“It's always like that,” I said sympathetically.
“Don't I know it.” He put a forkful of food in his mouth. “Where was I? Oh, yes, about Wynant. He gave up his apartment when he went away, and put his stuff in storage. We been looking through it—the stuff—but ain't found anything yet to show where he went or even what he was working on, which we thought maybe might help. We didn't have any better luck in his shop on First Avenue. It's been locked up too since he went away, except that she used to go down there for an hour or two once or twice a week to take care of his mail and things. There's nothing to tell us anything in the mail that's come since she got knocked off. We didn't find anything in her place to help.” He smiled at Nora. “I guess this must be pretty dull to you, Mrs. Charles.”
“Dull?” She was surprised. “I'm sitting on the edge of my chair.”
“Ladies usually like more color,” he said, and coughed, “kind of glamour. Anyways, we got nothing to show where he's been, only he phones Macaulay last Friday and says to meet him at two o'clock in the Plaza lobby. Macaulay wasn't in, so he just left the message.”
“Macaulay was here,” I said, “for lunch.”
“He told me. Well, Macaulay don't get to the Plaza till nearly three and he don't find any Wynant there and Wynant ain't registered there. He tries describing him, with and without a beard, but nobody at the Plaza remembers seeing him. He phones his office, but Wynant ain't called up again. And when he phones Julia Wolf and she tells him she don't even know Wynant's in town, which he figures is a lie, because he had just give her five thousand dollars for Wynant yesterday and figures Wynant's come for it, but he just says all right and hangs up and goes on about his business.”
“His business such as what?” I asked.
Guild stopped chewing the piece of roll he had just bitten off. “I guess it wouldn't hurt to know, at that. I'll find out. There didn't seem to be anything pointing at him, so we didn't bother with that, but it don't ever hurt any to know who's got an alibi and who ain't.”
I shook my head no at the question he had decided not to ask. “I don't see anything pointing at him, except that he's Wynant's lawyer and probably knows more than he's telling.”
“Sure. I understand. Well, that's what people have lawyers for, I guess. Now about the girl: maybe Julia Wolf wasn't her real name at all. We ain't been able to find out for sure yet, but we have found out she wasn't the kind of dame you'd expect him to be trusting to handle all that dough—I mean if he knew about her.”
“Had a record?”
He wagged his head up and down. “This is elegant stew. A couple of years before she went to work for him she did six months on a badgergame charge out West, in Cleveland, under the name of Rhoda Stewart.”
“You suppose Wynant knew that?”
“Search me. Don't look like he'd turned her loose with that dough if he did, but you can't tell. They tell me he was kind of nuts about her, and you know how guys can go. She was running around off and on with this Shep Morelli and his boys too.”
“Have you really got anything on him?” I asked.
“Not on this,” he said regretfully, “but we wanted him for a couple of other things.” He drew his sandy brows together a little. “I wish I knew what sent him here to see you. Of course these junkies are likely to do anything, but I wish I knew.”
“I told you all I knew.”
“I'm not doubting that,” he assured me. He turned to Nora. “I hope you don't think we were too rough with him, but you see you got to—”
Nora smiled and said she understood perfectly and filled his cup with coffee.
“Thank you, ma'am.”
“What's a junkie?” she asked.
“Hop-head.”
She looked at me. “Was Morelli—?”
“Primed to the ears,” I said.
“Why didn't you tell me?” she complained. “I miss everything.” She left the table to answer the telephone.
Guild asked: “You going to prosecute him for shooting you?”
“Not unless you need it.”
He shook his head. His voice was casual, though there was some curiosity in his eyes. “I guess we got enough on him for a while.”
“You were telling me about the girl.”
“Yes,” he said. “Well, we found out she's been spending a lot of nights away from her apartment—two or three days at a stretch sometimes. Maybe that's when she was meeting Wynant. I don't know. We ain't been able to knock any holes in Morelli's story of not seeing her for three months. V/hat do you make of that?”
“The same thing you do,” I replied. “It's just about three months since Wynant went off. Maybe it means something, maybe not.”
Nora came in and said Harrison Quinn was on the telephone. He told me he had sold some bonds I was writing off losses on and gave me the prices.
“Have you seen Dorothy Wynant?” I asked.
“Not since I left her in your place, but I'm meeting her at the Palma for cocktails this afternoon. Come to think of it, she told me not to tell you. How about that gold, Nick? You're missing something if you don't get in on it. Those wild men from the West are going to give us some kind of inflation as soon as Congress meets, that's certain, and even if they don't, everybody expects them to. As I told you last week, there's already talk of a pooi being—”
“All right,” I said and gave him an order to buy some Dome Mines at izЅ.
He remembered then that he had seen something in the newspapers about my having been shot. He was pretty vague about it and paid very little attention to my assurances that I was all right. “I suppose that means no ping-pong for a couple of days,” he said with what seemed genuine regret. “Listen: you've got tickets for the opening tonight. If you can't use them I'll be—”
“We're going to use them. Thanks just the same.”
He laughed and said good-by.
A waiter was carrying away the table when I returned to the living— room. Guild had made himself comfortable on the sofa. Nora was telling him: ”. . . have to go away over the Christmas holidays every year because what's left of my family make a fuss over them and if we're home they come to visit us or we have to visit them, and Nick doesn't like it.” Asta was licking her paws in a corner.
Guild looked at his watch. “I'm taking up a lot of you folks' time. I didn't mean to impose—”
I sat down and said: “We were just about up to the murder, weren't we?”
“Just about.” He relaxed on the sofa again. “That was on Friday the 23rd at some time before twenty minutes after three in the afternoon, which was the time Mrs. Jorgensen got there and found her. It's kind of hard to say how long she'd been laying there dying before she was found. The only thing we know is that she was all right and answered the phone—and the phone was all right—at about half past two, when Mrs. Jorgensen called her up and was still all right around three, when Macaulay phoned.”
“I didn't know Mrs. Jorgensen phoned.”
“It's a fact.” Guild cleared his throat. “We didn't suspect anything there, you understand, but we checked it up just as a matter of course and found out from the girl at the switchboard at the Courtland that she put the call through for Mrs. J. about two thirty.”
“What did Mrs. J. say?”
“She said she called up to ask where she could find Wynant, but this Julia Wolf said she didn't know, so Mrs. J., thinking she's lying and maybe she can get her to tell the truth if she sees her, asks if she can drop in for a minute, and she says sure.” He frowned at my right knee. “Well, she went there and found her. The apartment- house people don't remember seeing anybody going in or out of the Wolf apartment, but that's easy. A dozen people could do it without being seen. The gun wasn't there. There wasn't any signs of anybody busting in, and things in the place hadn't been disturbed any more than I've told you. I mean the place didn't look like it had been frisked. She had on a diamond ring that must've been worth a few hundred and there was thirty-some bucks in her bag. The people there know Wynant and Morelli—both of 'em have been in and out enough—but claim they ain't
