“All right,” I said and gave him an order to buy some Dome Mines at 12½.
He remembered then that he had seen something in the newspapers about my having been shot. He was pretty vague about it and paid very little attention to my assurances that I was all right. “I suppose that means no Ping-Pong for a couple of days,” he said with what seemed genuine regret. “Listen: you’ve got tickets for the opening tonight. If you can’t use them I’ll be—”
“We’re going to use them. Thanks just the same.” He laughed and said good-by.
A waiter was carrying away the table when I returned to the living-room. Guild had made himself comfortable on the sofa. Nora was telling him: “… have to go away over the Christmas holidays every year because what’s left of my family make a fuss over them and if we’re home they come to visit us or we have to visit them, and Nick doesn’t like it.” Asta was licking her paws in a corner.
Guild looked at his watch. “I’m taking up a lot of you folks’ time. I didn’t mean to impose—”
I sat down and said: “We were just about up to the murder, weren’t we?”
“Just about.” He relaxed on the sofa again. “That was on Friday the 23rd at some time before twenty minutes after three in the afternoon, which was the time Mrs. Jorgensen got there and found her. It’s kind of hard to say how long she’d been laying there dying before she was found. The only thing we know is that she was all right and answered the phone—and the phone was all right—at about half past two, when Mrs. Jorgensen called her up and was still all right around three, when Macaulay phoned.”
“I didn’t know Mrs. Jorgensen phoned.”
“It’s a fact.” Guild cleared his throat. “We didn’t suspect anything there, you understand, but we checked it up just as a matter of course and found out from the girl at the switchboard at the Courtland that she put the call through for Mrs. J. about two-thirty.”
“What did Mrs. J. say?”
“She said she called up to ask where she could find Wynant, but this Julia Wolf said she didn’t know, so Mrs. J., thinking she’s lying and maybe she can get her to tell the truth if she sees her, asks if she can drop in for a minute, and she says sure.” He frowned at my right knee. “Well, she went there and found her. The apartment-house people don’t remember seeing anybody going in or out of the Wolf apartment, but that’s easy. A dozen people could do it without being seen. The gun wasn’t there. There wasn’t any signs of anybody busting in, and things in the place hadn’t been disturbed any more than I’ve told you. I mean the place didn’t look like it had been frisked. She had on a diamond ring that must’ve been worth a few hundred and there was thirty-some bucks in her bag. The people there know Wynant and Morelli—both of ’em have been in and out enough—but claim they ain’t seen either for some time. The fire-escape window was locked and the fire-escape didn’t look like it had been walked on recently.” He turned his hands over, palms up. “I guess that’s the crop.”
“No fingerprints?”
“Hers, some belonging to the people that clean up the place, near as we can figure. Nothing any good to us.”
“Nothing out of her friends?”
“She didn’t seem to have any—not any close ones.”
“How about the—what was his name?—Nunheim who identified her as a friend of Morelli’s?”
“He just knew her by sight through seeing her around with Morelli and recognized her picture when he saw it in the paper.”
“Who is he?”
“He’s all right. We know all about him.”
“You wouldn’t hold out on me, would you,” I asked, “after getting me to promise not to hold out on you?”
Guild said: “Well, if it don’t go any further, he’s a fellow that does some work for the department now and then.”
“Oh.”
He stood up. “I hate to say it, but that’s just about as far as we’ve got. You got anything you can help with?”
“No.”
He looked at me steadily for a moment. “What do you think of it?”
“That diamond ring, was it an engagement ring?”
“She had it on that finger.” After a pause he asked, “Why?”
“It might help to know who bought it for her. I’m going to see Macaulay this afternoon. If anything turns up I’ll give you a ring. It looks like Wynant, all right, but—”
He growled good-naturedly, “Uh-huh, but,” shook hands with Nora and me, thanked us for our whisky, our lunch, our hospitality, and our kindness in general, and went away.
