The Thin Man (4 page)

“Charles isn’t a Greek name.”

“It’s Charalambides,” I explained. “When the old man came over, the mugg that put him through Ellis Island said Charalambides was too long—too much trouble to write—and whittled it down to Charles. It was all right with the old man; they could have called him X so they let him in.”

Dorothy stared at me. “I never know when you’re lying.” She started to put on the stocking, stopped. “What’s Mamma trying to do to you?”

“Nothing. Pump me. She’d like to know what you did and said last night.”

“I thought so. What’d you tell her?”

“What could I tell her? You don’t do or say anything.”

She wrinkled her forehead over that, but when she spoke again it was about something else: “I never knew there was anything
between you and Mamma. Of course I was only a kid then and wouldn’t have known what it was all about even if I’d noticed anything, but I didn’t even know you called each other by your first names.”

Nora turned from the mirror laughing. “Now we’re getting somewhere.” She waved the comb at Dorothy. “Go on, dear.”

Dorothy said earnestly: “Well, I didn’t know.”

I was taking laundry pins out of a shirt. “What do you know now?” I asked.

“Nothing,” she said slowly, and her face began to grow pink, “but I can guess.” She bent over her stocking.

“Can and do,” I growled. “You’re a dope, but don’t look so embarrassed. You can’t help it if you’ve got a dirty mind.”

She raised her head and laughed, but when she asked, “Do you think I take after Mamma much?” she was serious.

“I wouldn’t be surprised.”

“But do you?”

“You want me to say no. No.”

“That’s what I have to live with,” Nora said cheerfully. “You can’t do anything with him.”

I finished dressing first and went out to the living-room. Mimi was sitting on Jorgensen’s knee. She stood up and asked: “What’d you get for Christmas?”

“Nora gave me a watch.” I showed it to her.

She said it was lovely, and it was. “What’d you give her?”

“Necklace.”

Jorgensen said, “May I?” and rose to mix himself a drink.

The doorbell rang. I let the Quinns and Margot Innes in, introduced them to the Jorgensens. Presently Nora and Dorothy finished dressing and came out of the bedroom, and Quinn attached himself to Dorothy. Larry Crowley arrived with a girl named Denis, and a few minutes later the Edges. I won thirty-two dollars—on the cuff—from Margot at backgammon. The Denis girl had to go into the bedroom and lie down awhile. Alice Quinn, with Margot’s help, tore her husband away from Dorothy at a little after six and carried
him off to keep a date they had. The Edges left. Mimi put on her coat, got her husband and daughter into their coats.

“It’s awful short notice,” she said, “but can’t you come to dinner tomorrow night?”

Nora said: “Certainly.” We shook hands and made polite speeches all around and they went away. Nora shut the door after them and leaned her back against it. “Jesus, he’s a handsome guy,” she said.

So far I had known just where I stood on the Wolf-Wynant-Jorgensen troubles and what I was doing—the answers were, respectively, nowhere and nothing—but when we stopped at Reuben’s for coffee on our way home at four the next morning, Nora opened a newspaper and found a line in one of the gossip columns: “Nick Charles, former Trans-American Detective Agency ace, on from Coast to sift the Julia Wolf murder mystery”; and when I opened my eyes and sat up in bed some six hours later Nora was shaking me and a man with a gun in his hand was standing in the bedroom doorway.

He was a plump dark youngish man of medium height, broad through the jaws, narrow between the eyes. He wore a black derby hat, a black overcoat that fitted him very snugly, a dark suit, and black shoes, all looking as if he had bought them within the past fifteen minutes. The gun, a blunt black .38-calibre automatic, lay comfortably in his hand, not pointing at anything. Nora was saying: “He made me let him in, Nick. He said he had to—”

“I got to talk to you,” the man with the gun said. “That’s all, but I got to do that.” His voice was low, rasping. I had blinked myself awake by then. I looked at Nora. She was excited, but apparently
not frightened: she might have been watching a horse she had a bet on coming down the stretch with a nose lead.

