The Thin Man Page 19

  “And why didn’t you?”

  “Why should he write letters antagonizing Mimi, the one who was helping him by holding back incriminating evidence? That’s why I thought the chain had been planted when she did turn it in, only I was a little bit too willing to believe she had done the planting. Morelli worried Macaulay, too, because he didn’t want suspicion thrown on anybody who might, in clearing themselves, throw it in the wrong direction. Mimi was all right, because she’d throw it back on Wynant, but everybody else was out. Suspicion thrown on Wynant was the one thing that was guaranteed to keep anybody from suspecting that Wynant was dead, and if Macaulay hadn’t killed Wynant, then there was no reason for his having killed either of the others. The most obvious thing in the whole layout and the key to the whole layout was that Wynant had to be dead.”

  “You mean you thought that from the beginning?” Nora demanded, fixing me with a stern eye.

  “No, darling, though I ought to be ashamed of myself for not seeing it, but once I heard there was a corpse under the floor, I wouldn’t have cared if doctors swore it was a woman’s, I’d have insisted it was Wynant’s. It had to be. It was the right thing.”

  “I guess you’re awfully tired. That must be what makes you talk like this.”

  “Then he had Nunheim to worry about too. After pointing the finger at Morelli, just to show the police he was being useful, he went to see Macaulay. I’m guessing again, sweetheart. I had a phone-call from a man who called himself Albert Norman, and the conversation ended with a noise on his end of the wire. My guess is that Nunheim went to see Macaulay and demanded some dough to keep quiet and, when Macaulay tried to bluff him, Nunheim said he’d show him and called me up to make a date with me to see if I’d buy his information—and Macaulay grabbed the phone and gave Nunheim something, if only a promise, but when Guild and I had our little talk with Nunheim, and he ran out on us, then he phoned Macaulay and demanded real action, probably a lump sum, with a promise to beat it out of town, away from us meddling sleuths. We do know he called up that afternoon—Macaulay’s telephone-operator remembers a Mr. Albert Norman calling up, and she remembers that Macaulay went out right after talking to him, so don’t get snooty about this—uh—reconstruction of mine. Macaulay wasn’t silly enough to think Nunheim was to be trusted even if he paid him, so he lured him down to this spot he had probably picked out ahead of time and let him have it—and that took care of that.”

  “Probably,” Nora said.

  “It’s a word you’ve got to use a lot in this business. The letter to Gilbert was only for the purpose of showing that Wynant had a key to the girl’s apartment, and sending Gilbert there was only a way of making sure that he’d fall into the hands of the police, who’d squeeze him and not let him keep the information about the letter and the key to himself. Then Mimi finally comes through with the watch-chain, but meanwhile another worry comes up. She’s persuaded Guild to suspect me a little. I’ve an idea that when Macaulay came to me this morning with that hooey he intended to get me up to Scarsdale and knock me off, making me number three on the list of Wynant’s victims. Maybe he just changed his mind, maybe he thought I was suspicious, too willing to go up there without policemen. Anyhow, Gilbert’s lie about having seen Wynant gave him another idea. If he could get somebody to say they had seen Wynant and stick to it … Now this part we know definitely.”

  “Thank God.”

  “He went to see Mimi this afternoon—riding up two floors above hers and walking down so the elevator boys wouldn’t remember having carried him to her floor—and made her a proposition. He told her there was no question about Wynant’s guilt, but that it was doubtful if the police would ever catch him. Meanwhile, he, Macaulay, had the whole estate in his hands. He couldn’t take a chance on appropriating any of it, but he’d fix it so she could—if she would split with him. He’d give her these bonds he had in his pocket and this check, but she’d have to say that Wynant had given them to her and she’d have to send this note, which he also had, over to Macaulay as if from Wynant. He assured her that Wynant, a fugitive, could not show up to deny his gift, and, except for herself and her children, there was no one else who had any interest in the estate, any reason for questioning the deal. Mimi’s not very sensible where she sees a chance to make a profit, so it was all O.K. with her, and he had what he wanted—somebody who’d seen Wynant alive. He warned her that everybody would think Wynant was paying her for some service, but if she simply denied it there would be nothing anybody could prove.”

  “Then what he told you this morning about Wynant instructing him to give her any amount she asked for was simply in preparation?”

  “Maybe, maybe it was an earlier fumbling towards that idea. Now are you satisfied with what we’ve got on him?”

  “Yes, in a way. There seems to be enough of it, but it’s not very neat.”

  “It’s neat enough to send him to the chair,” I said, “and that’s all that counts. It takes care of all the angles and I can’t think of any other theory that would. Naturally it wouldn’t hurt to find the pistol, and the typewriter he used for the Wynant letters, and they must be somewhere around where he can get at them when he needs them. (We found them in the Brooklyn apartment he had rented as George Foley.)

  “Have it your own way,” she said, “but I always thought detectives waited until they had every little detail fixed in—”

  “And then wonder why the suspect’s had time to get to the farthest country that has no extradition treaty.”

  She laughed. “All right, all right. Still want to leave for San Francisco tomorrow?”

  “Not unless you’re in a hurry. Let’s stick around awhile. This excitement has put us behind in our drinking.”

  “It’s all right by me. What do you think will happen to Mimi and Dorothy and Gilbert now?”

