“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:
Dear Vic—Olga wrote me about you being back in the U.S. married to another woman and using the name of Christian Jorgensen. That is not right Vic as you very well know the same as leaving me without word of any kind all these years. And no money. I know that you had to go away on account of that trouble you had with Mr. Wynant but am sure he has long since forgot all about that and I do think you might have written to me as you know very well I have always been your friend and am willing to do anything within my power for you at any time. I do not want to scold you Vic but I have to see you. I will be off from the store Sunday and Monday on account of New Years and will come down to N. Y. Saturday night and must have a talk with you. Write me where you will meet me and what time as I do not want to make any trouble for you. Be sure and write me right away so I will get it in time.
Your true wife, Georgia
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.”
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 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.”
“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 battle-axes. 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’s 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 see 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, “Sh-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 them 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 and 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. r />
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 shirt.
“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, some 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.”