groans?”

Guild pursed his lips, opened them to ask, “You think she might’ve—?” and left the rest of the question hanging in the air.

“I think she might’ve. I’d like to know where Nunheim was. I’d like to know the answers to the questions in Wynant’s letter. I’d like to know where the four-thousand-dollar difference between what Macaulay gave the girl and what she seems to have given Wynant went. I’d like to know where her engagement ring came from.”

“We’re doing the best we can,” Guild said. “Me—just now I’d like to know why, if he didn’t do it, Wynant don’t come in and answer questions for us.”

“One reason might be that Mrs. Jorgensen’d like to slam him in the squirrel cage again.” I thought of something. “Herbert Macaulay’s working for Wynant: you didn’t just take Macaulay’s word for it that the man in Allentown wasn’t him?”

“No. He was a younger man than Wynant, with damned little gray in his hair and no dye, and he didn’t look like the pictures we got.” He seemed positive. “You got anything to do the next hour or so?”

“No.”

“That’s fine.” He stood up. “I’ll get some of the boys working on these things we been discussing and then maybe me and you will pay some visits.”

“Swell,” I said, and he went out of the office.

There was a copy of the
Times
in his wastebasket. I fished it out and turned to the Public Notices columns. Macaulay’s advertisement was there:
“Abner. Yes. Bunny.”

When Guild returned I asked: “How about Wynant’s help, whoever he had working in the shop? Have they been looked up?”

“Uh-huh, but they don’t know anything. They was laid off at the end of the week that he went away—there’s two of them—and haven’t seen him since.”

“What were they working on when the shop was closed?”

“Some kind of paint or something—something about a permanent green. I don’t know. I’ll find out if you want.”

“I don’t suppose it matters. Is it much of a shop?”

“Looks like a pretty good layout, far as I can tell. You think the shop might have something to do with it?”

“Anything might.”

“Uh-huh. Well, let’s run along.”

“First thing,” Guild said as we left his office, “we’ll go see Mr. Nunheim. He ought to be home: I told him to stick around till I phoned him.”

Mr. Nunheim’s home was on the fourth floor of a dark, damp, and smelly building made noisy by the Sixth Avenue elevated. Guild knocked on the door. There were sounds of hurried movement inside, then a voice asked: “Who is it?” The voice was a man’s, nasal, somewhat irritable.

Guild said: “John.”

The door was hastily opened by a small sallow man of thirty-five or -six whose visible clothes were an undershirt, blue pants, and black silk stockings. “I wasn’t expecting you, Lieutenant,” he whined. “You said you’d phone.” He seemed frightened. His dark eyes were small and set close together; his mouth was wide, thin, and loose; and his nose was peculiarly limber, a long, drooping nose, apparently boneless.

Guild touched my elbow with his hand and we went in. Through an open door to the left an unmade bed could be seen. The room we entered was a living-room, shabby and dirty, with clothing, newspapers, and dirty dishes sitting around. In an alcove to the right there was a sink and a stove. A woman stood between
them holding a sizzling skillet in her hand. She was a big-boned, full-fleshed, red-haired woman of perhaps twenty-eight, handsome in a rather brutal, sloppy way. She wore a rumpled pink kimono and frayed pink mules with lopsided bows on them. She stared sullenly at us. Guild did not introduce me to Nunheim and he paid no attention to the woman. “Sit down,” he said, and pushed some clothing out of the way to make a place for himself on an end of the sofa.

I removed part of a newspaper from a rocking-chair and sat down. Since Guild kept his hat on I did the same with mine. Nunheim went over to the table, where there was about two inches of whisky in a pint bottle and a couple of tumblers, and said: “Have a shot?”

Guild made a face. “Not that vomit. What’s the idea of telling me you just knew the Wolf girl by sight?”

“That’s all I did, Lieutenant, that’s the Christ’s truth.” Twice his eyes slid sidewise towards me and he jerked them back. “Maybe I said hello to her or how are you or something like that when I saw her, but that’s all I knew her. That’s the Christ’s truth.”

