The Thin Man

2

The next day Herbert Macaulay telephoned me. “Hello. I didn't know you were back in town till Dorothy Wynant told me. How about lunch?"

“What time is it?”

“Half past eleven. Did I wake you up?”

“Yes,” I said, “but that's all right. Suppose you come up here for lunch: I've got a hangover and don't feel like running around much. . . . O.K., say one o'clock.”

I had a drink with Nora, who was going out to have her hair washed, then another after a shower, and was feeling better by the time the telephone rang again.

A female voice asked: “Is Mr. Macaulay there?”

“Not yet.”

“Sorry to trouble you, but would you mind asking him to call his office as soon as he gets there? It's important.”

I promised to do that.

Macaulay arrived about ten minutes later. He was a big curly-haired, tosy-cheeked, rather good-looking chap of about my age—forty-one— though he looked younger. He was supposed to be a pretty good lawyer. I had worked on several jobs for him when I was living in New York and we had always got along nicely.

Now we shook hands and patted each other's backs, and he asked me how the world was treating me, and I said, “Fine,” and asked him and he said, “Fine,” and I told him to call his office.

He came away from the telephone frowning. “Wynant's back in town,” he said, “and wants me to meet him.”

I turned around with the drinks I had poured. “Well, the lunch can—”

“Let him wait,” he said, and took one of the glasses from me.

“Still as screwy as ever?”

“That's no joke,” Macaulay said solemnly. “You heard they had him in a sanatorium for nearly a year back in '29?”

“No.”

He nodded. He sat down, put his glass on a table beside his chair, and leaned towards me a little. “What's Mimi up to, Charles?”

'Mimi? Oh, the wife—the ex-wife. I don't know. Does she have to be up to something?”

“She usually is,” he said dryly, and then very slowly, “and I thought you'd know.”

So that was it. I said: “Listen, Mac, I haven't been a detective for six years, since 1927.”

He stared at me.

“On the level,” I assured him, “a year after I got married, my wife's father died and left her a lumber mill and a narrow-gauge railroad and some other things and I quit the Agency to look after them. Anyway I wouldn't be working for Mimi Wynant, or Jorgensen, or whatever her name is—she never liked me and I never liked her.”

“Oh, I didn't think you—” Macaulay broke off with a vague gesture and picked up his glass. When he took it away from his mouth, he said: “I was just wondering. Here Mimi phones me three days ago—Tuesday— trying to find Wynant; then yesterday Dorothy phones, saying you told her to, and comes around, and—I thought you were still sleuthing, so I was wondering what it was all about.”

“Didn't they tell you?”

“Sure—they wanted to see him for old times' sake. That means a lot.”

“You lawyers are a suspicious crew,” I said. “Maybe they did—that and money. But what's the fuss about? Is he in hiding?”

Macaulay shrugged. “You know as much about it as I do. I haven't seen him since October.” He drank again. “How long are you going to be in town?”

“Till after New Year's,” I told him and went to the telephone to ask room service for menus.