The Thin Man (25 page)

“But that seems so loose.”

“When the murders are committed by mathematicians,” I said, “you can solve them by mathematics. Most of them aren’t and this one wasn’t. I don’t want to go against your idea of what’s right and wrong, but when I say he probably dissected the body so he could carry it into town in bags I’m only saying what seems most probable.
That would be on the 6th of October or later, because it wasn’t until then that he laid off the two mechanics Wynant had working in the shop—Prentice and McNaughton—and shut it up. So he buried Wynant under the floor, buried him with a fat man’s clothes and a lame man’s stick and a belt marked D. W. Q., all arranged so they wouldn’t get too much of the lime—or whatever he used to eat off the dead man’s features and flesh—on them, and he re-cemented the floor over the grave. Between police routine and publicity we’ve got more than a fair chance of finding out where he bought or otherwise got the clothes and stick and the cement.” (We traced the cement to him later—he had bought it from a coal and wood dealer uptown—but had no luck with the other things.)

“I hope so,” she said, not too hopefully.

“So now that’s taken care of. By renewing the lease on the shop and keeping it vacant—supposedly waiting for Wynant to return—he can make sure—reasonably sure—that nobody will discover the grave, and if it is accidentally discovered, then fat Mr. D. W. Q.—by that time Wynant’s bones would be pretty bare and you can’t tell whether a man was thin or fat by his skeleton—was murdered by Wynant, which explains why Wynant has made himself scarce. That taken care of, Macaulay forges the power of attorney and, with Julia’s help, settles down to the business of gradually transferring the late Clyde’s money to themselves. Now I’m going theoretical again. Julia doesn’t like murder, and she’s frightened, and he’s not too sure she won’t weaken on him. That’s why he makes her break with Morelli—giving Wynant’s jealousy as an excuse. He’s afraid she might confide to Morelli in a weak moment and, as the time draws near for her still closer friend, Face Peppler, to get out of prison, he gets more and more worried. He’s been safe there as long as Face stayed in, because she’s not likely to put anything dangerous in a letter that has to pass through the warden’s hands, but now … Well, he starts to plan, and then all hell breaks loose. Mimi and her children arrive and start hunting for Wynant and I come to town and am in touch with them and he thinks I’m helping
them. He decides to play safe on Julia by putting her out of the way. Like it so far?”

“Yes, but …”

“It gets worse as it goes along,” I assured her. “On his way here for lunch that day he stops and phones his office, pretending he’s Wynant, and making that appointment at the Plaza, the idea being to establish Wynant’s presence in town. When he leaves here he goes to the Plaza and asks people if they’ve seen Wynant, to make that plausible, and for the same reason phones his office to ask if any further word has come in from Wynant, and phones Julia. She tells him she’s expecting Mimi and she tells him Mimi thought she was lying when she said she didn’t know where Wynant was, and Julia probably sounds pretty frightened. So he decides he’s got to beat Mimi to the interview and he does. He beats it over there and kills her. He’s a terrible shot. I saw him shoot during the war. It’s likely he missed her with the first shot, the one that hit the telephone, and didn’t succeed in killing her right away with the other four, but he probably thought she was dead, and, anyhow, he had to get out before Mimi arrived, so he dropped the piece of Wynant’s chain that he had brought along as a clincher—and his having saved that for three months makes it look as if he’d intended killing her from the beginning—and scoots over to the engineer Hermann’s office, where he takes advantage of the breaks and fixes himself up with an alibi. The two things he doesn’t expect—couldn’t very well have foreseen—are that Nunheim, hanging around trying to get at the girl, had seen him leave her apartment—may even have heard the shots—and that Mimi, with blackmail in her heart, was going to conceal the chain for use in shaking down her ex-husband. That’s why he had to go down to Philadelphia and send me that wire and the letter to himself and one to Aunt Alice later—if Mimi thinks Wynant’s throwing suspicion on her she’ll get mad enough to give the police the evidence she’s got against him. Her desire to hurt Jorgensen nearly gummed that up, though. Macaulay, by the way, knew Jorgensen was Rosewater. Right after he killed Wynant
he had detectives look Mimi and her family up in Europe—their interest in the estate made them potentially dangerous—and the detectives found out who Jorgensen was. We found the reports in Macaulay’s files. He pretended he was getting the information for Wynant, of course. Then he started worrying about me, about my not thinking Wynant guilty and—”

“And why didn’t you?”

“Why should he write letters antagonizing Mimi, the one who was helping him by holding back incriminating evidence? That’s why I thought the chain had been planted when she did turn it in, only I was a little bit too willing to believe she had done the planting. Morelli worried Macaulay, too, because he didn’t want suspicion thrown on anybody who might, in clearing themselves, throw it in the wrong direction. Mimi was all right, because she’d throw it back on Wynant, but everybody else was out. Suspicion thrown on Wynant was the one thing that was guaranteed to keep anybody from suspecting that Wynant was dead, and if Macaulay hadn’t killed Wynant, then there was no reason for his having killed either of the others. The most obvious thing in the whole layout and the key to the whole layout was that Wynant had to be dead.”

“You mean you thought that from the beginning?” Nora demanded, fixing me with a stern eye.