The woman in the alcove laughed, once, derisively, and there was no merriment in her face. Nunheim twisted himself around to face her. “All right,” he told her, his voice shrill with rage, “put your mouth in and I’ll pop a tooth out of it.” She swung her arm and let the skillet go at his head. It missed, crashing into the wall. Grease and eggyolks made fresher stains on the wall, floor, and furniture. He started for her. I did not have to rise to put out a foot and trip him. He tumbled down on the floor. The woman had picked up a paring knife.

“Cut it out,” Guild growled. He had not stood up either. “We come here to talk to you, not to watch this roughhouse comedy. Get up and behave yourself.”

Nunheim got slowly to his feet. “She drives me nuts when she’s drinking,” he said. “She’s been ragging me all day.” He moved his right hand back and forth. “I think I sprained my wrist.” The
woman walked past us without looking at any of us, went into the bedroom, and shut the door.

Guild said: “Maybe if you’d quit sucking around after other women you wouldn’t have so much trouble with this one.”

“What do you mean, Lieutenant?” Nunheim was surprised and innocent and perhaps pained.

“Julia Wolf.”

The little sallow man was indignant now. “That’s a lie, Lieutenant. Anybody that say I ever—”

Guild interrupted him by addressing me: “If you want to take a poke at him, I wouldn’t stop on account of his bum wrist: he couldn’t ever hit hard anyhow.”

Nunheim turned to me with both hands out. “I didn’t mean you were a liar. I meant maybe somebody made a mistake if they—”

Guild interrupted him again: “You wouldn’t’ve taken her if you could’ve gotten her?”

Nunheim moistened his lower lip and looked warily at the bedroom door. “Well,” he said slowly in a cautiously low voice, “of course she was a classy number. I guess I wouldn’t’ve turned it down.”

“But you never tried to make her?”

Nunheim hesitated, then moved his shoulders and said: “You know how it is. A fellow knocking around tries most everything he runs into.”

Guild looked sourly at him. “You’d’ve done better to tell me that in the beginning. Where were you the afternoon she was knocked off?”

The little man jumped as if he had been stuck with a pin. “For Christ’s sake, Lieutenant, you don’t think I had anything to do with that. What would I want to hurt her for?”

“Where were you?”

Nunheim’s loose lips twitched nervously. “What day was she—” He broke off as the bedroom door opened. The big woman came out carrying a suitcase. She had put on street clothes.

“Miriam,” Nunheim said.

She stared at him dully and said: “I don’t like crooks, and even if I did, I wouldn’t like crooks that are stool-pigeons, and if I liked crooks that are stool-pigeons, I still wouldn’t like you.” She turned to the outer door.

Guild, catching Nunheim’s arm to keep him from following the woman, repeated: “Where were you?”

Nunheim called: “Miriam. Don’t go. I’ll behave, I’ll do anything. Don’t go, Miriam.” She went out and shut the door.

“Let me go,” he begged Guild. “Let me bring her back. I can’t get along without her. I’ll bring her right back and tell you anything you want to know. Let me go. I’ve got to have her.”

Guild said: “Nuts. Sit down.” He pushed the little man down in a chair. “We didn’t come here to watch you and that broad dance around a maypole. Where were you the afternoon the girl was killed?”

Nunheim put his hands over his face and began to cry. “Keep on stalling,” Guild said, “and I’m going to slap you silly.” I poured some whisky in a tumbler and gave it to Nunheim.

“Thank you, sir, thank you.” He drank it, coughed, and brought out a dirty handkerchief to wipe his face with. “I can’t remember offhand, Lieutenant,” he whined. “Maybe I was over at Charlie’s shooting pool, maybe I was here. Miriam would remember if you’ll let me go bring her back.”

Guild said: “The hell with Miriam. How’d you like to be thrown in the can on account of not remembering?”

“Just give me a minute. I’ll remember. I’m not stalling, Lieutenant. You know I always come clean with you. I’m just upset now. Look at my wrist.” He held up his right wrist to let us see it was swelling. “Just one minute.” He put his hands over his face again. Guild winked at me and we waited for the little man’s memory to work.