I said: “All right, talk, but do you mind putting the gun away? My wife doesn’t care, but I’m pregnant and I don’t want the child to be born with—”

He smiled with his lower lip. “You don’t have to tell me you’re tough. I heard about you.” He put the pistol in his overcoat pocket. “I’m Shep Morelli.”

“I never heard about you,” I said.

He took a step into the room and began to shake his head from side to side. “I didn’t knock Julia off.”

“Maybe you didn’t, but you’re bringing the news to the wrong place. I got nothing to do with it.”

“I haven’t seen her in three months,” he said. “We were washed up.”

“Tell the police.”

“I wouldn’t have any reason to hurt her: she was always on the up and up with me.”

“That’s all swell,” I said, “only you’re peddling your fish in the wrong market.”

“Listen.” He took another step towards the bed. “Studsy Burke tells me you used to be O.K. That’s why I’m here. Do the—”

“How is Studsy?” I asked. “I haven’t seen him since the time he went up the river in ’23 or ’24.”

“He’s all right. He’d like to see you. He’s got a joint on West Forty-ninth, the Pigiron Club. But listen, what’s the law doing to me? Do they think I did it? Or is it just something else to pin on me?”

I shook my head. “I’d tell you if I knew. Don’t let newspapers fool you: I’m not in this. Ask the police.”

“That’d be very smart.” He smiled with his lower lip again. “That’d be the smartest thing I ever did. Me that a police captain’s been in a hospital three weeks on account we had an argument. The boys would like me to come in and ask ’em questions. They’d
like it right down to the end of their blackjacks.” He turned a hand over, palm up. “I come to you on the level. Studsy says you’re on the level. Be on the level.”

“I’m being on the level,” I assured him. “If I knew anything I’d—”

Knuckles drummed on the corridor door, three times, sharply. Morelli’s gun was in his hand before the noise stopped. His eyes seemed to move in all directions at once. His voice was a metallic snarl deep in his chest: “Well?”

“I don’t know.” I sat up a little higher in bed and nodded at the gun in his hand. “That makes it your party.” The gun pointed very accurately at my chest. I could hear the blood in my ears, and my lips felt swollen. I said: “There’s no fire-escape.” I put my left hand out towards Nora, who was sitting on the far side of the bed.

The knuckles hit the door again, and a deep voice called: “Open up. Police.”

Morelli’s lower lip crawled up to lap the upper, and the whites of his eyes began to show under the irises. “You son of a bitch,” he said slowly, almost as if he were sorry for me. He moved his feet the least bit, flattening them against the floor.

A key touched the outer lock. I hit Nora with my left hand, knocking her down across the room. The pillow I chucked with my right hand at Morelli’s gun seemed to have no weight; it drifted slow as a piece of tissue paper. No noise in the world, before or after, was ever as loud as Morelli’s gun going off. Something pushed my left side as I sprawled across the floor. I caught one of his ankles and rolled over with it, bringing him down on me, and he clubbed my back with the gun until I got a hand free and began to hit him as low in the body as I could.

Men came in and dragged us apart. It took us five minutes to bring Nora to. She sat up holding her cheek and looked around the room until she saw Morelli, nippers on one wrist, standing between two detectives. Morelli’s face was a mess: the coppers had worked him over a little just for the fun of it. Nora glared at me. “You
damned fool,” she said, “you didn’t have to knock me cold. I knew you’d take him, but I wanted to see it.”

One of the coppers laughed. “Jesus,” he said admiringly, “there’s a woman with hair on her chest.”

She smiled at him and stood up. When she looked at me she stopped smiling. “Nick, you’re—” I said I didn’t think it was much and opened what was left of my pyjama-coat. Morelli’s bullet had scooped out a gutter perhaps four inches long under my left nipple. A lot of blood was running out of it, but it was not very deep.

Morelli said: “Tough luck. A couple of inches over would make a lot of difference the right way.” The copper who had admired Nora—he was a big sandy man of forty-eight or fifty in a gray suit that did not fit him very well—slapped Morelli’s mouth.

Keyser, the Normandie’s manager, said he would get a doctor and went to the telephone. Nora ran to the bathroom for towels. I put a towel over the wound and lay down on the bed. “I’m all right. Don’t let’s fuss over it till the doctor comes. How’d you people happen to pop in?”

