Return of the Thin Man: Two never-before-published novellas featuring Nick & Nora Charles

by Dashiell Hammett

  Nick: “If I can.”

  Lois: “You’ve got to. There’s nobody else I can turn to. I don’t know what to—” Looking over Nick’s shoulder, she sees a man with a gun in his hand emerge from the clump of bushes behind Nick. Lois gasps, “Look out!” and pushes Nick to one side as the man fires. (It must be obvious that she does save Nick from being shot.)

  Nick, upset by the girl’s push, yanks his gun out as he falls, and fires as the man near the bushes shoots a second time. The man staggers back into the bushes and from time to time fires again, with Nick, circling the bushes, returning his fire.

  Police come running up, pouring bullets into the bushes. The grounds are flooded with lights again. Presently the firing stops, and Nick and the police force their way into the clump of bushes.

  Dudley Horn is lying there dead, the ragged condition of his clothes suggesting that he has been nearly shot to pieces. The police stare at him in surprise.

  Trooper: “Him! Can you beat that?” Then he suddenly looks sharply at Nick and demands: “Say, what were you shooting at him for?”

  Nick: “Because he was shooting at me. What were you shooting at him for?”

  Trooper, scratching his head: “Well, everybody else was.”

  VanSlack arrives, stares at Horn, says: “This is a surprise in a way. Do you mind telling me what—how it happened?

  Nick: “I was taking the knife”—he hands the knife to VanSlack— “away from the dog when Lois MacFay came up and started to tell me something. Then she yelled and pushed me out of the way just as this fellow started snapping caps at me.”

  VanSlack: “Lois MacFay, hum? Do you—the question will surprise you no doubt—but do you think she might have been—you know?”

  Nick: “Putting me on the spot? The first bullet would have caught me if she hadn’t pushed me out of the way. I felt it go past.”

  VanSlack: “It was just a thought. Where is she?”

  Nick looks around. “I don’t know.”

  Police throw the beams from their lights across the grounds. Lois is lying on the grass back where Nick was first shot at, apparently unconscious, with blood staining her clothes.

  Nick kneels beside her, feeling for a pulse, then says: “She’s alive.”

  Another of the men says: “It’s just her arm,” and opens a knife to rip her sleeve.

  Lois’s eyes open. She sees Nick and asks: “Was it—Dudley?”

  Nick: “Yes.”

  Lois shudders, then asks: “Did they catch him?”

  Nick: “He’s dead.”

  Lois shuts her eyes.

  The man who has been examining Lois’s arm says: “She’ll be okay. The bullet only took a hunk of flesh out.”

  VanSlack: “Well, let’s carry her up to the house. I want to talk to her when she comes to.” Then to Nick: “What was it she started to tell you?”

  Lois opens her eyes again and sits up, saying: “I’m not badly hurt. It was the shock. Oh, Nick, it was true then!”

  Nick: “What was true?”

  Lois: “What I tried to tell you, about Dudley.” She begins to cry. “Oh, it can’t be true. I loved him so.”

  Nick: “He killed Colonel MacFay?”

  Lois: “That’s what I wanted to ask you.”

  VanSlack: “I don’t want to seem unkind, Miss MacFay, but surely you can see that all this might have been avoided if you had come to us with your suspicions, whatever they were.”

  Lois: “I know, but how could I believe it? I can’t believe it now.”

  VanSlack: “It’s not a matter of what you believe, Miss MacFay, it’s more—well—what happened that you wanted to talk to Mr. Charles about?”

  Lois: “It was about Dudley. He—it started right after Papa was killed. Dudley suggested that we say we were together at the time Papa was killed—so the police wouldn’t bother me, he said. I told him we couldn’t do that, but I didn’t think anything of it until later when he began to act funny.

  VanSlack: “Funny in just what way?

  Lois: “Nothing that anyone who didn’t know him so well would notice, but I noticed it. And then after that policeman said the knife had been found, and you and Mr. Charles went out, he acted still funnier, and when he went out of the room I followed him to ask him what was the matter, I saw him in his room putting a pistol in his pocket, and then I didn’t know what to think except that I’d better find Mr. Charles as soon as possible and ask him what he thought.”

