THE THIN MAN by Dashiell Hammett

Nora and Quinn were dancing.

“And what do you think of your father?” I asked.

Gilbert shrugged. “I haven’t seen him since I was a child. I’ve got a theory about him, but a lot of it’s guess-work. I’d like–the chief thing I’d like to know is if he’s impotent.”

I said: “He tried to kill himself today, down in Allentown.”

Dorothy cried, “He didn’t,” so sharply that Quinn and Nora stopped dancing, and she turned and thrust her face up at her brother’s. “Where’s Chris?” she demanded.

Gilbert looked from her face to mine and quickly back to hers. “Don’t be an ass,” he said coldly. “He’s off with that girl of his, that Fenton girl.”

Dorothy did not look as if she believed him.

“She’s jealous of him,” he explained to me. “It’s that mother fixation.”

I asked: “Did either of you ever see the Sidney Kelterman your father had trouble with back when I first knew you?”

Dorothy shook her head. Gilbert said: “No. Why?”

“Just an idea I had. I never saw him either, but the description they gave me, with some easy changes, could be made to fit your Chris Jorgensen.”

14

That night Nora and I went to the opening of the Radio City Music Hall, decided we had had enough of the performance after an hour, and left. “Where to?” Nora asked.

“I don’t care. Want to hunt up that Pigiron Club that Morelli told us about? You’ll like Studsy Burke. He used to be a safe-burglar. He claims to’ve cracked the safe in the Hagerstown jail while he was doing thirty days there for disorderly conduct.”

“Let’s,” she said.

We went down to Forty-ninth Street and, after asking two taxidrivers, two newsboys, and a policeman, found the place. The doorman said he didn’t know about any Burkes, but he’d see. Studsy came to the door. “How are you, Nick?” he said. “Come on in.”

He was a powerfully built man of medium height, a little fat now, but not soft. He must have been at least fifty, but looked ten years younger than that. He had a broad, pleasantly ugly, pockmarked face under not much hair of no particular color, and even his baldness could not make his forehead seem large. His voice was a deep bass growl.

I shook hands with him and introduced him to Nora.

“A wife,” he said. “Think of that. By God, you’ll drink champagne or you’ll fight me.”

I said we wouldn’t fight and we went inside. His place had a comfortably shabby look. It was between hours: there were only three customers in the place. We sat at a table in a corner and Studsy told the waiter exactly which bottle of wine to bring. Then he examined me carefully and nodded. “Marriage done you good.” He scratched his chin. “It’s a long time I don’t see you.”

“A long time,” I agreed.

“He sent me up the river,” he told Nora.

She clucked sympathetically. “Was he a good detective?”

Studsy wrinkled what forehead he had. “Folks say, but I don’t know. The once he caught me was a accident: I led with my right.”

“How come you sicked this wild man Morelli on me?” I asked.

“You know how foreigners are,” he said; “they’re hysterical. I don’t know he’s going to do nothing like that. He’s worrying about the coppers trying to hang that Wolf dame’s killing on him and we see in the paper you got something to do with it and I say to him, ‘Nick might not maybe sell his own mother out and you feel like you got to talk to somebody,’ so he says he will. What’d you do, make faces at him?”

“He let himself be spotted sneaking in and then blamed me for it. How’d he find me?”

“He’s got friends and you wasn’t hiding, was you?”

“I’d only been in town a week and there was nothing in the paper saying where I was staying.”

“Is that so?” Studsy asked with interest. “Where you been?”

“I live in San Francisco now. How’d he find me?”

“That’s a swell town. I ain’t been there in years, but it’s one swell town. I oughtn’t tell you, Nick. Ask him. It’s his business.”

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