The copper who had slapped Morelli said: “We happen to hear this is getting to be kind of a meeting-place for Wynant’s family and his lawyer and everybody, so we think we’ll kind of keep an eye on it in case he happens to show up, and this morning when Mack here, who was the eye we were kind of keeping on it at the time, sees this bird duck in, he gives us a ring and we get hold of Mr. Keyser and come on up, and pretty lucky for you.”

“Yes, pretty lucky for me, or maybe I wouldn’t’ve got shot.”

He eyed me suspiciously. His eyes were pale gray and watery. “This bird a friend of yours?”

“I never saw him before.”

“What’d he want of you?”

“Wanted to tell me he didn’t kill the Wolf girl.”

“What’s that to you?”

“Nothing.”

“What’d he think it was to you?”

“Ask him. I don’t know.”

“I’m asking you.”

“Keep on asking.”

“I’ll ask you another one: you’re going to swear to the complaint on him shooting you?”

“That’s another one I can’t answer right now. Maybe it was an accident.”

“Oke. There’s plenty of time. I guess we got to ask you a lot more things than we’d figured on.” He turned to one of his companions: there were four of them. “We’ll frisk the joint.”

“Not without a warrant,” I told him.

“So you say. Come on, Andy.” They began to search the place.

The doctor—a colorless wisp of a man with the snuffles—came in, clucked and sniffed over my side, got the bleeding stopped and a bandage on, and told me I would have nothing to worry about if I lay still for a couple of days. Nobody would tell the doctor anything. The police would not let him touch Morelli. He went away looking even more colorless and vague. The big sandy man had returned from the living-room holding one hand behind him. He waited until the doctor had gone, then asked: “Have you got a pistol permit?”

“No.”

“Then what are you doing with this?” He brought from behind him the gun I had taken from Dorothy Wynant. There was nothing I could say.

“You’ve heard about the Sullivan Act?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Then you know where you stand. This gun yours?”

“No.”

“Whose is it?”

“I’ll have to try to remember.”

He put the pistol in his pocket and sat down on a chair beside the bed. “Listen, Mr. Charles,” he said. “I guess we’re both of us doing this wrong. I don’t want to get tough with you and I don’t
guess you really want to get tough with me. That hole in your side can’t be making you feel any too good, so I ain’t going to bother you any more till you’ve had a little rest. Then maybe we can get together the way we ought to.”

“Thanks,” I said and meant it. “We’ll buy a drink.”

Nora said, “Sure,” and got up from the edge of the bed.

The big sandy man watched her go out of the room. He shook his head solemnly. His voice was solemn: “By God, sir, you’re a lucky man.” He suddenly held out his hand. “My name’s Guild, John Guild.”

“You know mine.” We shook hands.

Nora came back with a siphon, a bottle of Scotch, and some glasses on a tray. She tried to give Morelli a drink, but Guild stopped her. “It’s mighty kind of you, Mrs. Charles, but it’s against the law to give a prisoner drinks or drugs except on a doctor’s say-so.” He looked at me. “Ain’t that right?” I said it was. The rest of us drank.

Presently Guild set down his empty glass and stood up. “I got to take this gun along with me, but don’t you worry about that. We got plenty of time to talk when you’re feeling better.” He took Nora’s hand and made an awkward bow over it. “I hope you didn’t mind what I said back there awhile ago, but I meant it in a—”

Nora can smile very nicely. She gave him one of her nicest smiles. “Mind? I liked it.” She let the policemen and their prisoner out. Keyser had gone a few minutes before.

“He’s sweet,” she said when she came back from the door. “Hurt much?”

“No.”

“It’s pretty much my fault, isn’t it?”

“Nonsense. How about another drink?”

She poured me one. “I wouldn’t take too many of these today.”

“I won’t,” I promised. “I could do with some kippers for breakfast. And, now our troubles seem to be over for a while, you might have them send up our absentee watchdog. And tell the operator not to give us any calls; there’ll probably be reporters.”