THE THIN MAN by Dashiell Hammett

“I don’t think that’s a fact. Look here, Mr. Charles, would you take your oath, or even just tell me straight out, that you’ve been emptying your pockets to me right along?”

There was no use saying yes–he would not have believed me. I said: “Practically.”

“Practically, yes,” he grumbled. “Everybody’s been telling me practically the whole truth. ‘What I want’s some impractical son of a gun that’ll shoot the works.”

I could sympathize with him: I knew how he felt. I said: “Maybe nobody you’ve found knows the whole truth.”

He made an unpleasant face. “That’s very likely, ain’t it? Listen, Mr. Charles, I’ve talked to everybody I could find. If you can find any more for me, I’ll talk to them too. You mean Wynant? Don’t you suppose we got every facility the department’s got working night and day trying to turn him up?”

“There’s his son,” I suggested.

“There’s his son,” he agreed. He called in Andy and a swarthy bowlegged man named Kline. “Get me that Wynant kid–the punk–I want to talk to him.” They went out. He said: “See, I want people to talk to.”

I said: “Your nerves are in pretty bad shape this afternoon, aren’t they? Are you bringing Jorgensen down from Boston?”

He shrugged his big shoulders. “His story listens all right to we. I don’t know. Want to tell me what you think of it?”

“Sure.”

“I’m kind of jumpy this afternoon, for a fact,” he said. “I didn’t get a single solitary wink of sleep last night. It’s a hell of a life. I don’t know why I stick at it. A fellow can get a piece of land and some wire fencing and a few head of silver fox and– Well, anyways, when you people scared Jorgensen off back in ’25, he says he hit out for Germany, leaving his wife in the lurch–though he don’t say much about that–and changing his name to give you more trouble finding him, and on the same account he’s afraid to work at his regular job–he calls himself some kind of a technician or something–so pickings are kind of slim. He says he worked at one thing and another, whatever he could get, but near as I can figure out he was mostly gigohoing, if you know what I mean, and not finding too many heavy-money dames. Well, along about ’27 or ’28 he’s in Milan–that’s a ‘city in Italy–and he sees in the Paris Herald where this Mimi, recently divorced wife of Clyde Miller Wynant, has arrived in Paris. He don’t know her personally and she don’t know him, but he knows she’s a dizzy blonde that likes men and fun and hasn’t got much sense. He figures a bunch of Wynant’s dough must’ve come to her with the divorce and, the way he looks at it, any of it he could take away from her wouldn’t be any more than what Wynant had gypped him out of–he’d only be getting some of what belonged to him. So he scrapes up the fare to Paris and goes up there. All right so far?”

“Sounds all right.”

“That’s what I thought. Well, he don’t have any trouble getting to know her in Paris–either picking her up or getting somebody to introduce him or whatever happened–and the rest of it’s just as easy. She goes. for him in a big way–bing, according to him–right off the bat, and the first thing you know she’s one jump ahead of him, she’s thinking about marrying him. Naturally he don’t try to talk her out of that. She’d gotten a lump sum–two hundred thousand berries, by God!–out of Wynant instead of alimony, so her marrying again wasn’t stopping any payments, and it’ll put him right in the middle of the cash-drawer. So they do it. According to him, it was a trick marriage up in some mountains he says are between Spain and France and was done by a Spanish priest on what was really French soil, which don’t make it legal, but I figure he’s just trying to discourage a bigamy rap. Personally, I don’t care one way or the other. The point is he got his hands on the dough and kept them on it till there wasn’t any more dough. And all this time, understand, he says she didn’t know he was anybody but Christian Jorgensen, a fellow she met in Paris, and still didn’t know it up to the time we grabbed him in Boston. Still sound all right?”

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