I told Nora: “I’m not one to suggest that your charm wouldn’t make any man turn himself inside out for you, but don’t be too sure that guy isn’t kidding us.”
“So it’s come to that,” she said. “You’re jealous of policemen.”
12
Macaulay’s letter from Clyde Wynant was quite a document. It was very badly typewritten on plain white paper and dated Philadelphia, Pa., December 26, 1932. It read:
Dear Herbert: I am telegraphing Nick Charles who worked for me you will remember some years ago and who is in New York to get in touch with you about the terrible death of poor Julia. I want you to do everything in your power to [a line had been x’d and m’d out here so that it was impossible to make anything at all of it] persuade him to find her murderer. I don’t care what it costs—pay him!
Here are some facts I want to give him outside of all you know about it yourself I don’t think he should tell these facts to the police, but he will know what is best and I want him to have a completely free hand as I have got the utmost confidence in him. Perhaps you had better just show him this letter, after which I must ask you to carefully destroy it.
Here are the facts. When I met Julia Thursday night to get that $1,000 from her she told me she wanted to quit her job. She said she hadn’t been at all well for some time and her doctor had told her she ought to go away and rest and now that her uncle’s estate bad been settled she could afford to and wanted to do it. She had never said anything about bad health before and I thought she was hiding her real reason and tried to get it out of her, but she stuck to what she had said. I didn’t know anything about her uncle dying either. She said it was her Uncle John in Chicago. I suppose that could be looked up if it’s important. I couldn’t persuade her to change her mind, so she was to leave the last day of the month. She seemed worried or frightened, but she said she wasn’t. I was sorry at first that she was going, but then I wasn’t, because I had always been able to trust her and now I wouldn’t be if she was lying, as I thought she was.
The next fact I want Charles to know is that whatever anybody may think or whatever was true some time ago Julia and I [“are now” was x’d out lightly] were at the time of her murder and had been for more than a year not anything more to each other than employee and employer. This relationship was the result of mutual agreement.
Next, I believe some attempt should be made to learn the present whereabouts of the Victor Rosewater with whom we had trouble some years ago inasmuch as the experiments I am now engaged in are in line with those he claimed I cheated him out of and I consider him quite insane enough to have killed Julia in a rage at her refusal to tell him where I could be found.
Fourth, and most important, has my divorced wife been in communication with Rosewater? How did she learn I was carrying out the experiments with which he once assisted me?
Fifth, the police must be convinced at once that I can tell them nothing about the murder so that they will take no steps to find me—steps that might lead to a discovery of and a premature exposure of my experiments, which I would consider very dangerous at this time. This can best be avoided by clearing up the mystery of her murder immediately, and that is what I wish to have done.
I will communicate with you from time to time and if in the meanwhile anything should arise to make communication with me imperative insert the following advertisement in the Times: Abner. Yes. Bunny.
I will thereupon arran
ge to get in touch with you.
I hope you sufficiently understand the necessity of persuading Charles to act for me, since he is already acquainted with the Rosewater trouble and knows most of the people concerned. Yours truly,
Clyde Miller Wynant
I put the letter down on Macaulay’s desk and said: “It makes a lot of sense. Do you remember what his row with Rosewater was about?”
“Something about changes in the structures of crystals. I can look it up.” Macaulay picked up the first sheet of the letter and frowned at it. “He says he got a thousand dollars from her that night. I gave her five thousand for him; she told me that’s what he wanted.”
“Four thousand from Uncle John’s estate?” I suggested.
“Looks like it. That’s funny: I never thought she’d gyp him. I’ll have to find out about the other money I turned over to her.”
“Did you know she’d done a jail sentence in Cleveland on a badger-game charge?”
“No. Had she really?”
“According to the police—under the name of Rhoda Stewart. Where’d Wynant find her?”
He shook his head. “I’ve no idea.”
“Know anything about where she came from originally, relatives, things like that?” He shook his head again. “Who was she engaged to?” I asked.
