The Thin Man (13 page)

“No, never mind.” She shuddered. “I don’t want to hear it. Can’t you stay for dinner? I’ll probably be all alone.”

“I’m sorry I can’t. Now how about this evidence you found?”

“I didn’t really find anything. That was a lie.” She frowned earnestly. “Don’t look at me like that. It really was a lie.”

“So you sent for me just to lie to me?” I asked. “Then why’d you change your mind?”

She chuckled. “You must really like me, Nick, or you wouldn’t always be so disagreeable.”

I could not follow that line of reasoning. I said: “Well, I’ll see what Gilbert wants and run along.”

“I wish you could stay.”

“I’m sorry I can’t,” I said again. “Where’ll I find him?”

“The second door to the— Will they really arrest Chris?”

“That depends,” I told her, “on what kind of answers he gives them. He’ll have to talk pretty straight to stay out.”

“Oh, he’ll—” she broke off, looked sharply at me, asked, “You’re not playing a trick on me? He’s really that Rosewater?”

“The police are sure enough of it.”

“But the man who was here this afternoon didn’t ask a single question about Chris,” she objected. “He only asked me if I knew—”

“They weren’t sure then,” I explained. “It was just a half-idea.”

“But they’re sure now?” I nodded.

“How’d they find out?”

“From a girl he knows,” I said.

“Who?” Her eyes darkened a little, but her voice was under control.

“I can’t remember her name.” Then I went back to the truth: “The one that gave him his alibi for the afternoon of the murder.”

“Alibi?” she asked indignantly. “Do you mean to tell me the police would take the word of a girl like that?”

“Like what?”

“You know what I mean.”

“I don’t. Do you know the girl?”

“No,” she said as if I had insulted her. She narrowed her eyes and lowered her voice until it was not much more than a whisper: “Nick, do you suppose he killed Julia?”

“What would he do that for?”

“Suppose he married me to get revenge on Clyde,” she said, “and— You know he did urge me to come over here and try to get some money from Clyde. Maybe I suggested it—I don’t know—but he did urge me. And then suppose he happened to run into Julia.
She knew him, of course, because they worked for Clyde at the same time. And he knew I was going over to see her that afternoon and was afraid if I made her mad she might expose him to me and so— Couldn’t that be?”

“That doesn’t make any sense at all. Besides, you and he left here together that afternoon. He wouldn’t’ve had time to—”

“But my taxicab was awfully slow,” she said, “and then I may have stopped somewhere on—I think I did. I think I stopped at a drug store to get some aspirin.” She nodded energetically. “I remember I did.”

“And he knew you were going to stop, because you had told him,” I suggested. “You can’t go on like this, Mimi. Murder’s serious. It’s nothing to frame people for just because they played tricks on you.”

“Tricks?” she asked, glaring at me. “Why, that…” She called Jorgensen all the usual profane, obscene, and otherwise insulting names, her voice gradually rising until towards the end she was screaming into my face.

When she stopped for breath I said: “That’s pretty cursing, but it—”

“He even had the nerve to hint that I might’ve killed her,” she told me. “He didn’t have nerve enough to ask me, but he kept leading up to it until I told him positively that—well, that I didn’t do it.”

“That’s not what you started to say. You told him positively what?”

She stamped her foot. “Stop heckling me.”

“All right and to hell with you,” I said. “Coming here wasn’t my idea.” I started towards my hat and coat.

She ran after me, caught my arm. “Please, Nick, I’m sorry. It’s this rotten temper of mine. I don’t know what I—”

Gilbert came in and said: “I’ll go along part of the way with you.”

Mimi scowled at him. “You were listening.”

“How could I help it, the way you screamed?” he asked. “Can I have some money?”

“And we haven’t finished talking,” she said.

I looked at my watch. “I’ve got to run, Mimi. It’s late.”

“Will you come back after you get through with your date?”

“If it’s not too late. Don’t wait for me.”

“I’ll be here,” she said. “It doesn’t matter how late it is.” I said I would try to make it. She gave Gilbert his money. He and I went downstairs.

“I was listening,” Gilbert told me as we left the building. “I think it’s silly not to listen whenever you get a chance if you’re interested in studying people, because they’re never exactly the same as when you’re with them. People don’t like it when they know about it, of course, but”—he smiled—“I don’t suppose birds and animals like having naturalists spying on them either.”

“Hear much of it?” I asked.

“Oh, enough to know I didn’t miss any of the important part.” “And what’d you think of it?”

He pursed his lips, wrinkled his forehead, said judicially: “It’s hard to say exactly. Mamma’s good at hiding things sometimes, but she’s never much good at making them up. It’s a funny thing—I suppose you’ve noticed it—the people who lie the most are nearly always the clumsiest at it, and they’re easier to fool with lies than most people, too. You’d think they’d be on the look-out for lies, but they seem to be the very ones that will believe almost anything at all. I suppose you’ve noticed that, haven’t you?”

“Yes.”

