Return of the Thin Man

by Dashiell Hammett

  Suddenly he emits an ear-piercing scream of terror and sends the car hurtling ahead. Through a window, Nick catches a glimpse of a Negro man lying on his back on the side of the road. The man’s body is arched so that its weight rests on heels and head. The five-inch handle of a knife sticks up from the left side of his breast.

  Nick yells to the chauffeur to stop. The chauffeur pays no attention, and, when Nick touches him on the shoulder, he screams again but does not slow up.

  Nick, standing up in the lurching car, puts his forearm around the chauffeur’s throat, his other hand on the wheel, finally chokes the chauffeur into submission, and stops the car. Nick Jr. opens his eyes once to look at this and then goes back to sleep.

  Nick says to the nurse: “Come back here.”

  She jumps out and gets in the rear of the car. Nick pushes the chauffeur over into the nurse’s seat and climbs in behind the wheel. The chauffeur jumps out of the car and runs off into the woods.

  Nora asks: “What happened?”

  Nick says: “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” turns the car around, and drives back to where he saw the Negro.

  There is no body there, and, with the help of the car’s lights, he can find no signs that one has been there.

  Nora asks: “What are you hunting for?”

  Nick says: “I thought I knew, but now I’ll take anything I can find. Listen, I’m willing to call the whole thing off and drive right back to New York.”

  The nurse says: “Oh yes, sir, that would be fine.”

  Nora says: “We can’t do that, Nick. Colonel MacFay expects us. What was the matter with the chauffeur, Nick?”

  Nick answers: “He was scared and now I am. Let’s go somewhere and get a drink and think this over.”

  Nora says: “The nearest drink would be at the MacFays’, but I wish you would tell me what is going on—what we came back here for.”

  Nick says: “You’re a stubborn woman, Mom.”

  He turns the car around again and drives on. Presently they come to a high grilled gate that blocks the road. When Nick has honked the horn, a gangling youth appears on the other side of the gate holding a double-barreled shotgun partly out of sight behind the gatepost. His manner is half-frightened, half-sullen.

  He asks: “What do you want?”

  Nick says: “We’re bringing back Colonel MacFay’s car.”

  The youth says: “I can see that all right, but how do I know what you want?”

  Nick says: “This is the Charles family. We have come down to spend the weekend.”

  The youth says: “Anybody can say that, but wait—I’ll see,” and vanishes into a cottage set beside the gate. His voice can be heard talking over the telephone. “He says their name is Charles—I don’t know—He looks like a pool parlor dude and he’s got a couple of ladies and a baby and a dog. Oh, all right.”

  He comes back without his shotgun and swings the gate open. They drive on to a large house set in the middle of extensive grounds.

  The front door is opened by a neat, elderly woman with a placid face. This is Mrs. Bellam, the MacFay housekeeper.

  Nick says to her: “I’m sorry, but we lost your chauffeur somewhere along the road.”

  She replies serenely: “Oh, bless you, it’s quite all right. Thomas,” indicating the servant who has appeared behind her, “will bring up your bags. I suppose you’ll want to wash up. Colonel MacFay is waiting dinner for you, but you don’t have to hurry.”

  She leads them upstairs into their rooms. One is for Nick and Nora, with a connecting bath leading to the nurse and Junior’s room.

  MACFAY LIVING ROOM

  In the MacFay living room are four people.

  Colonel Burr MacFay is a tall, scrawny man of seventy, actually still vigorous, but a hypochondriac and suspicious of those around him, though his bark is worse than his bite.

  Lois, his adopted daughter, is a girl of twenty—very pretty, with a sweet and simple manner.

  Dudley Horn, her fiancé, is a large man in his thirties. He is an engineer, MacFay’s right-hand man, rather good-looking, and affects a candid, open-faced, man’s-man manner.

  Freddie Coleman is MacFay’s secretary, a nice boy of twenty-two or twenty-three, who is very much in love with Lois and is writing a play in his spare time.

  Colonel MacFay is complaining over a glass of sherry, his voice a nasal whine: “I won’t have it. I won’t put up with it. I’m not a child and I won’t have it.”