“I didn’t know she was engaged.”
“She was wearing a diamond ring on her finger.”
“That’s news to me,” he said. He shut his eyes and thought. “No, I can’t remember ever noticing an engagement ring.” He put his forearms on his desk and grinned over them at me. “Well, what are the chances of getting you to do what he wants?”
“Slim.”
“I thought so.” He moved a hand to touch the letter. “You know as much about how he feels as I do. What would make you change your mind?”
“I don’t—”
“Would it help any if I could persuade him to meet you? Maybe if I told him that was the only way you’d take it—”
“I’m willing to talk to him,” I said, “but he’d have to talk a lot straighter than he’s writing.”
Macaulay asked slowly: “You mean you think he may have killed her?”
“I don’t know anything about that,” I said. “I don’t know as much as the police do, and it’s a cinch they haven’t got enough on him to make the pinch even if they could find him.”
Macaulay sighed. “Being a goof’s lawyer is not much fun. I’ll try to make him listen to reason, but I know he won’t.”
“I meant to ask, how are his finances these days? Is he as well fixed as he used to be?”
“Almost. The depression’s hurt him some, along with the rest of us, and the royalties from his smelting process have gone pretty much to hell now that the metals are dead, but he can still count on fifty or sixty thousand a year from his glassine and soundproofing patents, with a little more coming in from odds and ends like—” He broke off to ask: “You’re not worrying abut his ability to pay whatever you’d ask?”
“No, I was just wondering.” I thought of something else: “Has he any relatives outside of his ex-wife and children?”
“A sister, Alice Wynant, that hasn’t been on speaking terms with him for—it must be four or five years now.”
I supposed that was the Aunt Alice the Jorgensens had not gone to see Christmas afternoon. “What’d they fall out about?” I asked.
“He gave an interview to one of the papers saying he didn’t think the Russian Five Year Plan was necessarily doomed to failure. Actually he didn’t make it much stronger than that.”
I laughed. “They’re a—”
“She’s even better than he is. She can’t remember things. The time her brother had his appendix out, she and Mimi were in a taxi going to see him the first afternoon and they passed a hearse coming from the direction of the hospital. Miss Alice turned pale and grabbed Mimi by the arm and said: ‘Oh, dear! If that should be what’s-his-name!’ ”
“Where does she live?”
“On Madison Avenue. It’s in the phone book.” He hesitated. “I don’t think—”
“I’m not going to bother her.” Before I could say anything else his telephone began to ring.
He put the receiver to his ear and said: “Hello…. Yes, speaking…. Who?… Oh, yes….” Muscles tightened around his mouth, and his eyes opened a little wider. “Where?” He listened some more. “Yes, surely. Can I make it?” He looked at the watch on his left wrist. “Right. See you on the train.” He put the telephone down. “That was Lieutenant Guild,” he told me. “Wynant’s tried to commit suicide in Allentown, Pennsylvania.”
13
Dorothy and Quinn were at the bar when I went into the Palma Club. They did not see me until I came up beside Dorothy and said: “Hello, folks.” Dorothy had on the same clothes I had last seen her in.
She looked at me and at Quinn and her face flushed. “You had to tell him.”
“The girl’s in a pet,” Quinn said cheerfully. “I got that stock for you. You ought to pick up some more and what are you drinking?”
“Old-fashioned. You’re a swell guest—ducking out without leaving a word behind you.”
Dorothy looked at me again. The scratches on her face were pale, the bruise barely showed, and her mouth was no longer swollen. “I trusted you,” she said. She seemed about to cry.
“What do you mean by that?”
“You know what I mean. Even when you went to dinner at Mamma’s I trusted you.”
“And why not?”
