The Thin Man Read Online Free Page B

later the Edges. I won thirty-two dollars—on the cuff—from Margot at backgammon. The Denis girl had to go into the bedroom and lie down awhile. Alice Quinn, with Margot’s help, tore her husband away from Dorothy at a little after six and carriedhim off to keep a date they had. The Edges left. Mimi put on her coat, got her husband and daughter into their coats.
    “It’s awful short notice,” she said, “but can’t you come to dinner tomorrow night?”
    Nora said: “Certainly.” We shook hands and made polite speeches all around and they went away. Nora shut the door after them and leaned her back against it. “Jesus, he’s a handsome guy,” she said.

 
8

    So far I had known just where I stood on the Wolf-Wynant-Jorgensen troubles and what I was doing—the answers were, respectively, nowhere and nothing—but when we stopped at Reuben’s for coffee on our way home at four the next morning, Nora opened a newspaper and found a line in one of the gossip columns: “Nick Charles, former Trans-American Detective Agency ace, on from Coast to sift the Julia Wolf murder mystery”; and when I opened my eyes and sat up in bed some six hours later Nora was shaking me and a man with a gun in his hand was standing in the bedroom doorway.
    He was a plump dark youngish man of medium height, broad through the jaws, narrow between the eyes. He wore a black derby hat, a black overcoat that fitted him very snugly, a dark suit, and black shoes, all looking as if he had bought them within the past fifteen minutes. The gun, a blunt black .38-calibre automatic, lay comfortably in his hand, not pointing at anything. Nora was saying: “He made me let him in, Nick. He said he had to—”
    “I got to talk to you,” the man with the gun said. “That’s all, but I got to do that.” His voice was low, rasping. I had blinked myself awake by then. I looked at Nora. She was excited, but apparentlynot frightened: she might have been watching a horse she had a bet on coming down the stretch with a nose lead.
    I said: “All right, talk, but do you mind putting the gun away? My wife doesn’t care, but I’m pregnant and I don’t want the child to be born with—”
    He smiled with his lower lip. “You don’t have to tell me you’re tough. I heard about you.” He put the pistol in his overcoat pocket. “I’m Shep Morelli.”
    “I never heard about you,” I said.
    He took a step into the room and began to shake his head from side to side. “I didn’t knock Julia off.”
    “Maybe you didn’t, but you’re bringing the news to the wrong place. I got nothing to do with it.”
    “I haven’t seen her in three months,” he said. “We were washed up.”
    “Tell the police.”
    “I wouldn’t have any reason to hurt her: she was always on the up and up with me.”
    “That’s all swell,” I said, “only you’re peddling your fish in the wrong market.”
    “Listen.” He took another step towards the bed. “Studsy Burke tells me you used to be O.K. That’s why I’m here. Do the—”
    “How is Studsy?” I asked. “I haven’t seen him since the time he went up the river in ’23 or ’24.”
    “He’s all right. He’d like to see you. He’s got a joint on West Forty-ninth, the Pigiron Club. But listen, what’s the law doing to me? Do they think I did it? Or is it just something else to pin on me?”
    I shook my head. “I’d tell you if I knew. Don’t let newspapers fool you: I’m not in this. Ask the police.”
    “That’d be very smart.” He smiled with his lower lip again. “That’d be the smartest thing I ever did. Me that a police captain’s been in a hospital three weeks on account we had an argument. The boys would like me to come in and ask ’em questions. They’dlike it right down to the end of their blackjacks.” He turned a hand over, palm up. “I come to you on the level. Studsy says you’re on the level. Be on the level.”
    “I’m being on the level,” I assured him. “If I knew