“Not unless you want to believe him,” I said.
Dorothy asked: “What is it?”
“A thing in the book,” Gilbert replied.
“Tell him about the letter your aunt got,” I said to Dorothy. She told him.
When she had finished, he grimaced impatiently. “That’s silly. Mamma’s not really dangerous. She’s just a case of arrested development. Most of us have outgrown ethics and morals and so on. Mamma’s just not grown up to them yet.” He frowned and corrected himself thoughtfully: “She might be dangerous, but it would be like a child playing with matches.”
Nora and Quinn were dancing. “And what do you think of your father?” I asked.
Gilbert shrugged. “I haven’t seen him since I was a child. I’ve got a theory about him, but a lot of it’s guesswork. I’d like—the chief thing I’d like to know is if he’s impotent.”
I said: “He tried to kill himself today, down in Allentown.”
Dorothy cried, “He didn’t,” so sharply that Quinn and Nora stopped dancing, and she turned and thrust her face up at her brother’s. “Where’s Chris?” she demanded.
Gilbert looked from her face to mine and quickly back to hers. “Don’t be an ass,” he said coldly. “He’s off with that girl of his, that Fenton girl.”
Dorothy did not look as if she believed him. “She’s jealous of him,” he explained to me. “It’s that mother fixation.”
I asked: “Did either of you ever see the Victor Rosewater your father had trouble with back when I first knew you?”
Dorothy shook her head. Gilbert said: “No. Why?”
“Just an idea I had. I never saw him either, but the description they gave me, with some easy changes, could be made to fit your Chris Jorgensen.”
14
That night Nora and I went to the opening of the Radio City Music Hall, decided we had had enough of the performance after an hour, and left. “Where to?” Nora asked.
“I don’t care. Want to hunt up that Pigiron Club that Morelli told us about? You’ll like Studsy Burke. He used to be a safe-burglar. He claims to’ve cracked the safe in the Hagerstown jail while he was doing thirty days there for disorderly conduct.”
“Let’s,” she said.
We went down to Forty-ninth Street and, after asking two taxi-drivers, two newsboys, and a policeman, found the place. The doorman said he didn’t know about any Burkes, but he’d see. Studsy came to the door. “How are you, Nick?” he said. “Come on in.”
He was a powerfully built man of medium height, a little fat now, but not soft. He must have been at least fifty, but looked ten years younger than that. 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. His voice was a deep bass growl. I shook hands with him and introduced him to Nora.
“A wife,” he said. “Think of that. By God, you’ll drink champagne or you’ll fight me.” I said we wouldn’t fight and we went inside. His place had a comfortably shabby look. It was between hours: there were only three customers in the place. We sat at a table in a corner and Studsy told the waiter exactly which bottle of wine to bring. Then he examined me carefully and nodded. “Marriage done you good.” He scratched his chin. “It’s a long time I don’t see you.”
“A long time,” I agreed.
“He sent me up the river,” he told Nora.
She clucked sympathetically. “Was he a good detective?”
Studsy wrinkled what forehead he had. “Folks say, but I don’t know. The once he caught me was a accident: I led with my right.”
“How come you sicked this wild man Morelli on me?” I asked.
“You know how foreigners are,” he said; “they’re hysterical. I don’t know he’s going to do nothing like that. He’s worrying about the coppers trying to hang that Wolf dame’s killing on him and we see in the paper you got something to do with it and I say to him, ‘Nick might not maybe sell his own mother out and you feel like you got to talk to somebody,’ so he says he will. What’d you do, make faces at him?”
“He let himself be spotted sneaking in and then blamed me for it. How’d he find me?”
“He’s got friends, and you wasn’t hiding, was you?”
“I’d only been in town a week and there was nothing in the paper saying where I was staying.”
“Is that so?” Studsy asked with interest. “Where you been?”
“I live in San Francisco now. How’d he find me?”
“That’s a swell town. I ain’t been there in years, but it’s one swell town. I oughtn’t tell you, Nick. Ask him. It’s his business.”
“Except that you sent him to me.”
“Well, yes,” he said, “except that, of course; but then, see, I was putting in a boost for you.” He said it seriously.
I said: “My pal.”
“How did I know he was going to blow his top? Anyways, he didn’t hurt you much, did he?”
“Maybe not, but it didn’t do me any good and I—” I stopped as the waiter arrived with the champagne. We tasted it and said it was swell. It was pretty bad. “Think he killed the girl?” I asked.
Studsy shook his head sidewise with certainty. “No chance.”
“He’s a fellow you can persuade to shoot,” I said.
“I know—these foreigners are hysterical—but he was around here all that afternoon.”
“All?”
“All. I’ll take my oath to it. Some of the boys and girls were celebrating upstairs and I know for a fact he wasn’t off his hip, let alone out of here, all afternoon. No kidding, that’s a thing he can prove.”
“Then what was he worried about?”
“Do I know? Ain’t that what I been asking him myself? But you know how these foreigners are.”
I said: “Uh-huh. They’re hysterical. He wouldn’t’ve sent a friend around to see her, would he?”
“I think you got the boy wrong,” Studsy said. “I knew the dame. She used to come in here with him sometimes. They was just playing. He wasn’t nuts enough about her that he’d have any reason for weighting her down like that. On the level.”
“Was she on the stuff too?”
“I don’t know. I seen her take it sometimes, but maybe she was just being sociable, taking a shot because he did.”
“Who else did she play around with?”
“Nobody I know,” Studsy replied indifferently. “There was a rat named Nunheim used to come in here that was on the make for her, but he didn’t get nowhere that I could see.”
“So that’s where Morelli got my address.”
“Don’t be silly. All Morelli’d want of him would be a crack at him. What’s it to him telling the police Morelli knew the dame? A friend of yours?”
I thought it over and said: “I don’t know him. I hear he does chores for the police now and then.”
“M-m-m. Thanks.”
“Thanks for what? I haven’t said anything.”
“Fair enough. Now you tell me something: what’s all this fiddlededee about, huh? That guy Wynant killed her, didn’t he?”
“A lot of people think so,” I said, “but fifty bucks’ll get you a hundred he didn’t.”
He shook his head. “I don’t bet with you in your own racket”—his face brightened—“but I tell you what I will do and we can put some dough on it if you want. You know that time you copped me, I did lead with my right like I said, and I always wondered if you could do it again. Some time when you’re feeling well I’d like—”
I laughed and said: “No, I’m all out of condition.”
“I’m hog-fat myself,” he insisted.
“Besides, that was a fluke: you were off balance and I was set.”
“You’re just trying to let me down easy,” he said, and then more thoughtfully, “though I guess you did get the breaks at that. Well, if you won’t— Here, let me fill your glasses.”
Nora decided that she wanted to go home early and sober, so we left Studsy and his Pigiron Club at a little after eleven o’clock. He escorted us to a taxicab and shook our hands vigorously. “This has been a fine pleasure,” he told us. We said equally polite things and rode away.