The Thin Man

9

Nora said: “You're just showing off, that's all it is. And what for? I know bullets bounce off you. You don't have to prove it to me.”

“It's not going to hurt me to get up.”

“And it's not going to hurt you to stay in bed at least one day. The doctor said—”

“If he knew anything he'd cure his own snuffles.” I sat up and put my feet on the floor. Asta tickled them with her tongue.

Nora brought me slippers and robe. “All right, hard guy, get up and bleed on the rugs.”

I stood up cautiously and seemed to be all right as long as I went easy with my left arm and kept out of the way of Asta's front feet.

“Be reasonable,” I said. “I didn't want to get mixed up with these people—still don't—but a fat lot of good that's doing me. Well, I can't just blunder out of it. I've got to see.”

“Let's go away,” she suggested. “Let's go to Bermuda or Havana for a week or two, or back to the Coast.”

“I'd still have to tell the police some kind of story about that gun. And suppose it turns out to be the gun she was killed with? If they don't know already they're finding out.”

“Do you really think it is?”

“That's guessing. We'll go there for dinner tonight and—”

“We'll do nothing of the kind. Have you gone completely nuts? If you want to see anybody have them come here.”

“It's not the same thing.” I put my arms around her. “Stop worrying about this scratch. I'm all right.”

“You're showing off,” she said. “You want to let people see you're a hero who can't be stopped by bullets.”

“Don't be nasty.”

“I will be nasty. I'm not going to have you—”

I shut her mouth with a hand over it. “I want to see the Jorgensens together at home, I want to see Macaulay, and I want to see Studsy Burke. I've been pushed around too much. I've got to see about things.”

“You're so damned pig-headed,” she complained. “Well, it's only five o'clock. Lie down till it's time to dress.”

I made myself comfortable on the living-room sofa. We had the afternoon papers sent up. Morelli, it seemed, had shot me—twice for one of the papers and three times for another—when I tried to arrest him for Julia Wolf's murder, and I was too near death to see anybody or to be moved to a hospital. There were pictures of Morelli and a thirteen-year-old one of me in a pretty funny-looking hat, taken, I remembered, when I was working on the Wall Street explosion. Most of the follow-up stories on the murder of Julia Wolf were rather vague. We were reading them when our little constant visitor, Dorothy Wynant, arrived.

I could hear her at the door when Nora opened it: “They wouldn't send my name up, so I sneaked up. Please don't send me away. I can help you nurse Nick. I'll do anything. Please, Nora.”

Nora had a chance then to say: “Come on in.”

Dorothy came in. She goggled at me. “B-but the papers said you—”

“Do I look like I'm dying? What's happened to you?” Her lower lip was swollen and cut near one corner, there was a bruise on one cheek-bane and two fingernail scratches down the other cheek, and her eyes were red and swollen.

“Mamma beat me,” she said. “Look.” She dropped her coat on the floor, tore off a button unbuttoning her dress, took an arm out of its sleeve, and pushed the dress down to show her back. There were dark bruises on her arm, and her back was criss-crossed by long red welts. She was crying now. “See?”

Nora put an arm around her. “You poor kid.”

“What'd she beat you for?” I asked.

She turned from Nora and knelt on the floor beside my sofa. Asta came over and nuzzled her. “She thought I came—came to see you about Father and Julia Wolf.” Sobs broke up her sentences. “That's why she came over here—to find out—and you made her think I didn't. You—yoa made her think you didn't care anything about what happened—just like you made me—and she was all right till she saw the papers this afternoon. Then she knew—she knew you'd been lying about not having anything to do with it. She beat me to try to make me tell her what I'd told you.”

“What'd you tell her?”

“I couldn't tell her anything. I—I couldn't tell her about Chris. I couldn't tell her anything.”

“Was he there?”

“Yes.”

“And he let her beat you like this?”

“But he—he never makes her stop.”

I said to Nora: “For God's sake, let's have a drink.”

