“Am I invited to your party or do I–”
“Sure. You’ve never met Macaulay, have you? He’s a pretty good guy. I was attached to his outfit for a few days once, up around Vaux, and we looked each other up after the war. He threw a couple of jobs my way, including the Wynant one. How about a drop of something to cut the phlegm?”
“Why don’t you stay sober today?”
“We didn’t come to New York to stay sober. Want to see a hockey game tonight?”
“I’d like to.” She poured me a drink and went to order breakfast.
I looked through the morning papers. They had the news of Jorgensen’s being picked up by the Boston police and of Nunheim’s murder, but further developments of what the tabloids called “The Hell’s Kitchen Gang War,” the arrest of “Prince Mike” Gerguson, and an interview with the “Jafsie” of the Lindbergh kidnapping negotiations got more space.
Macaulay and the bellboy who brought Asta up arrived together. Asta liked Macaulay because when he patted her he gave her something to set her weight against: she was never very fond of gentleness.
He had lines around his mouth this morning and some of the rosiness was gone from his cheeks. “Where’d the police get this new line?” he asked. “Do they think–” He broke off as Nora came in. She had dressed.
“Nora, this is Herbert Macaulay,” I said. “My wife.”
They shook hands and Nora said: “Nick would only let me order some coffee for you. Can’t I–”
“No, thanks, I’ve just finished breakfast.”
I said: “Now what’s this about the police?”
He hesitated.
“Nora knows practically everything I know,” I assured him, “so unless it’s something you’d rather not–”
“No, no, nothing like that,” he said. “It’s–well–for Mrs. Charles’s sake. I don’t want to cause her anxiety.”
“Then out with it. She only worries about things she doesn’t know. WThat’s the new police line?”
“Lieutenant Guild came to see me this morning,” he said. “First he showed me a piece of watch-chain with a knife attached to it and asked me if I’d ever seen them before. I had: they were Wynant’s. I told him I thought I had: I thought they looked like Wynant’s. Then he asked me if I knew of any way in which they could have come into anybody else’s possession and, after some beating about the bush, I discovered that by anybody else he meant you or Mimi. I told him certainly–Wynant could have given them to either of you, you could have stolen them or found them on the street or have been given them by somebody who stole them or found them on the street, or you could have got them from somebody Wynant gave them to. There were other ways, too, for you to have got them, I told him, but he knew I was kidding him, so he wouldn’t let me tell him about them.”
There were spots of color in Nora’s cheeks and her eyes were dark. “The idiot!”
“Now, now,” I said. “Maybe I should have warned you–he was heading in that direction last night. I think it’s likely my old pal Mimi gave him a prod or two. What else did he turn the searchlight on?”
“He wanted to know about–what he asked was: ‘Do you figure Charles and the Wolf dame was still playing around together? Or was that all washed up?'”
“That’s the Mimi touch, all right,” I said. “What’d you tell him?”
“I told him I didn’t know whether you were ‘still’ playing around together because I didn’t know that you had even played around together, and reminded him that you hadn’t been living in New York for a long time anyway.”
Nora asked me: “Did you?”
I said: “Don’t try to make a liar out of Mac. What’d he say to that?”
“Nothing. He asked me if I thought Jorgensen knew about you and Mimi and, when I asked him what about you and Mimi, he accused me of acting the innocent–they were his words–so we didn’t get very far. He was interested in the times I had seen you, also, where and when to the exact inch and second.”