The Thin Man

by Dashiell Hammett

“I guess we’ll find him, all right,” he said. “I got some news. We’ve identified Jorgensen as Rosewater.”

  “Who made the identification?”

  “I sent a man over to talk to the girl that gave him his alibi, this Olga Fenton, and he finally got it out of her. He says he couldn’t shake her on the alibi, though. I’m going over and have a try at her. Want to come along?”

  I looked at my watch and said: “I’d like to, but it’s too late. Picked him up yet?”

  “The order’s out.” He looked thoughtfully at me. “And will that baby have to do some talking!”

  I grinned at him. “Now who do you think killed her?”

  “I’m not worrying,” he said. “Just let me have things to squeeze enough people with and I’ll turn up the right one before the whistle blows.” In the street he promised to let me know what happened, and we shook hands and separated. He ran after me a couple of seconds later to send his very best regards to Nora.

  17

  Home, I delivered Guild’s message to Nora and told her the day’s news.

  “I’ve got a message for you, too,” she said. “Gilbert Wynant dropped in and was quite disappointed at missing you. He asked me to tell you he has something of the ‘utmost importance’ to tell you.”

  “He’s probably discovered that Jorgensen has a mother fixation.”

  “Do you think Jorgensen killed her?” she asked.

  “I thought I knew who did it,” I said, “but it’s too mixed up right now for anything but guesses.”

  “And what’s your guess?”

  “Mimi Jorgensen, Wynant, Nunheim, Gilbert, Dorothy, Aunt Alice, Morelli, you, me, or Guild. Maybe Studsy did it. How about shaking up a drink?”

  She mixed some cocktails. I was on my second or third when she came back from answering the telephone and said: “Your friend Mimi wants to talk to you.”

  I went to the telephone. “Hello, Mimi.”

  “I’m awfully sorry I was so rude the other night, Nick, but I was so upset and I just simply lost my temper and made a show of myself. Please forgive me.” She ran through this very rapidly, as if anxious to get it over with.

  “That’s all right,” I said.

  She hardly let me get my three words out before she was speaking again, but slower and more earnestly now: “Can I see you, Nick? Something horrible has happened, something—I don’t know what to do, which way to turn.”

  “What is it?”

  “I can’t tell you over the phone, but you’ve got to tell me what to do. I’ve got to have somebody’s advice. Can’t you come over?”

  “You mean now?”

  “Yes. Please.”

  I said, “All right,” and went back to the living-room. “I’m going to run over and see Mimi. She says she’s in a jam and needs help.”

  Nora laughed. “Keep your legs crossed. She apologize to you? She did to me.”

  “Yes, all in one breath. Is Dorothy home or still at Aunt Alice’s?”

  “Still at Auntie’s, according to Gilbert. How long will you be?”

  “No longer than I have to. The chances are they’ve copped Jorgensen and she wants to know if it can be fixed.”

  “Can they do anything to him? I mean if he didn’t kill the Wolf girl.”

  “I suppose the old charges against him—threats by mail, attempted extortion—could be raked up.” I stopped drinking to ask Nora and myself a question: “I wonder if he and Nunheim know each other.” I thought that over, but could make nothing more than a possibility of it. “Well, I’m on my way.”

  18

  Mimi received me with both hands. “It’s awfully, awfully nice of you to forgive me, Nick, but then you’ve always been awfully nice. I don’t know what got into me Monday night.”

  I said: “Forget it.” Her face was somewhat pinker than usual and the firmness of its muscles made it seem younger. Her blue eyes were very bright. Her hands had been cold on mine. She was tense with excitement, but I could not figure out what kind of excitement it was.

  She said: “It was awfully sweet of your wife, too, to—”

  “Forget it.”

  “Nick, what can they do to you for concealing evidence that somebody’s guilty of a murder?”

  “Make you an accomplice—accomplice after the fact is the technical term—if they want.”