Nora said, “Sure,” picked up Dorothy's coat, laid it across the back of a chair, and went into the pantry.

Dorothy said: “Please let me stay here, Nick. I won't be any trouble, honestly, and you told me yourself I ought to walk out on them. You know you did, and I've got nowhere else to go. Please.”

“Take it easy. This thing needs a little figuring out. I'm as much afraid of Mimi as you are, you know. What did she think you'd told me?”

“She must know something—something about the murder that she thinks I know—but I don't, Nick. Honest to Cod, I don't.”

“That helps a lot,” I complained. “But listen, sister: there are things you know and we're going to start with those. You come clean at and from the beginning—or we don't play.”

She made a movement as if she were about to cross her heart. “I swear I will,” she said.

“That'll be swell. Now let's drink.” We took a glass apiece from Nora. “Tell her you were leaving for good?”

“No, I didn't say anything. Maybe she doesn't know yet I'm not in my room.”

“That helps some.”

“You're not going to make me go back?” she cried.

Nora said over her glass: “The child can't stay and be beaten like that, Nick.”

I said: “Sh-h-h. I don't know. I was just thinking that if we're going there for dinner maybe it's better for Mimi not to know—”

Dorothy stared at me with horrified eyes while Nora said: “Don't think you're going to take me there now.”

Then Dorothy spoke rapidly: “But Mamma doesn't expect you. I don't even know whether she'll be there. The papers said you were dying. She doesn't think you're coming.”

“So much the better,” I said. “We'll surprise them.”

She put her face, white now, close to mine, spilling some of her drink on my sleeve in her excitement. “Don't go. You can't go there now. Listen to me. Listen to Nora. You can't go.” She turned her white face around to look up at Nora. “Can he? Tell him he can't.”

Nora, not shifting the focus of her dark eyes from my face, said: “Wait, Dorothy. He ought to know what's best. What is it, Nick?”

I made a face at her. “I'm just fumbling around. If you say Dorothy stays here, she stays. I guess she can sleep with Asta. 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. I've got to find out in my own way.”

“WTe won't interfere,” Dorothy said. “Will we, Nora?”

Nora continued to look at me, saying nothing.

I asked Dorothy: “Where'd you get that gun? And nothing out of books this time.”

She moistened her lower lip and her face became pinker. She cleared her throat.

“Careful,” I said. “If it's another piece of chewing-gum, I'll phone Mimi to come get you.”

“Give her a chance,” Nora said.

Dorothy cleared her throat again. “Can—can I tell you something that happened to me when I was a little child?”

“Has it got anything to do with the gun?”

“Not exactly, but it'll help you understand why I—”

“Not now, Some other time. Where'd you get the gun?”

“I wish you'd let me.” She hung her head.

“Where'd you get the gun?”

Her voice was barely audible. “From a man in a speakeasy.”

I said: “I knew we'd get the truth at last.” Nora frowned and shook her head at me. “All right, say you did. What speakeasy?”

Dorothy raised her head. “I don't know. It was on Tenth Avenue, I think. Your friend Mr. Quinn would know. He took me there.”

“You met him after you left us that night?”

“Yes.”

“By accident, I suppose.”

She looked reproachfully at me. “I'm trying to tell you the truth, Nick. I'd promised to meet him at a place called the Palma Club. He wrote the address down for me. So after I said good-night to you and Nora, I met him there and we went to a lot of places, winding up in this place where I got the gun. It was an awful tough place. You can ask him if I'm not telling the truth.”

“Quinn get the gun for you?”

“No. He'd passed out then. He was sleeping with his head on the table. I left him there. They said they'd get him home all right.”

“And the gun?”

