Guild touched my elbow with his hand and we went in. Through an open door to the left an unmade bed could be seen. The room we entered was a living-room, shabby and dirty, with clothing, newspapers, and dirty dishes sitting around. In an alcove to the right there was a sink and a stove. A woman stood between them holding a sizzling skillet in her hand. She was a big-boned, full-fleshed, red-haired woman of perhaps twenty-eight, handsome in a rather brutal, sloppy way. She wore a rumpled pink kimono and frayed pink mules with lopsided bows on them. She stared sullenly at us.
Guild did not introduce me to Nunheim and he paid no attention to the woman. “Sit down,” he said, and pushed some clothing out of the way to make a place for himself on an end of the sofa.
I removed part of a newspaper from a rocking-chair and sat down. Since Guild kept his hat on I did the same with mine.
Nunheim went over to the table, where there was about two inches of whisky in a pint bottle and a couple of tumblers, and said: “Have a shot?”
Guild made a face. “Not that vomit. What’s the idea of telling me you just knew the Wolf girl by sight?”
“That’s all I did, Lieutenant, that’s the Christ’s truth.” Twice his eyes slid sidewise towards me and he jerked them back. “Maybe I said hello to her or how are you or something like that when I saw her, but that’s all I knew her. That’s the Christ’s truth.”
The woman in the alcove laughed, once, derisively, and there was no merriment in her face.
Nunheim twisted himself around to face her. “All right,” he told her, his voice shrill with rage, “put your mouth in and I’ll pop a tooth out of it.”
She swung her arm and let the skillet go at his head. It missed, crashing into the wall. Grease and egg-yolks made fresher stains on wall, floor, and furniture.
He started for her. I did not have to rise to put out a foot and trip him. He tumbled down on the floor. The woman had picked up a paring knife.
“Cut it out,” Guild growled. He had not stood up either. “We come here to talk to you, not to watch this rough-house comedy. Get up and behave yourself.”
Nunheim got slowly to his feet. “She drives me nuts when she’s drinking,” he said. “She been ragging me all day.” He moved his right hand back and forth. “I think I sprained my wrist.”
The woman walked past us without looking at any of us, went into the bedroom, and shut the door.
Guild said: “Maybe if you’d quit sucking around after other women you wouldn’t have so much trouble with this one.”
“What do you mean, Lieutenant?” Nunheim was surprised and innocent and perhaps pained.
“Julia Wolf.”
The little sallow man was indignant now. “That’s a lie, Lieutenant. Anybody that say I ever–”
Guild interrupted him by addressing me: “If you want to take a poke at him, I wouldn’t stop on account of his bum wrist: he couldn’t ever hit hard anyhow.”
Nunheim turned to me with both hands out. “I didn’t mean you were a liar. I meant maybe somebody made a mistake if they–”
Guild interrupted him again: “You wouldn’t’ve taken her if you could’ve gotten her?”
Nunheim moistened his lower lip and looked warily at the bedroom door. “Well,” he said slowly in a cautiously low voice, “of course she was a classy number. I guess I wouldn’t’ve turned it down.”
“But you never tried to make her?”
Nunheim hesitated, then moved his shoulders and said: “You know how it is. A fellow knocking around tries most everything he runs into.”
Guild looked sourly at him. “You’d done better to tell me that in the beginning. Where were you the afternoon she was knocked off?”
The little man jumped as if he had been stuck with a pin. “For Christ’s sake, Lieutenant, you don’t think I had anything to do with that. What would I want to hurt her for?”
“Where were you?”
Nunheims loose lips twitched nervously. “What day was she–” He broke off as the bedroom door opened.