  Horn, leaning against the mantelpiece, holding a Scotch and soda, says good-naturedly: “What’s the good of saying we won’t put up with it when we are putting up with it?”

  Freddie, leaning forward in his chair, frowning earnestly, says: “But maybe he did kill him.”

  MacFay, glaring at Freddie, whines impatiently: “Him! Him! I’m the one that doesn’t want to be killed.”

  Lois, patting a collie that is standing with its head on her knee, looks anxiously at her foster-father and starts to say: “But, Papa dear, you—” as Nick, Nora, and Asta come in. Asta goes over to investigate the collie.

  MacFay greets Nick and Nora: “Come in! Come in! You’re late.”

  Nick: “Had a little trouble. Did your chauffeur tell you about the black man in the road?”

  MacFay presses his lips together, says nothing.

  Nick: “He wasn’t there when we went back.”

  MacFay, explosively: “I don’t care about your black men and your roads. I care about what happens to me. I—” He breaks off, pushes his face into what is meant for a smile. “You know Dudley.”

  Nick and Nora say: “Yes,” and shake hands with Horn.

  MacFay: “And this is my adopted daughter, Lois, and my secretary, Mr. Coleman.”

  When the introductions have been acknowledged and Lois has given Nick and Nora each a drink, MacFay says: “Dinner is waiting. Come on, bring your drinks in.”

  As they go into the dining room, Lois tells the servant to feed the dogs.

  Dinner is served by two badly trained servants who keep looking over their shoulders as if frightened, and jump at every unexpected sound. One of them, turning from putting soup on the table, knocks Nick on the elbow with the butt of a pistol in his pocket.

  MacFay, who attacks his soup hungrily, complains after each spoonful. “They know this isn’t good for my stomach. I ought to have some kind of light broth, but they don’t care—nobody cares what happens to me.” He empties his plate before the others are half through and has a second helping. When he has finished that, between complaints that it is so badly cooked that it wouldn’t be food for him even if it weren’t too heavy, he bangs his spoon down on a plate and says to Nick: “I’m not a child—I won’t be frightened.”

  Nick asks: “What is there to be frightened of?”

  MacFay replies: “Nothing, nothing but a lot of idiotic and very pointless trickery and play-acting.”

  One of the servants grumbles sullenly over the dish he is taking from the table: “You can call it anything you want to call it, but I seen what I seen.” Nobody pays any attention to him.

  Nick says: “What kind of trickery and play-acting?”

  MacFay puts his arms on the table, leans over them toward Nick, and says: “Suppose you had a man working for you and he did something they put him in jail for. He did it, you didn’t do it, and you even tried to get him off and to get his sentence cut down, but you couldn’t. And now, after he gets out, he comes to you and says it’s all your fault and wants you to give him a lot of money. And when you’re not fool enough to do that, he says he hopes you’re not going to be pig-headed about it because he’s dreamed twice about your dying, and the third time he dreams things, they come true. He says he hopes you’re not going to die before your conscience makes you do the right thing by him. What wo
uld you think?”

  Nick says: “I wouldn’t think I ought to hurry up my dying on his account.”

  MacFay stares at Nick blankly for a moment, then says: “You’ll excuse me, but that’s just about as stupid an answer as I’ve ever heard.”

  Nora nods brightly at Nick and assures him: “Yes it is.”

  One of the servants says to the other: “A fat lot of help this new guy’s going to be to us.”

  MacFay taps his glass with a knife and says angrily to the servants: “Shut up! Where’s the roast?” He points to Nora’s glass. “Her glass is empty.” He holds up the knife and complains: “See how they take care of my silverware. It hasn’t been cleaned decently in a month.” He puts the knife down, pushes back his plate, and leans over the table. “Listen,” he whines to Nick, “this isn’t April-foolery, this man means to murder me. He came here to murder me, and he will certainly murder me unless somebody does something to stop him.”

  Nick asks: “But what has he done so far?”

