“I told you all I knew.”
“I’m not doubting that,” he assured me. He turned to Nora. “I hope you don’t think we were too rough with him, but you see you got to–”
Nora smiled and said she understood perfectly and filled his cup with coffee.
“Thank you, ma’am.”
“What’s a junkie?” she asked.
“Hop-head.”
She looked at me. “Was Morelli–?”
“Primed to the ears,” I said.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” she complained. “I miss everything.” She left the table to answer the telephone.
Guild asked: “You going to prosecute him for shooting you?”
“Not unless you need it.”
He shook his head. His voice was casual, though there was some curiosity in his eyes. “I guess we got enough on him for a while.”
“You were telling me about the girl.”
“Yes,” he said. “Well, we found out she’s been spending a lot of nights away from her apartment–two or three days at a stretch sometimes. Maybe that’s when she was meeting Wynant. I don’t know. We ain’t been able to knock any holes in Morelli’s story of not seeing her for three months. V/hat do you make of that?”
“The same thing you do,” I replied. “It’s just about three months since Wynant went off. Maybe it means something, maybe not.”
Nora came in and said Harrison Quinn was on the telephone. He told me he had sold some bonds I was writing off losses on and gave me the prices.
“Have you seen Dorothy Wynant?” I asked.
“Not since I left her in your place, but I’m meeting her at the Palma for cocktails this afternoon. Come to think of it, she told me not to tell you. How about that gold, Nick? You’re missing something if you don’t get in on it. Those wild men from the West are going to give us some kind of inflation as soon as Congress meets, that’s certain, and even if they don’t, everybody expects them to. As I told you last week, there’s already talk of a pooi being–”
“All right,” I said and gave him an order to buy some Dome Mines at iz½.
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?”