The Thin Man

by Dashiell Hammett

I was leaning against the bar in a speakeasy on Fifty-second Street, waiting for Nora to finish her Christmas shopping, when a girl got up from the table where she had been sitting with three other people and came over to me. She was small and blonde, and whether you looked at her face or at her body in powder-blue sports clothes, the result was satisfactory. “Aren’t you Nick Charles?” she asked.

Now we shook hands and patted each other’s backs, and he asked me how the world was treating me, and I said, “Fine,” and asked him and he said, “Fine,” and I told him to call his office.

Do you think Macaulay’s trustworthy?” “He’s Wynant’s lawyer,” I said. “There’s no reason why you should trust him.”

Nora said: “Certainly.” We shook hands and made polite speeches all around and they went away. Nora shut the door after them and leaned her back against it. “Jesus, he’s a handsome guy,” she said.

So far I had known just where I stood on the Wolf-Wynant-Jorgensen troubles and what I was doing—the answers were, respectively, nowhere and nothing—but when we stopped at Reuben’s for coffee on our way home at four the next morning, Nora opened a newspaper and found a line in one of the gossip columns: “Nick Charles, former Trans-American Detective Agency ace, on from Coast to sift the Julia Wolf murder mystery”; and when I opened my eyes and sat up in bed some six hours later Nora was shaking me and a man with a gun in his hand was standing in the bedroom doorway.

He wore a black derby hat, a black overcoat that fitted him very snugly, a dark suit, and black shoes, all looking as if he had bought them within the past fifteen minutes.

I said: “All right, talk, but do you mind putting the gun away? My wife doesn’t care, but I’m pregnant and I don’t want the child to be born with—”

But you’ve got to leave me alone on the rest of it. I don’t know what I’m going to do because I don’t know what’s being done to me. I’ve got to find out.

“You’ve got to believe me. I couldn’t tell you all that, couldn’t make myself out such a cheap little lying fool, if it wasn’t the truth.”

“It makes more sense if I don’t believe you,” I said. “Twelve bucks isn’t enough money.

Gilbert Wynant was two years younger than his sister, a gangling pale blond boy of eighteen with not too much chin under a somewhat slack mouth.

“I’m not doing anything. If she wants to stay, she stays.” Anger was a very pretty thing in Mimi’s blue eyes.

“He wasn’t surprised at not finding her, though. He said she was always wandering off somewhere, she has dromomania,

After partaking of the hospitality of the employees at the Agency for ten days, Packer proceeded to a place called Saquache, claiming that he intended to work his way to Pennsylvania, where he had a brother.

Most of us have outgrown ethics and morals and so on. Mamma’s just not grown up to them yet.”

He had a broad, pleasantly ugly, pockmarked face under not much hair of no particular color, and even his baldness could not make his forehead seem large.

“You didn’t tell him you’d quit gum-shoeing.” “He’d’ve thought I was trying to put something over on him,” I explained. “To a mugg like him, once a sleuth always a sleuth, and I’d rather lie to him than have him think I’m lying.

She stared at him dully and said: “I don’t like crooks, and even if I did, I wouldn’t like crooks that are stool-pigeons, and if I liked crooks that are stool-pigeons, I still wouldn’t like you.”

She chuckled. “You must really like me, Nick, or you wouldn’t always be so disagreeable.”

It’s a funny thing—I suppose you’ve noticed it—the people who lie the most are nearly always the clumsiest at it, and they’re easier to fool with lies than most people, too. You’d think they’d be on the look-out for lies, but they seem to be the very ones that will believe almost anything at all.

Our friend Nunheim was filled full of .32s just about an hour after he copped the sneak on us—deader’n hell. The pills look like they come from the same gun that cut down the Wolf dame.

“I don’t believe it,” she said. “You made it up. There aren’t any people like that. What’s the matter with them? Are they the first of a new race of monsters?” “I just tell you what happens; I don’t explain it.”

“For one thing, if Jorgensen’s out of town, as I think he is, and the bullets are from the same gun that was used on Julia Wolf, and they probably are, then the police’ll have to find his accomplice if they want to hang anything on him.”

“I’m sure if you were a good detective you’d be able to make it much clearer to me than it is.” She went to work on her puzzle again. “Are you going back to see Mimi?”

When Nora returned from the telephone she had a look in her eye. “Now what’s up?” I asked. “Nothing. Just ‘how are you’ and all that.” I said: “If you’re lying to the old man, God’ll punish you.”

Presently she said: “It’s none of my business, Nick, but what do people think of me?” “You’re like everybody else: some people like you, some people don’t, and some have no feeling about it one way or the other.” She frowned. “That’s not exactly what I meant. What do people think about my staying with Harrison with him chasing everything that’s hot and hollow?”

Guild said: “Oh.” He scratched his chin with a thumbnail, looked at his watch. “It’s getting kind of late. Suppose you drop in and see me some time tomorrow—today.” I said, “Sure,” instead of the things I was thinking, nodded at him and Andy, and went out to the living-room.

“Maybe, but you’ve been talking double to me ever since last—” He looked at me with steady pale eyes and said calmly: “I’m a copper and I got my work to do.”

“What do you think of it?” Macaulay asked in a low voice. “When I start believing Mimi,” I said, “I hope I have sense enough not to admit