  “Even if you voluntarily change your mind and give them the evidence?”

  “They can. Usually they don’t.”

  She looked around the room as if to make sure there was nobody else there and said: “Clyde killed Julia. I found the proof and hid it. What’ll they do to me?”

  “Probably nothing except give you hell—if you turn it in. He was once your husband: you and he are close enough together that no jury’d be likely to blame you for trying to cover him up—unless, of course, they had reason to think you had some other motive.”

  She asked coolly, deliberately: “Do you?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “My guess would be that you had intended to use this proof of his guilt to shake him down for some dough as soon as you could get in touch with him, and that now something else has come up to make you change your mind.” She made a claw of her right hand and struck at my face with her pointed nails. Her teeth were together, her lips drawn far back over them.

  I caught her wrist. “Women are getting tough,” I said, trying to sound wistful. “I just left one that heaved a skillet at a guy.”

  She laughed, though her eyes did not change. “You’re such a bastard. You always think the worst of me, don’t you?” I took my hand away from her wrist and she rubbed the marks my fingers had left on it.

  “Who was the woman who threw the skillet?” she asked. “Anyone I know?”

  “It wasn’t Nora, if that’s what you mean. Have they arrested Victor-Christian Rosewater-Jorgensen yet?”

  “What?”

  I believed in her bewilderment, though both it and my belief in it surprised me. “Jorgensen is Rosewater,” I said. “You remember him. I thought you knew.”

  “You mean that horrible man who—”

  “Yes.”

  “I won’t believe it.” She stood up working her fingers together. “I won’t. I won’t.” Her face was sick with fear, her voice strained, unreal as a ventriloquist’s. “I won’t believe it.”

  “That’ll help a lot,” I said. She was not listening to me. She turned her back to me and went to a window, where she stood with her back to me.

  I said: “There’s a couple of men in a car out front who look like they might be coppers waiting to pick him up when he—”

  She turned around and asked sharply: “Are you sure he’s Rosewater?” Most of the fear had already gone out of her face and her voice was at least human again.

  “The police are.” We stared at each other, both of us busy thinking. I was thinking she had not been afraid that Jorgensen killed Julia Wolf, or even that he might be arrested: she was afraid his only reason for marrying her had been as a move in some plot against Wynant.

  When I laughed—not because the idea was funny, but because it had come to me so suddenly—she started and smiled uncertainly. “I won’t believe it,” she said, and her voice was very soft now, “until he tells me himself.”

  “And when he does—then what?”

  She moved her shoulders a little, and her lower lip quivered. “He is my husband.”

  That should have been funny, but it annoyed me. I said: “Mimi, this is Nick. You remember me, N-i-c-k.”

  “I know you never think any good of me,” she said gravely. “You think I’m—”

  “All right. All right. Let it pass. Let’s get back to the dope on Wynant you found.”

  “Yes, that,” she said, and turned away from me. When she turned back her lip was quivering again. “That was a lie, Nick. I didn’t find anything.” She came close to me. “Clyde had no right to send those letters to Alice and Macaulay trying to make everybody suspicious of me and I thought it would se
rve him right if I made up something against him, because I really did think—I mean, I do think—he killed her and it was only—”

  “What’d you make up?” I asked.

  “I—I hadn’t made it up yet. I wanted to find out about what they could do—you know, the things I asked you—first. I might’ve pretended she came to a little when I was alone with her, while the others were phoning, and told me he did it.”

  “You didn’t say you heard something and kept quiet, you said you found something and hid it.”

  “But I hadn’t really made up my mind what I—”

  “When’d you hear about Wynant’s letter to Macaulay?”

  “This afternoon,” she said, “there was a man here from the police.”

  “Didn’t he ask you anything about Rosewater?”

  “He asked me if I knew him or had ever known him, and I thought I was telling the truth when I said no.”

  “Maybe you did,” I said, “and for the first time I now believe you were telling the truth when you said you found some sort of evidence against Wynant.”

