The Thin Man

20

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 Q uinns 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.”

“Maybe that explains it,” I suggested.

“I'd like to see Aunt Alice,” she said. “Are you going to turn that letter over to the police?”

“I've already phoned Guild,” I replied, and told her about Nunheim.

“What does that mean?” she asked.

“For one thing, if Jorgensen's out of town, as I think he is, and the bullets are from the same gun that was used on Julia Wolf, and they probably are, then the police'll have to find his accomplice if they want to hang anything on him.”

“I'm sure if you were a good detective you'd be able to make it much clearer to me than it is.” She went to work on her puzzle again. “Are you going back to see Mimi?”

“I doubt it. How about letting that dido rest while we get some dinner?”

The telephone rang and I said I would get it. It was Dorothy Wynant. “Hello. Nick?”

“The same. How are you, Dorothy?”

“Gil just got here and asked me about that you-know, and I wanted to tell you I did take it, but I only took it to try to keep him from becoming a dope-fiend.”

“What'd you do with it?” I asked.

“He made me give it back to him and he doesn't believe me, but, honestly, that's the only reason I took it.”

“I believe you.”

“Will you tell Gil, then? If you believe me, he will, because he thinks you know all about things like that.”

“I'll tell him as soon as I see him,” I promised.

There was a pause, then she asked: “How's Nora?”

“Looks all right to me. Want to talk to her?”

“Well, yes, but there's something I want to ask you. Did—did Mamma say anything about me when you were over there today?”

“Not that I remember. Why?”

“And did Gil?”

“Only about the morphine.”

“Are you sure?”

“Pretty sure,” I said. “Why?”

“It's nothing, really—if you're sure. It's just silly.”

“Right. I'll call Nora.” I went into the living-room. “Dorothy wants to talk to you. Don't ask her to eat with us.”

When Nora returned from the telephone she had a look in her eye.

“Now what's up?” I asked.

“Nothing. Just 'How are you' and all that.”

I said: “If you're lying to the old man, God'll punish you.”

We went over to a Japanese place on Fifty-eighth Street for dinner and then I let Nora talk me into going to the Edges' after all.

Halsey Edge was a tall scrawny man of fifty-something with a pinched yellow face and no hair at all. He called himself “a ghoul by profession and inclination”—his only joke, if that is what it was—by which he meant he was an archaeologist, and he was very proud of his collection of battleaxes. He was not so bad once you had resigned yourself to the fact that you were in for occasional cataloguings of his armory—stone axes, copper axes, bronze axes, double-bladed axes, faceted axes, polygonal axes, scalloped axes, hammer axes, adze axes, Mesopotamian axes, Hungarian axes, Nordic axes, and all of them looking pretty moth-eaten. It was his wife we objected to. Her name was Leda, but he called her Tip. She was very small and her hair, eyes, and skin, though naturally of different shades, were all muddy. She seldom sat—she perched on things—and liked to cock her head a little to one side. Nora had a theory that once when Edge opened an antique grave, Tip ran out of it, and Margot Innes always spoke of her as the gnome, pronouncing all the letters. She once told me that she did not think any literature of twenty years ago would live, because it had no psychiatry in it. They lived in a pleasant old three-story house on the edge of Greenwich Village and their liquor was excellent.

A dozen or more people were there when we arrived. Tip introduced us to the ones we did not know and then backed me into a corner. “Why didn't you tell me that those people I met at your place Christmas were mixed up in a murder mystery?” she asked, tilting her head to the left until her ear was practically resting on her shoulder.

“I don't know that they are. Besides, what's one murder mystery nowadays?”

She tilted her head to the right. “You didn't even tell me you had taken the case.”

“I had done what? Oh, I see what you mean. Well, I hadn't and haven't. My getting shot ought to prove I was an innocent bystander.”

“Does it hurt much?”

“It itches. I forgot to have the dressing changed this afternoon.”

“Wasn't Nora utterly terrified?”

“So was I and so was the guy that shot me. There's Halsey. I haven't spoken to him yet.”

As I slid around her to escape she said: “Harrison promised to bring the daughter tonight.”

I talked to Edge for a few minutes—chiefly about a place in Pennsylvania he was buying—then found myself a drink and listened to Larry Crowley and Phil Thames swap dirty stories until some woman came over and asked Phil—he taught at Columbia—one of the questions about technocracy that people were asking that week. Larry and I moved away.

We went over to where Nora was sitting. “Watch yourself,” she told me. “The gnome's hell-bent on getting the inside story of Julia Wolf's murder out of you.”

“Let her get it out of Dorothy,” I said. “She's coming with Quinn.”

“I know.”

Larry said: “He's nuts over that girl, isn't he? He told me he was going to divorce Alice and marry her.”

Nora said, “Poor Alice,” sympathetically. She did not like Alice.

Larry said: “That's according to how you look at it.” He liked Alice. “I saw that fellow who's married to the girl's mother yesterday. You know, the tall fellow I met at your house.”

“Jorgensen?”

“That's it. He was coming out of a pawnshop on Sixth Avenue near Forty-sixth .”