  (Those of Horn’s actions which fit in with her story may be shown in their proper place if necessary, depending on whether it is thought better to bolster up her story than to keep the audience in doubt as to who Nick’s assailant is until the last moment.)

  Nick and VanSlack are together in the rear of a car being driven toward New York City. The sun is not yet up, though it is fairly light.

  VanSlack: “It’s amazing the obstacles one runs into in this work, isn’t it?”

  Nick: “Oh, quite.”

  VanSlack: “It’s so unfortunate that your dog should have found the knife with nobody around to see where he found it. Now we’ll probably never know.”

  Nick: “I’m apologizing. No fingerprints on the knife?”

  VanSlack: “There’d hardly be, after the dog had been playing with it for nobody knows how long. Though there are plenty of his tooth prints on it. But I daresay we can safely assume it was the knife used for the murder. Don’t you think so?”

  Nick: “I think so.” After a pause. “How do you fit Horn into all this?”

  VanSlack: “I should ask you that. After all, you’re the one who killed him.”

  Nick: “Maybe I am, maybe not. A lot of you people were shooting at him, too. All we know is that I am the one he was trying to kill.”

  VanSlack: “Doesn’t that come to the same thing in a sense?” Looks at his watch. “Now that you have had time to think, perhaps you can remember something—something that happened or was said—that might have slipped your memory in the excitement . . . if you know what I mean.”

  Nick: “I know what you mean. You mean if I’ve been holding out on you, you’ll make it easy for me to come clean now.”

  VanSlack: “Not at all, Mr. Charles. Well, not exactly. But perhaps Miss MacFay’s story was not . . .”

  Nick: “Miss MacFay may be a liar but that was a truthful bullet she pushed me out of the way of.”

  VanSlack, sighing: “I suppose it was, but it makes the whole thing more confusing, doesn’t it?”

  Nick, shrugging: “Maybe yes, maybe no. All we’ve got to find out is why Horn should try to kill me when I found the knife that killed MacFay and that belonged to Church’s henchman.”

  VanSlack: “That’s exactly it, and I must say that from my viewpoint everything would be clearer if it were not for your statements that Miss MacFay was with you and Mrs. Charles at the time of her father’s murder and that she did save you from being killed by Horn.”

  Nick: “What do you want me to do? Confess that Horn killed me?”

  VanSlack, his voice and manner for the first time cold and menacing: “What I want you to do, Mr. Charles, is to tell me the truth.”

  Nick stares at him a moment, then laughs. “You know, I am beginning to think you’ve really got hold of something, even if you don’t know what it is or what to do with it. My guess is you are bouncing around not more than six inches away from the answer to the whole thing.”

  VanSlack looks down at the space between him and Nick on the seat of the car. The space is about six inches.

  Back at MacFay’s Lois is lying on her bed with her eyes shut. Mrs. Bellam sits in a chair beside the bed, placidly knitting.

  Mrs. Bellam: “Whatever Mr. Horn did in this world, he is now answering for in the other world and it is not for us to judge him.”

  Lois, opening her eyes, sitting up: “But why did he kill Papa?”

  Mrs. Bellam: “Lie down, dear. Men’s hearts are incomprehensible.”

  Lois: “But Papa was so g
ood to Dudley. He—”

  Mrs. Bellam: “How are we, with our limited understandings, to say what is good and what is not good?” She pauses to count a row of stitches. “It would be easy for us in our worldliness to say that Colonel MacFay was the most wicked man that ever lived, but how can we look into his inner soul?”

  Lois: “But nobody could say that. He wasn’t. He wasn’t.”

  Mrs. Bellam, quietly as before: “Only by human standards, my dear.”

  Lois: “But look how good he was to me, and to Dudley.”

  Mrs. Bellam: “Colonel MacFay was afraid of Dudley Horn. Dudley Horn knew too much about him, even knew how he was robbing that nice Mr. and Mrs. Charles.”

  Lois: “Oh, he wasn’t!”

  Mrs. Bellam, calmly nodding: “I’m only telling you that because I imagine it will come to light anyhow. Dudley Horn would most surely have taken the precaution of leaving a statement somewhere to be published in case he was killed. He would have thought that would tie Colonel MacFay’s hands.”

  Lois: “But then why should Dudley have tried to kill Mr. Charles?”