  MacFay shakes his head impatiently. “That isn’t it. I don’t ask you to undo anything that he’s done. I ask you to keep him from killing me. What has he done? He’s terrorized the whole place—that’s what he’s done.”

  Nick asks: “How long has this been going on?”

  MacFay says: “A week, ten days.”

  Nick asks: “Do you think the black man on the road is part of it?”

  MacFay retorts: “I don’t think anything about it. You used to be a detective. I asked you down here to help me, not to bring me more wild stories.”

  Nick asks: “Have you said anything to the local authorities?”

  MacFay whines: “I’m not altogether a fool. Of course I have, but what good did it do? Has he threatened me? Well, he told me he has dreams about me dying, and I know him well enough to know that’s a threat. But to the sheriff it isn’t a threat. Have I any proof that he is responsible for all these things that have happened—that he’s turned this place upside down? The sheriff says I haven’t. As if I needed proof! So it comes to this: The sheriff promises to keep an eye on him. ‘An eye,’ mind you. Here I have, with my family and servants and the guards I’ve hired, twenty people with forty eyes, and he comes and goes when he wants, so what good’s the sheriff’s ‘eye’?”

  Nick asks: “Who is this fellow?”

  One of the servants mutters: “It’s not him, it’s that black devil.”

  MacFay says: “Church is his name—Sam Church. He’s an ­engineer—worked for me ten years ago.”

  Nick asks: “How long was he in jail?”

  MacFay says: “Ten years. He got out a month ago.”

  Nick: “You think he really means to kill you?”

  MacFay bangs on the table and shouts: “No! No! No! I don’t think he means to kill me, I know it!”

  Lois tries to soothe MacFay, saying: “Mr. Charles is only trying to get it straight in his mind, Papa.”

  MacFay: “There’s nothing to get straight. This man means to kill me and I am asking Mr. Charles not to let him do it. That’s simple enough, isn’t it, even for Mr. Charles?”

  Nora shakes her head, no.

  Mrs. Bellam, the placid housekeeper, puts her head in at the door and says: “The swimming pool is on fire.”

  Everybody jumps up from the table. The servants disappear.

  Nora exclaims: “Nicky!” She starts upstairs to the baby.

  Nick tells Freddie: “Better stay here with the Colonel and Miss MacFay.”

  Nick and Horn go out, Horn picking up a heavy walking-stick in the vestibule. They go out the front door, separating a little as they go around the side of the house toward where a wooden bathhouse is burning fiercely at one end of a large swimming pool.

  The muzzle of a double-barreled shotgun is suddenly jabbed into Nick’s face from a clump of bushes and a voice roars: “One move out of you and I’ll blow your head right off the end of your neck. Hey, Barney! Hey, Slim! I got him!” A big man comes out of the bushes, holding the end of the shotgun within half an inch of Nick’s nose.

  Two other men with shotguns, yelling: “Hold him! Kill him if he bats a eye!” come running toward Nick and his captor.

  Horn comes around the clump of bushes and says to the man with the shotgun: “Take that gun out of Mr. Charles’s face and stop bellowing.”

  Nick: “I’m mighty glad to see you, Mr. Horn.”

  The man with the shotgun steps back, mumbling: “How was I going to know who he was?” He turns to his mates, who have arrived by then, and says: “It ain’t the right one. It beats all how that fellers come and go without nobody seeing hide nor hair of them.”

  The three men with shotguns move off toward the fire.

  Horn says to Nick: “The Colonel’s guards. They’ve never seen anything and never will.”

  Nick spies Lois’s collie lying on its side a short distance from the burning building and goes over to it.

  Horn, following him, asks: “Dead?”

  Nick: “Yes. Its head almost cut off.”

  Horn says in a somewhat choked voice: “He was a swell dog. This is going to be tough on Lois.”

  Nick: “Is this the kind of thing that’s been going on?”

  Horn, still looking gloomily down at the dog: “More or less. I don’t know how seriously you’re going to take it. Most of it’s pretty silly, but it’s nasty, too.”

  Lois comes running up and kneels beside the dead dog. Horn squats with an arm around her, trying to console her.