“Talk to him?”

“I was in a taxi. It's probably polite to pretend you don't see people coming out of pawnshops, anyhow.”

Tip said, “Sh-h-h,” in all directions, and Levi Oscant began to play the piano. Quinn and Dorothy arrived while he was playing. Quinn was drunk as a lord and Dorothy seemed to have something better than a glow.

She came over to me and whispered: “I want to leave when you and Nora do.”

I said: “You won't be here for breakfast.”

Tip said, “Sh-h-h,” in my direction.

We listened to some more music.

Dorothy fidgeted beside me for a minute and whispered again: “Gil says you're going over to sec Mamma later. Are you?”

“I doubt it.”

Quinn came unsteadily around to us. “How're you, boy? How're you, Nora? Give him my message?” (Tip said, “Sb-h-h,” at him. He paid no attention to her. Other people looked relieved and began to talk.) “Listen, boy, you bank at the Golden Gate Trust in San Francisco, don't you?”

“Got a little money there.”

“Get it out, boy. I heard tonight they're plenty shaky.”

“All right. I haven't got much there, though.”

“No? What do you do with all your money?”

“Me and the French hoard gold.”

He shook his head solemnly. “It's fellows like you that put the country on the bum.”

“And it's fellows like me that don't go on the bum with it,” I said. “Where'd you get the skinful?”

“It's Alice. She's been sulking for a week. If I didn't drink I'd go crazy.”

“What's she sulking about?”

“About my drinking. She thinks—” He leaned forward and lowered his voice confidentially. “Listen. You're all my friends and I'm going to tell you what I'm going to do. I'm going to get a divorce and marry—”

He had tried to put an arm around Dorothy. She pushed it away and said: “You're silly and you're tiresome. I wish you'd leave me alone.”

“She thinks I'm silly and tiresome,” he told me. “You know why she don't want to marry me? I bet you don't. It's because she's in—”

“Shut up! Shut up, you drunken fool!” Dorothy began to beat his face with both hands. Her face was red, her voice shrill. “If you say that again I'll kill you!”

I pulled Dorothy away from Quinn; Larry caught him, kept him from falling. He whimpered: “She hit me, Nick.” Tears ran down his cheeks.

Dorothy had her face against my coat and seemed to be crying.

We had what audience there was. Tip came running, her face bright with curiosity. “What is it, Nick?”

I said: “Just a couple of playful drunks. They're all right. I'll see that they get home all right.”

Tip was not for that: she wanted thcm to stay at least until she had a chance to discover what had happened. She urged Dorothy to lie down awhile, offered to get something—whatever she meant by that—for Quinn, who was having trouble standing up now.

Nora and I took them out, Larry offered to go along, but we decided that was not necessary. Quinn slept in a corner of the taxicab during the ride to his apartment, and Dorothy sat stiff arid silent in the other corner, with Nora between them. I clung to a folding seat and thought that anyway we had not stayed long at the Edges.

Nora and Dorothy remained in the taxicab while I took Quinn upstairs. He was pretty limp.

Alice opened the door when I rang. She had on green pyjamas and held a hairbrush in one hand. She looked wearily at Quinn and spoke wearily: “Bring it in.”

I took it in and spread it on a bed. It mumbled something I could not make out and moved one hand feebly back and forth, but its eyes stayed shut.

“I'll tuck him in,” I said and loosened his tie.

Alice leaned on the foot of the bed. “If you want to. I've given up doing it.”

I took off his coat, vest, and shirts.

“Where'd he pass out this time?” she asked with not much interest. She was still standing at the foot of the bed, brushing her hair now.

“The Edges'.” I unbuttoned his pants.

“With that little Wynant bitch?” The question was casual.

“There were a lot of people there.”

“Yes,” she said. “He wouldn't pick a secluded spot.” She brushed her hair a couple of times. “So you don't think it's clubby to tell me anything.”

Her husband stirred a little and mumbled: “Dorry.”

I took off his shoes.

Alice sighed. “I can remember when he had muscles.” She stared at her husband until I took off the last of his clothes and rolled him under the covers. Then she sighed again and said: “I'll get you a drink.”

“You'll have to make it short: Nora's waiting in the cab.”

She opened her mouth as if to speak, shut it, opened it again to say: “Righto.”

I went into the kitchen with her.

Presently she said: “It's none of my business, Nick, but what do people think of me?”

“You're like everybody else: some people like you, sonic people don't, and some have no feeling about it one way or the other.”

She frowned. “That's not exactly what I meant. What do people think about my staying with Harrison with him chasing everything that's hot and hollow?”

“I don't know, Alice.”

“What do you think?”

“I think you probably know what you're doing and whatever you do is your own business.”

She looked at me with dissatisfaction. “You'll never talk yourself into any trouble, will you?” She smiled bitterly. “You know I'm only staying with him for his money, don't you? It may not be a lot to you, but it is to me—the way I was raised.”

“There's always divorce and alimony. You ought to have—”

“Drink your drink and get to hell out of here,” she said wearily.