  Mrs. Bellam: “If Mr. Charles had discovered his losses in going over the accounts yesterday, the estate would have had to make them good, my dear.”

  Lois: “Go away, please, Mrs. Bellam.” She turns over, burying her head in the pillow. “Go away.”

  Mrs. Bellam: “Try to rest, my dear.” She gathers up her knitting, rises, and goes quietly out.

  Freddie, listening outside the door, jumps back in confusion as Mrs. Bellam comes out of the room.

  Mrs. Bellam smiles tranquilly at Freddie, shuts the door behind her, and goes upstairs.

  Freddie stares after Mrs. Bellam for a moment, biting a fingernail, then looks at Lois’s door in indecision, hears footsteps coming up the stairs from the ground floor, and goes off to his own room.

  The man coming up the stairs is a detective. He goes into Nora’s room, where she is being questioned by two detectives. Nick Jr. has gone to sleep holding Asta’s tail. Asta is very uncomfortable, but afraid to try to pull away.

  Detective: “One o’clock in the morning’s a funny time to have a alibi down here in the country—unless you were expecting something to happen. Were you?”

  Nora: “Of course not.”

  The Detective: “Nobody else had a alibi—just you and your husband and this Lois.”

  Nora: “It’s a habit with Nick. He’s had an alibi for everything that’s happened since I married him.”

  Detective: “And a lot of things happen every place he goes, don’t they?”

  Nora: “Never a dull moment is what all our friends say.”

  Detective: “Wasn’t there a killing in your family that he was mixed up in out on the Coast a year or two ago?”

  Nora: “Do you mean wasn’t there a killing that he solved while policemen were suspecting the wrong people?”

  Detective: “You can put it any way you want, but he was mixed up in it; and there was another woman mixed up in it, too, wasn’t there?”

  Nora: “My cousin.”

  Detective: “I don’t know anything about that. I just remember seeing her picture in the papers, and she was kind of young and pretty. Then he was mixed up in that Wynant murder last time he was in New York, and there was some women in that that he used to know before he was married, wasn’t there?”

  Nora: “Just what are you getting at?”

  Detective: “Looks to me like every time he gets in with a gal the insurance companies take an awful beating. Say, that guy’s deadlier than the Bourbon plague.”

  Nora: “But what has that got to do with Colonel MacFay’s murder?”

  Detective: “Lois. It’s nice for a wife to trust her husband—in reason—but don’t you ever get to wondering about him sometimes?”

  Nora: “Sometimes?”

  Detective: “We’re not just dishing the dirt on your husband for the fun of it. We’re trying to show you what you’re up against. It ain’t in the book that any man that’s had that many numbers would settle down to one, and you are too fine a lady to get that kind of runaround.”

  Nora: “Was he really like that? I thought he was just bragging.”

  Detective: “I suppose you never heard about the coalman’s widow in Cleveland that wanted to set him up in a detective agency of his own.”

  Nora, leading him on: “Was that Louella?”

  Detective: “No, her name was Belle Spruce.”

  Nora, delighted: “I mustn’t forget that one. Tell me more.”

  Detective: “Well, then there was a lighthouse keeper’s daughter in—”

  Nora: “A what?”

  Detective: “A lighthouse keeper’s daughter.”

  Nora: “What was her name?”

  Detective, exasperated by her facetiousness: “What it all comes down to is this Lois. You’re wrong to think there couldn’t be anything between them. They’re just making a monkey of you covering up for them.”

  A New Arrival: “Hey.” The second detective turns to him. “Are you getting anywhere?”

  Detective: “Naw, she’s bats.”

  Second Detective: “I wouldn’t mind my old lady being bats that way.”

  New Arrival to Nora: “There’s a telephone call for you.” He winks at the others.

  First Detective to Nora: “Go ahead, take it. We’re through with you.”

  Nora: “I’m sorry. You’ve no idea how interesting this sort of thing can be to a wife. Please tell me the lighthouse keeper’s daughter’s name.”

  As the three men go out, the Detective says, “Letty Finhaden,” and slams the door.

  Nora, happily, to the sleeping baby: “And Letty Finhaden. Isn’t your papa going to be surprised at the things your mama knows?” She goes to the telephone.