  She opened her eyes wider. “I don’t understand.”

  “Neither do I, but it could be like this: you could’ve found something and decided to hold it out, probably with the idea of selling it to Wynant; then when his letters started people looking you over, you decided to give up the money idea and both pay him back and protect yourself by turning it over to the police; and, finally, when you learn that Jorgensen is Rosewater, you make another about-face and hold it out, not for money this time, but to leave Jorgensen in as bad a spot as possible as punishment for having married you as a trick in his game against Wynant and not for love.”

  She smiled calmly and asked: “You really think me capable of anything, don’t you?”

  “That doesn’t matter,” I said. “What ought to matter to you is that you’ll probably wind up your life in prison somewhere.”

  Her scream was not loud, but it was horrible, and the fear that had been in her face before was as nothing to that there now. She caught my lapels and clung to them, babbling: “Don’t say that, please don’t. Say you don’t think it.” She was trembling so I put an arm around her to keep her from falling.

  We did not hear Gilbert until he coughed and asked: “Aren’t you well, Mamma?”

  She slowly took her hands down from my lapels and moved back a step and said: “Your mother’s a silly woman.” She was still trembling, but she smiled at me and she made her voice playful: “You’re a brute to frighten me like that.”

  I said I was sorry. Gilbert put his coat and hat on a chair and looked from one to the other of us with polite interest. When it became obvious that neither of us was going to tell him anything he coughed again, said, “I’m awfully glad to see you,” and came over to shake hands with me. I said I was glad to see him.

  Mimi said: “Your eyes look tired. I bet you’ve been reading all afternoon without your glasses again.” She shook her head and told me: “He’s as unreasonable as his father.”

  “Is there any news of Father?” he asked.

  “Not since that false alarm about his suicide,” I said. “I suppose you heard it was a false alarm.”

  “Yes.” He hesitated. “I’d like to see you for a few minutes before you go.”

  “Sure.”

  “But you’re seeing him now, darling,” Mimi said. “Are there secrets between you that I’m not supposed to know about?” Her tone was light enough. She had stopped trembling.

  “It would bore you.” He picked up his hat and coat, nodded at me, and left the room.

  Mimi shook her head again and said: “I don’t understand that child at all. I wonder what he made of our tableau.” She did not seem especially worried. Then, more seriously: “What made you say that, Nick?”

  “About you winding up in—?”

  “No, never mind.” She shuddered. “I don’t want to hear it. Can’t you stay for dinner? I’ll probably be all alone.”

  “I’m sorry I can’t. Now how about this evidence you found?”

  “I didn’t really find anything. That was a lie.” She frowned earnestly. “Don’t look at me like that. It really was a lie.”

  “So you sent for me just to lie to me?” I asked. “Then why’d you change your mind?”

  She chuckled. “You must really like me, Nick, or you wouldn’t always be so disagreeable.”

  I could not follow that line of reasoning. I said: “Well, I’ll see what Gilbert wants and run along.”

  “I wish you could stay.”

  “I’m sorry I can’t,” I said again. “Where’ll I find him?”

  “The second door to the— Will they really arrest Chris?”

  “That depends,” I told her, “on what kind of answers he gives them. He’ll have to talk pretty straight to stay out.”

  “Oh, he’ll—” she broke off, looked sharply at me, asked, “You’re not playing a trick on me? He’s really that Rosewater?”

  “The police are sure enough of it.”

  “But the man who was here this afternoon didn’t ask a single question about Chris,” she objected. “He only asked me if I knew—”

  “They weren’t sure then,” I explained. “It was just a half-idea.”

  “But they’re sure now?” I nodded.

  “How’d they find out?”

  “From a girl he knows,” I said.

  “Who?” Her eyes darkened a little, but her voice was under control.

  “I can’t remember her name.” Then I went back to the truth: “The one that gave him his alibi for the afternoon of the murder.”

