MAN HERE IS NOT WYNANT AND DID NOT TRY TO COMMIT SUICIDE
15
I had a stenographer in the next morning and got rid of most of the mail that had been accumulating; had a telephone conversation with our lawyer in San Francisco–we were trying to keep one of the mill’s customers from being thrown into bankruptcy; spent an hour going over a plan we had for lowering our state taxes; was altogether the busy business man, and felt pretty virtuous by two o’clock, when I knocked off work for the day and went out to lunch with Nora.
She had a date to play bridge after lunch. I went down to see Guild: I had talked to him on the telephone earlier in the day.
“So it was a false alarm?” I said after we had shaken hands and made ourselves comfortable in chairs.
“That’s what it was. He wasn’t any more Wynant than I am. You know how it is: we told the Philly police he’d sent a wire from there and broadcasted his description, and for the next week anybody that’s skinny and maybe got whiskers is Wynant to half of the State of Pennsylvania. This was a fellow named Barlow, a carpenter out of work as near as we can figure out, that got shot by a nigger trying to stick him up. He can’t talk much yet.”
“He couldn’t’ve been shot by somebody who made the same mistake the Allentown police did?” I asked.
“You mean thought he was Wynant? I guess that could be–if it helps any. Does it?”
I said I didn’t know. “Did Macaulay tell you about the letter he got from Wynant?”
“He didn’t tell me what was in it.”
I told him. I told him what I knew about Kelterman.
He said: “Now, that’s interesting.”
I told him about the letter Wynant had sent his sister.
He said: “He writes a lot of people, don’t he?”
“I thought of that.” I told him Sidney Kelterman’s description with a few easy changes would fit Christian Jorgensen.
He said: “It don’t hurt any to listen to a man like you. Don’t let me stop you.”
I told him that was the crop.
He rocked back in his chair and screwed his pale gray eyes up at the ceiling. “There’s some work to be done there,” he said presently.
“Was this fellow in Allentown shot with a .3 2?” I asked.
Guild stared curiously at me for a moment, then shook his head. “A .44. You got something on your mind?”
“No. Just chasing the set-up around in my head.”
He said, “I know what that is,” and leaned back to look at the ceiling some more. When he spoke again it was as if he was thinking of something else. “That alibi of Macaulay’s you was asking about is all right. He was late for a date then and we know for a fact he was in a fellow’s office named Hermann on Fifty-seventh Street from five minutes after three till twenty after, the time that counts.”
“What’s the five minutes after three?”
“That’s right, you don’t know about that. Well, we found a fellow named Caress with a cleaning and dyeing place on First Avenue that called her up at five minutes after three to ask her if she had any work for him, and she said no and told him she was liable to go away. So that narrows the time down to from three five to three twenty. You ain’t really suspicious of Macaulay?”
“I’m suspicious of everybody,” I said. “Where were you between three five and three twenty?”
He laughed. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “I’m just about the only one of the lot that ain’t got an alibi. I was at the moving pictures.”
“The rest of them have?”
He wagged his head up and down. “Jorgensen left his place with Mrs. Jorgensen–that was about five minutes to three–and sneaked over on West Seventy-third Street to see a girl named Olga Fenton–we promised not to tell his wife–and stayed there till about five. ‘We know what Mrs. Jorgensen did. The daughter was dressing when they left and she took a taxi at a quarter past and went straight to Bergdorf-Goodman’s. The son was in the Public Library all afternoon–Jesus, he reads funny books. Morelli was in a joint over in the Forties.” He laughed. “And where was you?”