  In New York City Nick and VanSlack buy morning papers with screaming headlines—ANOTHER THIN MAN MURDER MYSTERY—LONG ISLAND MILLIONAIRE KILLED—NICK CHARLES GUEST OF SLAIN CAPITALIST—EX-CONVICT AND NEGRO SOUGHT BY POLICE, etc. Nick’s photograph occupies the chief position on most front pages, with MacFay’s and Church’s (a rogues’ gallery photograph) flanking it.

  As Nick and VanSlack prepare to drive on, a bundle of extras is thrown to the newsdealer from a passing truck. They buy copies of the extras, whose headlines say—SECOND SLAYING IN LONG ISLAND THIN MAN MYSTERY—ENGINEER KILLED IN ATTACK ON NICK CHARLES, etc. There are more pictures of Nick, and one of Nora.

  As they get out of their car in front of Smitty’s apartment, they are joined by Lieutenant John Guild.

  Nick: “Hello, Guild.”

  Guild, shaking Nick’s hand warmly: “I’m glad to see you back with us. Say, things sure pop when you’re in town, don’t they? Remember last time when folks were being killed all over the—”

  Nick: “Don’t say that! I’m having enough trouble with VanSlack now. I’ve been on the wrong end of a third degree all morning.”

  VanSlack looks reproachfully at Nick.

  Guild: “How are you, Mr. VanSlack? I came over as soon as I heard you were trying to get a line on Smitty. But if your killing was at one o’clock this morning, she’s in the clear. We had a plant on this joint from before midnight till way after three and we know she was in it all the time.”

  VanSlack: “Are you sure she couldn’t—”

  Guild: “Dead sure. I saw her two-three times myself between twelve and three and it would take her easy an hour or an hour and a half each way to get down to MacFay’s and back.”

  Nick, beginning to grin: “How did it happen you were watching her place?”

  Guild: “It turned out to be a false alarm, but she phoned me yesterday—” He breaks off as Nick’s grin widens. “Could she have been stringing me—using me to give her an alibi?”

  Nick nods.

  Guild, indignantly: “She can’t do that to me!” He leads the way into the apartment building.

  They go up to Smitty’s apartment and knock on the door. After a little while it is opened
by Smitty in pajamas and robe.

  Smitty, yawning: “Good morning, Nick; good morning again, Lieutenant.” Then to VanSlack: “Pleased to meet you.” She yawns again. “Come on in and have some coffee before you tell me what Tip’s been doing now.”

  Guild: “So you pick me to give you an alibi, huh? I’ve got to lose a night’s sleep so you can duck a murder rap. Well, you’re not ducking it. There’s such a thing as complicity and—”

  Smitty: “Murder?”

  Guild: “What did you think was going to happen down at MacFay’s after midnight?”

  Smitty, holding up her right hand: “I never thought it was going to be murder.”

  VanSlack, edging in between her and the angry lieutenant: “But you did expect something to happen down there.” Then, when she does not reply: “Where is Church?”

  Smitty: “I don’t know.”

  VanSlack: “When is he coming back?”

  Smitty: “He isn’t coming back. He said he was going to Cuba.”

  Guild, who has been looking in the closet, turns with a man’s overcoat in his hand. “Who does this belong to?”

  Smitty: “Sam.”

  Guild empties the contents of its pockets on the table. They are a handkerchief, a pair of gloves, crumpled package of cigarettes, and a book of paper matches. “What is his coat doing here if he ain’t coming back?”

  Smitty: “It’s been here two or three weeks.”

  Guild, indicating the things he’s taken from the coat pocket to Nick and VanSlack: “There’s nothing else in it.”

  VanSlack to Smitty: “Where is his servant, Dum-Dum?”

  Guild continues to look around the apartment, opening drawers, looking under cushions, etc.

  Smitty: “I don’t know. They went out of here around ten o’clock last night and that’s the last I’ve seen or heard of them.”

  VanSlack: “Where were they going?”

  Smitty: “I don’t know.”

  VanSlack: “But they left together.”

  Smitty: “No. Dum-Dum left first, and Sam went out maybe ten or fifteen minutes afterwards.” She turns to Nick. “Please tell me on the level—was MacFay murdered?”

  VanSlack, before Nick can reply: “Why do you think MacFay was murdered?”