  “Alibi?” she asked indignantly. “Do you mean to tell me the police would take the word of a girl like that?”

  “Like what?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I don’t. Do you know the girl?”

  “No,” she said as if I had insulted her. She narrowed her eyes and lowered her voice until it was not much more than a whisper: “Nick, do you suppose he killed Julia?”

  “What would he do that for?”

  “Suppose he married me to get revenge on Clyde,” she said, “and— You know he did urge me to come over here and try to get some money from Clyde. Maybe I suggested it—I don’t know—but he did urge me. And then suppose he happened to run into Julia. She knew him, of course, because they worked for Clyde at the same time. And he knew I was going over to see her that afternoon and was afraid if I made her mad she might expose him to me and so— Couldn’t that be?”

  “That doesn’t make any sense at all. Besides, you and he left here together that afternoon. He wouldn’t’ve had time to—”

  “But my taxicab was awfully slow,” she said, “and then I may have stopped somewhere on—I think I did. I think I stopped at a drug store to get some aspirin.” She nodded energetically. “I remember I did.”

  “And he knew you were going to stop, because you had told him,” I suggested. “You can’t go on like this, Mimi. Murder’s serious. It’s nothing to frame people for just because they played tricks on you.”

  “Tricks?” she asked, glaring at me. “Why, that…” She called Jorgensen all the usual profane, obscene, and otherwise insulting names, her voice gradually rising until towards the end she was screaming into my face.

  When she stopped for breath I said: “That’s pretty cursing, but it—”

  “He even had the nerve to hint that I might’ve killed her,” she told me. “He didn’t have nerve enough to ask me, but he kept leading up to it until I told him positively that—well, that I didn’t do it.”

  “That’s not what you started to say. You told him positively what?”

  She stamped her foot. “Stop heckling me.”

  “All right and to hell with you,” I said. “Coming here wasn’t my idea.” I started towards my hat and coat.

  She ran after me, caught my arm. “Please, Nick, I’m sorry. It’s this rotten temper of mine. I don’t know what I—”

&nbs
p; Gilbert came in and said: “I’ll go along part of the way with you.”

  Mimi scowled at him. “You were listening.”

  “How could I help it, the way you screamed?” he asked. “Can I have some money?”

  “And we haven’t finished talking,” she said.

  I looked at my watch. “I’ve got to run, Mimi. It’s late.”

  “Will you come back after you get through with your date?”

  “If it’s not too late. Don’t wait for me.”

  “I’ll be here,” she said. “It doesn’t matter how late it is.” I said I would try to make it. She gave Gilbert his money. He and I went downstairs.

  19

  “I was listening,” Gilbert told me as we left the building. “I think it’s silly not to listen whenever you get a chance if you’re interested in studying people, because they’re never exactly the same as when you’re with them. People don’t like it when they know about it, of course, but”—he smiled—“I don’t suppose birds and animals like having naturalists spying on them either.”

  “Hear much of it?” I asked.

  “Oh, enough to know I didn’t miss any of the important part.” “And what’d you think of it?”

  He pursed his lips, wrinkled his forehead, said judicially: “It’s hard to say exactly. Mamma’s good at hiding things sometimes, but she’s never much good at making them up. It’s a funny thing—I suppose you’ve noticed it—the people who lie the most are nearly always the clumsiest at it, and they’re easier to fool with lies than most people, too. You’d think they’d be on the look-out for lies, but they seem to be the very ones that will believe almost anything at all. I suppose you’ve noticed that, haven’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  He said: “What I wanted to tell you: Chris didn’t come home last night. That’s why Mamma’s more upset than usual, and when I got the mail this morning there was a letter for him that I thought might have something in it, so I steamed it open.” He took a letter from his pocket and held it out to me. “You’d better read it and then I’ll seal it again and put it with tomorrow’s mail in case he comes back, though I don’t think he will.”