  Nick goes over to where the three men are standing looking at some faint blurred prints in a damp patch of ground.

  Nick: “Find anything?”

  One of the guards: “Only them, and they don’t look like nothing and don’t lead nowhere.”

  Nick, looking at the prints: “Our man wore rags wrapped around his shoes.”

  The guard, suspiciously: “You know a lot about them things, mister.”

  Nick: “Back home I’m a scoutmaster.” He suddenly thinks of something and goes back to Lois and Horn, asking them: “Wasn’t Asta with this dog?”

  Lois: “Yes, they were fed and let out together.”

  Nick begins to whistle and call to Asta, who after some time is found hiding in a folded beach umbrella with only the tip of his nose showing.

  When Nick, Lois, and Horn return to the house, MacFay is still at the table, eating a meringue glacé. Nora has returned to her place, holding Nick Jr. on her lap, and Freddie is awkwardly trying to play with him without any cooperation from the baby.

  MacFay looks up as they come in and says: “If it’s any more of that foolishness, I don’t want to hear a single word about it. It’ll only upset my stomach and these frozen desserts are unwholesome enough anyway.”

  Lois says: “Papa, they killed Sandy,” and explains to Nora: “I’ve had him ever since he was a puppy.” Then she sees Nick Jr., and goes over to play with him.

  Nick Jr. regards her with his usual complete lack of interest.

  Horn says: “They set fire to the bathhouse, too.”

  MacFay slams his spoon down on the table and stands up whining: “I’m tired of hearing about these things. I’m an old man and I’m sick and you should have some consideration for me. Freddie, bring the Consolidated Transportation correspondence upstairs. Good night! Good night! Good night!” He goes out, followed by Freddie.

  Nick says: “He’s a cheerful old fellow.”

  Horn laughs and Nora rises, saying: “I’m going to put Nicky to bed.”

  Lois says: “Let me help you!” and goes out with her.

  In the living room, Nick and Horn are given coffee and brandy by a frightened servant.

  Nick asks: “Is this Sam Church staying in the neighborhood?”

  Horn answers: �
�Yes, he’s rented the Kennedy cottage at the foot of the Hill Road.”

  Nick asks: “Have you tried talking to him?”

  Horn says: “Yes, but that didn’t do any good. I used to work under him and he seems to think I had a hand in sending him over. We never got along very well anyhow.”

  Nick asks: “What’s he like?”

  Horn replies: “He’s all right, I suppose, but don’t think you can frighten him off with rain on the roof. He’s a tough baby.”

  Nick says: “Does MacFay really owe him anything?”

  Horn says: “Not the way we look at it. His job was to get results without bothering the Colonel with too many details. We were trying to put over a, well, call it a public utilities enterprise—and some details that were pretty illegal were traced as far as Church, but not as far as the Colonel, and so Church went to jail.”

  Nick says: “In other words, if everything goes okay, the Colonel gets the profits, and if they go wrong, Church gets the blame.”

  Horn says cheerfully: “That’s about it.”

  Nick continues: “And that’s your job with the Colonel now?”

  Horn answers: “Something like it.”

  Nick: “This deal that Church got tripped up on—where did it happen?”

  Horn, beginning to smile: “Out West—California.”

  Nick: “Ten years ago, huh?”

  Horn: “Closer to twelve; it took a little while to catch him and convict him.” His smile broadens. “I know what’s worrying you. Your wife’s father was alive then. You’d like to know whether he was in on it with the Colonel or whether the Colonel was playing a lone hand.”

  Nick: “Well?”

  Horn: “I don’t know the answer. I don’t suppose anybody does but the Colonel. There were no records to show anything—that’s why Church took the fall alone.”

  Nick, after a thoughtful pause: “What do you think is behind all these Halloween tricks? What do you think Church is really up to?”

  Horn says: “Trying to scare the Colonel into coming across with money.”

  Nick asks: “Do you think he’ll do it?”

  Horn says: “I don’t know. The Colonel scares easily, but I’ve never seen it cost him anything.”