  “Nothing new. They’ll go on being Mimi and Dorothy and Gilbert just as you and I will go on being us and the Quinns will go on being the Quinns. Murder doesn’t round out anybody’s life except the murdered’s and sometimes the murderer’s.”

  “That may be,” Nora said, “but it’s all pretty unsatisfactory.”

  Dashiell Hammett was born in St. Marys County, Maryland, in 1894. He grew up in Philadelphia and Baltimore. He left school at the age of fourteen and held several kinds of jobs thereafter—messenger boy, newsboy, clerk, timekeeper, yardman, machine operator, and stevedore. He finally became an operative for Pinkerton’s Detective Agency.

  World War I, in which he served as a sergeant, interrupted his sleuthing and injured his health. When he was finally discharged from the last of several hospitals, he resumed detective work. Subsequently, he turned to writing, and in the late 1920s he became the unquestioned master of detective-story fiction in America. During World War II, Mr. Hammett again served as a sergeant in the Army, this time for more than two years, most of which he spent in the Aleutians. He died in 1961.

  Books by Dashiell Hammett

  The Big Knockover

  The Continental OP

  The Dain Curse

  The Glass Key

  The Maltese Falcon

  Nightmare Town

  Red Harvest

  The Thin Man

  Woman in the Dark

  ALSO BY DASHIELL HAMMETT

  THE DAIN CURSE

  The Continental Op is a short, squat, and utterly unsentimental tank of a private detective. Miss Gabrielle Dain Leggett is young, wealthy, and a devotee of morphine and religious cults. She has an unfortunate effect on the people around her: they have a habit of dying violently. Is Gabrielle the victim of a family curse? Or is the truth about her weirder and infinitely more dangerous? The Dain Curse is one of the Continental Op’s most bizarre cases, and a tautly crafted masterpiece of suspense.

  Fiction/Crime/978-0-679-72260-1

  THE GLASS KEY

  Paul Madvig was a cheerfully corrupt ward-heeler who aspired to something better: the daughter of Senator Ralph Bancroft Henry, the heiress to a dy
nasty of political purebreds. Did he want her badly enough to commit murder? And if Madvig was innocent, which of his dozens of enemies was doing an awfully good job of framing him? Dashiell Hammett’s tour de force of detective fiction combines an airtight plot, authentically venal characters, and writing of telegraphic crispness.

  Fiction/Crime/978-0-679-72262-5

  THE MALTESE FALCON

  A treasure worth killing for. Sam Spade, a slightly shopworn private eye with his own solitary code of ethics. A perfumed grafter named Joel Cairo, a fat man named Gutman, and Brigid O’Shaughnessy, a beautiful and treacherous woman whose loyalties shift at the drop of a dime. These are the ingredients of Dashiell Hammett’s coolly glittering gem of detective fiction, a novel that has haunted three generations of readers.

  Fiction/Crime/978-0-679-72264-9

  NIGHTMARE TOWN

  Laconic coppers, lowlifes, and mysterious women double-and triple-cross their colleagues with practiced nonchalance. A man on a bender awakens in a small town with a dark mystery at its heart. A woman confronts a brutal truth about her husband. Here is classic noir: hard-boiled descriptions to rival Hemingway, verbal exchanges punctuated with pistol shots and fisticuffs. Devilishly plotted, whip-smart, impassioned, Nightmare Town is a treasury of tales from America’s poet laureate of the dispossessed.

  Fiction/Crime/978-0-375-70102-3

  RED HARVEST

  When the last honest citizen of Poisonville was murdered, the Continental Op stayed on to punish the guilty—even if that meant taking on an entire town. Red Harvest is more than a superb crime novel: it is a classic exploration of corruption and violence in the American grain.

  Fiction/Crime/978-0-679-72261-8

  THE THIN MAN

  Nick and Nora Charles are Hammett’s most enchanting creations, a rich, glamorous couple who solve homicides in between wisecracks and martinis. At once knowing and unabashedly romantic, The Thin Man is a murder mystery that doubles as a sophisticated comedy of manners.

  Fiction/Crime/978-0-679-72263-2

  WOMAN IN THE DARK

  On a dark night a young woman seeks refuge at an isolated house. She is hurt and frightened. The man and woman who live there take her in. But their decency is utterly unequipped to deal with the Woman in the Dark, or with the designs of the men who want her. First published in installments in Liberty magazine and now rediscovered after many years, Woman in the Dark shows Dashiell Hammett at the peak of his narrative powers.

  Fiction/Crime/978-0-679-72265-6

  ALSO AVAILABLE:

  The Big Knockover, 978-0-679-72259-5

  The Continental OP, 978-0-679-72258-5

  VINTAGE CRIME/BLACK LIZARD

  Available at your local bookstore, or visit

  www.randomhouse.com

  First Vintage Crime/Black Lizard Edition, August 1992

  Copyright 1933, 1934 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

  Copyright renewed 1961, 1962 by Dashiell Hammett

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

  Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc.,

  New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1934.

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Hammett, Dashiell, 1894–1961.

  The thin man / Dashiell Hammett.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-76750-9

  I. Title.

  PS3515.A4347T47 1989

  813’.52–dcl9

  91-50920

  v3.0