He said: “What I wanted to tell you: Chris didn’t come home last night. That’s why Mamma’s more upset than usual, and when I got the mail this morning there was a letter for him that I thought
might have something in it, so I steamed it open.” He took a letter from his pocket and held it out to me. “You’d better read it and then I’ll seal it again and put it with tomorrow’s mail in case he comes back, though I don’t think he will.”

“Why don’t you?” I asked as I took the letter.

“Well, he’s really Rosewater”

“You say anything to him about it?”

“I didn’t have a chance. I haven’t seen him since you told me.”

I looked at the letter in my hand. The envelope was postmarked Boston, Massachusetts, December 27, 1932, and addressed in a slightly childish feminine hand to Mr. Christian Jorgensen, Courtland Apts., New York, N. Y. “How’d you happen to open it?” I asked, taking the letter out of the envelope.

“I don’t believe in intuition,” he said, “but there are probably odors, sounds, maybe something about the handwriting, that you can’t analyze, maybe aren’t even conscious of, that influence you sometimes. I don’t know what it was: I just felt there might be something important in it.”

“You often feel that way about the family’s mail?”

He glanced quickly at me as if to see whether I was spoofing, then said: “Not often, but I have opened their mail before. I told you I was interested in studying people.”

I read the letter:

There was a street address. I said, “Well, well, well,” and put the letter back in its envelope. “And you resisted the temptation to tell your mother about this?”

“Oh, I know what her reaction would be. You saw how she carried on with just what you told her. What do you think I ought to do about it?”

“You ought to let me tell the police.”

He nodded immediately. “If you think that’s the best thing. You can show it to them if you want.”

I said, “Thanks,” and put the letter in my pocket.

He said: “Now there’s another thing: I had some morphine I was experimenting with and somebody stole it, about twenty grains.”

“Experimenting how?”

“Taking it. I wanted to study the effects.”

“And how’d you like them?” I asked.

“Oh, I didn’t expect to like it. I just wanted to know about it. I don’t like things that dull my mind. That’s why I don’t very often drink, or even smoke. I want to try cocaine, though, because that’s supposed to sharpen the brain, isn’t it?”

“It’s supposed to. Who do you think copped the stuff?”

“I suspect Dorothy, because I have a theory about her. That’s why I’m going over to Aunt Alice’s for dinner: Dorry’s still there and I want to find out. I can make her tell me anything.”

“Well, if she’s been over there,” I asked, “how could she—”

“She was home for a little while last night,” he said, “and, besides, I don’t know exactly when it was taken. Today was the first time I opened the box it was in for three or four days.”

“Did she know you had it?”

“Yes. That’s one of the reasons I suspect her. I don’t think anybody else did. I experimented on her too.”

“How’d she like it?”

“Oh, she liked it all right, but she’d have taken it anyhow. But what I want to ask you is could she have become an addict in a little time like that?”

“Like what?”

“A week—no—ten days.”

“Hardly, unless she thought herself into it. Did you give her much?”

“No.”

“Let me know if you find out,” I said. “I’m going to grab a taxi here. Be seeing you.”

“You’re coming over later tonight, aren’t you?”

“If I can make it. Maybe I’ll see you then.”

“Yes,” he said, “and thanks awfully.”

At the first drug store I stopped to telephone Guild, not expecting to catch him in his office, but hoping to learn how to reach him at his home. He was still there, though. “Working late,” I said.

His “That’s what” sounded very cheerful.

I read Georgia’s letter to him, gave him her address.

“Good pickings,” he said.

I told him Jorgensen had not been home since the day before. “Think we’ll find him in Boston?” he asked.

“Either there,” I guessed, “or as far south as he could manage to get by this time.”

“We’ll try ’em both,” he said, still cheerful. “Now I got a bit of news for you. Our friend Nunheim was filled full of .32s just about an hour after he copped the sneak on us—deader’n hell. The pills look like they come from the same gun that cut down the Wolf dame. The experts are matching ’em up now. I guess he wishes he’d stayed and talked to us.”

Nora was eating a piece of cold duck with one hand and working on a jig-saw puzzle with the other when I got home.

“I thought you’d gone to live with her,” she said. “You used to be a detective: find me a brownish piece shaped something like a snail with a long neck.”

“Piece of duck or puzzle? Don’t let’s go to the Edges’ tonight: they’re dull folk.”

“All right, but they’ll be sore.”

“We wouldn’t be that lucky,” I complained. “They’d get sore at the Quinns and—”

“Harrison called you up. He told me to tell you now’s the time to buy some McIntyre Porcupine—I think that’s right—to go with your Dome stock. He said it closed at twenty and a quarter.” She put a finger on her puzzle. “The piece I want goes in there.” I found the piece she wanted and told her, almost word for word, what had been done and said at Mimi’s.

“I don’t believe it,” she said. “You made it up. There aren’t any people like that. What’s the matter with them? Are they the first of a new race of monsters?”

“I just tell you what happens; I don’t explain it.”

“How would you explain it? There doesn’t seem to be a single
one in the family—now that Mimi’s turned against her Chris—who has even the slightest reasonably friendly feeling for any of the others, and yet there’s something very alike in all of them.”