“No, darling, though I ought to be ashamed of myself for not seeing it, but once I heard there was a corpse under the floor, I wouldn’t have cared if doctors swore it was a woman’s, I’d have insisted it was Wynant’s. It had to be. It was the right thing.”

“I guess you’re awfully tired. That must be what makes you talk like this.”

“Then he had Nunheim to worry about too. After pointing the finger at Morelli, just to show the police he was being useful, he went to see Macaulay. I’m guessing again, sweetheart. I had a phone-call from a man who called himself Albert Norman, and the conversation ended with a noise on his end of the wire. My guess is that Nunheim went to see Macaulay and demanded some dough to keep quiet and, when Macaulay tried to bluff him, Nunheim said
he’d show him and called me up to make a date with me to see if I’d buy his information—and Macaulay grabbed the phone and gave Nunheim something, if only a promise, but when Guild and I had our little talk with Nunheim, and he ran out on us, then he phoned Macaulay and demanded real action, probably a lump sum, with a promise to beat it out of town, away from us meddling sleuths. We do know he called up that afternoon—Macaulay’s telephone-operator remembers a Mr. Albert Norman calling up, and she remembers that Macaulay went out right after talking to him, so don’t get snooty about this—uh—reconstruction of mine. Macaulay wasn’t silly enough to think Nunheim was to be trusted even if he paid him, so he lured him down to this spot he had probably picked out ahead of time and let him have it—and that took care of that.”

“Probably,” Nora said.

“It’s a word you’ve got to use a lot in this business. The letter to Gilbert was only for the purpose of showing that Wynant had a key to the girl’s apartment, and sending Gilbert there was only a way of making sure that he’d fall into the hands of the police, who’d squeeze him and not let him keep the information about the letter and the key to himself. Then Mimi finally comes through with the watch-chain, but meanwhile another worry comes up. She’s persuaded Guild to suspect me a little. I’ve an idea that when Macaulay came to me this morning with that hooey he intended to get me up to Scarsdale and knock me off, making me number three on the list of Wynant’s victims. Maybe he just changed his mind, maybe he thought I was suspicious, too willing to go up there without policemen. Anyhow, Gilbert’s lie about having seen Wynant gave him another idea. If he could get somebody to say they had seen Wynant and stick to it … Now this part we know definitely.”

“Thank God.”

“He went to see Mimi this afternoon—riding up two floors above hers and walking down so the elevator boys wouldn’t remember having carried him to her floor—and made her a proposition. He told her there was no question about Wynant’s guilt, but that it was doubtful if the police would ever catch him. Meanwhile, he,
Macaulay, had the whole estate in his hands. He couldn’t take a chance on appropriating any of it, but he’d fix it so she could—if she would split with him. He’d give her these bonds he had in his pocket and this check, but she’d have to say that Wynant had given them to her and she’d have to send this note, which he also had, over to Macaulay as if from Wynant. He assured her that Wynant, a fugitive, could not show up to deny his gift, and, except for herself and her children, there was no one else who had any interest in the estate, any reason for questioning the deal. Mimi’s not very sensible where she sees a chance to make a profit, so it was all O.K. with her, and he had what he wanted—somebody who’d seen Wynant alive. He warned her that everybody would think Wynant was paying her for some service, but if she simply denied it there would be nothing anybody could prove.”

“Then what he told you this morning about Wynant instructing him to give her any amount she asked for was simply in preparation?”

“Maybe, maybe it was an earlier fumbling towards that idea. Now are you satisfied with what we’ve got on him?”

“Yes, in a way. There seems to be enough of it, but it’s not very neat.”

“It’s neat enough to send him to the chair,” I said, “and that’s all that counts. It takes care of all the angles and I can’t think of any other theory that would. Naturally it wouldn’t hurt to find the pistol, and the typewriter he used for the Wynant letters, and they must be somewhere around where he can get at them when he needs them. (We found them in the Brooklyn apartment he had rented as George Foley.)

“Have it your own way,” she said, “but I always thought detectives waited until they had every little detail fixed in—”

“And then wonder why the suspect’s had time to get to the farthest country that has no extradition treaty.”

She laughed. “All right, all right. Still want to leave for San Francisco tomorrow?”

“Not unless you’re in a hurry. Let’s stick around awhile. This excitement has put us behind in our drinking.”

“It’s all right by me. What do you think will happen to Mimi and Dorothy and Gilbert now?”

“Nothing new. They’ll go on being Mimi and Dorothy and Gilbert just as you and I will go on being us and the Quinns will go on being the Quinns. Murder doesn’t round out anybody’s life except the murdered’s and sometimes the murderer’s.”

“That may be,” Nora said, “but it’s all pretty unsatisfactory.”

Dashiell Hammett was born in St. Marys County, Maryland, in 1894. He grew up in Philadelphia and Baltimore. He left school at the age of fourteen and held several kinds of jobs thereafter—messenger boy, newsboy, clerk, timekeeper, yardman, machine operator, and stevedore. He finally became an operative for Pinkerton’s Detective Agency.

World War I, in which he served as a sergeant, interrupted his sleuthing and injured his health. When he was finally discharged from the last of several hospitals, he resumed detective work. Subsequently, he turned to writing, and in the late 1920s he became the unquestioned master of detective-story fiction in America. During World War II, Mr. Hammett again served as a sergeant in the Army, this time for more than two years, most of which he spent in the Aleutians. He died in 1961.

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