Quinn said: “She’s been in a pet all afternoon. Don’t bait her.” He put a hand on one of hers. “There, there, darling, don’t you—”
“Please shut up.” She took her hand away from him. “You know very well what I mean,” she told me. “You and Nora both made fun of me to Mamma and—”
I began to see what had happened. “She told you that and you believed it?” I laughed. “After twenty years you’re still a sucker for her lies? I suppose she phoned you after we left: we had a row and didn’t stay long.”
She hung her head and said, “Oh, I’m a fool,” in a low miserable voice. Then she grabbed me by both arms and said: “Listen, let’s go over and see Nora now. I’ve got to square myself with her. I’m such an ass. It’d serve me right if she never—”
“Sure. There’s plenty of time. Let’s have this drink first.”
Quinn said: “Brother Charles, I’d like to shake your hand. You’ve brought sunshine back into the life of our little tot and joy to—” He emptied his glass. “Let’s go over and see Nora. The booze there is just as good and costs us less.”
“Why don’t you stay here?” she asked him.
He laughed and shook his head. “Not me. Maybe you can get Nick to stay here, but I’m going with you. I’ve put up with your snottiness all afternoon: now I’m going to bask in the sunshine.”
Gilbert Wynant was with Nora when we reached the Normandie. He kissed his sister and shook hands with me and, when he had been introduced, Harrison Quinn. Dorothy immediately began to make long and earnest and none too coherent apologies to Nora. Nora said: “Stop it. There’s nothing to forgive. If Nick’s told you I was sore or hurt or anything of the sort he’s just a Greek liar. Let me take your coat.”
Quinn turned on the radio. At the stroke of the gong it was five thirty-one and one quarter, Eastern Standard Time. Nora told Quinn, “Play bar-tender: you know where the stuff is,” and followed me into the bathroom. “Where’d you find her?”
“In a speak. What’s Gilbert doing here?”
“He came over to see her, so he said. She didn’t go home last night and he thought she was still here.” She laughed. “He wasn’t surprised at not finding her, though. He said she was always wandering off somewhere, she has dromomania, which comes from a mother fixation and is very interesting. He said Stekel claims people who have it usually show kleptomaniac impulses too, and he’s left things around to see if she’d steal them, but she never has
yet that he knows of.”
“He’s quite a lad. Did he say anything about his father?”
“No.”
“Maybe he hadn’t heard. Wynant tried to commit suicide down in Allentown. Guild and Macaulay have gone down to see him. I don’t know whether to tell the youngsters or not. I wonder if Mimi had a hand in his coming over here.”
“I wouldn’t think so, but if you do—”
“I’m just wondering,” I said. “Has he been here long?”
“About an hour. He’s a funny kid. He’s studying Chinese and writing a book on Knowledge and Belief—not in Chinese—and thinks Jack Oakie’s very good.”
“So do I. Are you tight?”
“Not very.”
When we returned to the living-room, Dorothy and Quinn were dancing to “Eadie Was a Lady.” Gilbert put down the magazine he was looking at and politely said he hoped I was recovering from my injury. I said I was.
“I’ve never been hurt, really hurt,” he went on, “that I can remember. I’ve tried hurting myself, of course, but that’s not the same thing. It just made me uncomfortable and irritable and sweat a lot.”
“That’s pretty much the same thing,” I said.
“Really? I thought there’d be more—well, more to it.” He moved a little closer to me. “It’s things like that I don’t know. I’m so horribly young I haven’t had a chance to— Mr. Charles, if you’re too busy or don’t want to, I hope you’ll say so, but I’d appreciate it very much if you’d let me talk to you some time when there aren’t a lot of people around to interrupt us. There are so many things I’d like to ask you, things I don’t know anybody else could tell me and—”
“I’m not so sure about that,” I said, “but I’ll be glad to try any time you want.”
“You really don’t mind? You’re not just being polite?”
“No, I mean it, only I’m not sure you’ll get as much help as you expect. It depends on what you want to know.”
“Well, things like cannibalism,” he said. “I don’t mean in places like Africa and New Guinea—in the United States, say. Is there much of it?”