“He’s probably discovered that Jorgensen has a mother fixation.”
“Do you think Jorgensen killed her?” she asked.
“I thought I knew who did it,” I said, “but it’s too mixed up right now for anything but guesses.”
“And what’s your guess?”
“Mimi, Jorgensen, Wynant, Nunheim, Gilbert, Dorothy, Aunt Alice, Morelli, you, me, or Guild. Maybe Studsy did it. How about shaking up a drink?”
She mixed some cocktails. I was on my second or third when she came back from answering the telephone and said: “Your friend Mimi wants to talk to you.”
I went to the telephone. “Hello, Mimi.”
“I’m awfully sorry I was so rude the other night, Nick, but I was so upset and I just simply lost my temper and made a show of myself. Please forgive me.” She ran through this very rapidly, as if anxious to get it over with.
“That’s all right,” I said.
She hardly let me get my three words out before she was speaking again, but slower and more earnestly now: “Can I see you, Nick? Something horrible has happened, something–I don’t know what to do, which way to turn.”
“What is it?”
“I can’t tell you over the phone, but you’ve got to tell me what to do. I’ve got to have somebody’s advice. Can’t you come over?”
“You mean now?”
“Yes. Please.”
I said, “All right,” and went back to the living-room. “I’m going to run over and see Mimi. She says she’s in a jam and needs help.”
Nora laughed. “Keep your legs crossed. She apologize to you? She did to me.”
“Yes, all in one breath. Is Dorothy home or still at Aunt Alice’s?”
“Still at Auntie’s, according to Gilbert. How long will you be?”
“No longer than I have to. The chances are they’ve copped Jorgensen and she wants to know if it can be fixed.”
“Can they do anything to him? I mean if he didn’t kill the Wolf girl.”
“I suppose the old charges against him–threats by mail, attempted extortion–could be raked up.” I stopped drinking to ask Nora and myself a question: “I wonder if he and Nunheim know each other.” I thought that over, but could make nothing more than a possibility of it. “Well, I’m on my way.”
18
Mimi received me with both hands. “It’s awfully, awfully nice of you to forgive me, Nick, but then you’ve always been awfully nice. I don’t know what got into me Monday night.”
I said: “Forget it.”
Her face was somewhat pinker than usual and the firmness of its muscles made it seem younger. Her blue eyes were very bright. Her hands had been cold on mine. She was tense with excitement, but I could not figure out what kind of excitement it was.
She said: “It was awfully sweet of your wife, too, to–”
“Forget it.”
“Nick, what can they do to you for concealing evidence that somebody’s guilty of a murder?”
“Make you an accomplice–accomplice after the fact is the technical term–if they want.”
“Even if you voluntarily change your mind and give them the evidence?”
“They can. Usually they don’t.”
She looked around the room as if to make sure there was nobody else there and said: “Clyde killed Julia. I found the proof and hid it. What’ll they do to me?”
“Probably nothing except give you hell–if you turn it in. He was once your husband: you and he are close enough together that no jury’d be likely to blame you for trying to cover him up–unless, of course, they had reason to think you had some other motive.”
She asked coolly, deliberately: “Do you?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “My guess would be that you had intended to use this proof of his guilt to shake him down for some dough as soon as you could get in touch with him, and that now something else has come up to make you change your mind.”
She made a claw of her right hand and struck at my face with her pointed nails. Her teeth were together, her lips drawn far back over them.
I caught her wrist. “Women are getting tough,” I said, trying to sound wistful. “I just left one that heaved a skillet at a guy.”