17

Home, I delivered Guild’s message to Nora and told her the day’s news.

“I’ve got a message for you, too,” she said. “Gilbert Wynant dropped in and was quite disappointed at missing you. He asked me to tell you he has something of the ‘utmost importance’ to tell you.”

“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.”

She laughed, though her eyes did not change. “You’re such a bastard. You always think the worst of me, don’t you?” I took my hand away from her wrist and she rubbed the marks my fingers had left on it.

“Who was the woman who threw the skillet?” she asked. “Anyone I know?”

“It wasn’t Nora, if that’s what you mean. Have they arrested Victor-Christian Rosewater-Jorgensen yet?”

“What?”

I believed in her bewilderment, though both it and my belief in it surprised me. “Jorgensen is Rosewater,” I said. “You remember him. I thought you knew.”

“You mean that horrible man who—”

“Yes.”

“I won’t believe it.” She stood up working her fingers together. “I won’t. I won’t.” Her face was sick with fear, her voice strained, unreal as a ventriloquist’s. “I won’t believe it.”

“That’ll help a lot,” I said. She was not listening to me. She turned her back to me and went to a window, where she stood with her back to me.

I said: “There’s a couple of men in a car out front who look like they might be coppers waiting to pick him up when he—”

She turned around and asked sharply: “Are you sure he’s Rosewater?” Most of the fear had already gone out of her face and her voice was at least human again.

“The police are.” We stared at each other, both of us busy thinking. I was thinking she had not been afraid that Jorgensen killed Julia Wolf, or even that he might be arrested: she was afraid his only reason for marrying her had been as a move in some plot against Wynant.

When I laughed—not because the idea was funny, but because it had come to me so suddenly—she started and smiled uncertainly. “I won’t believe it,” she said, and her voice was very soft now, “until he tells me himself.”

“And when he does—then what?”

She moved her shoulders a little, and her lower lip quivered. “He is my husband.”

That should have been funny, but it annoyed me. I said: “Mimi, this is Nick. You remember me, N-i-c-k.”

“I know you never think any good of me,” she said gravely. “You think I’m—”

“All right. All right. Let it pass. Let’s get back to the dope on Wynant you found.”

“Yes, that,” she said, and turned away from me. When she turned back her lip was quivering again. “That was a lie, Nick. I didn’t find anything.” She came close to me. “Clyde had no right to send those letters to Alice and Macaulay trying to make everybody suspicious of me and I thought it would serve him right if I made up something against him, because I really did think—I mean, I do think—he killed her and it was only—”

“What’d you make up?” I asked.

“I—I hadn’t made it up yet. I wanted to find out about what they could do—you know, the things I asked you—first. I might’ve pretended she came to a little when I was alone with her, while the others were phoning, and told me he did it.”

“You didn’t say you heard something and kept quiet, you said you found something and hid it.”

“But I hadn’t really made up my mind what I—”

“When’d you hear about Wynant’s letter to Macaulay?”

“This afternoon,” she said, “there was a man here from the police.”

“Didn’t he ask you anything about Rosewater?”

“He asked me if I knew him or had ever known him, and I thought I was telling the truth when I said no.”

“Maybe you did,” I said, “and for the first time I now believe you were telling the truth when you said you found some sort of evidence against Wynant.”