“I'm coming to it.” She began to blush. “He told me it was a gunman's hang-out. That's why I'd said let's go there. And after he went to sleep I got to talking to a man there, an awful tough-looking man. I was fascinated. And all the time I didn't want to go home, I wanted to come back here, but I didn't know if you'd let me.” Her face was quite red now and in her embarrassment she blurred her words. “So I thought perhaps if I—if you thought I was in a terrible fix—and, besides, that way I wouldn't feel so silly. Anyhow, I asked this awful tough-looking gangster, or whatever he was, if he would sell me a pistol or tell me where I could buy one. He thought I was kidding and laughed at first, but I told him I wasn't, and then he kept on grinning, but he said he'd see, and when he came back he said yes, he could get me one and asked how much I would pay for it. I didn't have much money, but I offered him my bracelet, but I guess he didn't think it was any good, because he said no, he'd have to have cash, so finally I gave him twelve dollars—all I had but a dollar for the taxi—and he gave me the pistol and I came over here and made up that about being afraid to go home because of Chris.” She finished so rapidly her words ran together, and she sighed as if very glad to have finished.

“Then Chris hasn't been making passes at you?”

She bit her lip. “Yes, but not—not that bad.” She put bath hands on my arm, and her face almost touched mine. “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. We'll let that rest for a minute, though. Did you know Mimi was going to see Julia Wolf that afternoon?” —“No. I didn't even know she was thing to find my father then. They didn't say where they were going that afternoon.”

“They?”

“Yes, Chris left the apartment with her.”

“What time was that?”

She wrinkled her forehead. “It must've been pretty close to three o'clock—after two thirty, anyway—because I remember I was late for a date to go shopping with Elsie Hamilton and was hurrying into my clothes.”

“They come back together?”

“I don't know. They were both home before I came.”

“What time was that?”

“Some time after six. Nick, you don't think they— Oh, I remember something she said while she was dressing. I don't know what Chris said, but she said: 'V/hen I ask her she'll tell me,' in that Queen-of-France way she talks sometimes. You know. I didn't hear anything else. Does that mean anything?”

“What'd she tell you about the murder when you came home?”

“Oh, just about finding her and how upset she was and about the police and everything.”

“She seem very shocked?”

Dorothy shook her head. “No, just excited. You know Mamma.” She stared at me for a moment, asked slowly: “You don't think she had anything to do with it?”

“What do you think?”

“I hadn't thought. I just thought about my father.” A little later she said gravely: “If he did it, it's because he's crazy, but she'd kill somebody if she wanted to.”

“It doesn't have to be either of them,” I reminded her. “The police seem to have picked Morelli. What'd she want to find your father for?”

“For money. We're broke: Chris spent it all.” She pulled down the corners of her mouth. “I suppose we all helped, but he spent most of it. Mamma's afraid he'll leave her if she hasn't any money.”

“How do you know that?”

“I've heard them talk.”

“Do you think he will?”

She nodded with certainty. “Unless she has money.”

I looked at my watch and said: “The rest of it'll have to wait till we get back. You can stay here tonight, anyhow. Make yourself comfortable and have the restaurant send up your dinner. It's probably better if you don't go out.”

She stared miserably at me and said nothing.

Nora patted her shoulder. “I don't know what he's doing, Dorothy, but if he says we ought to go there for dinner he probably knows what he's talking about. He wouldn't—”

Dorothy smiled and jumped up from the floor. “I believe you. I won't be silly any more.”

I called the desk on the telephone and asked them to send up our mail. There were a couple of letters for Nora, one for me, some belated Christmas cards (including one from Larry Crowley, which was a copy of Haldeman-Julius Little Blue Book Number i with “and a Merry Christmas,” followed by Larry's name enclosed in a holly wreath, all printed in red under the book's title, How to Test Your Urine at Home), a number of telephone-call memoranda slips, and a telegram from Philadelphia:

NICK CHARLES

THE NORMANDIE NEW YORK N Y

WILL YOU COMMUNICATE WITH HERBERT MACAULAY TO DISCUSS

TAKING CHARGE OF INVESTIGATION OF WOLF MURDER STOP AM

GIVING HIM FULL INSTRUCTIONS STOP BEST REGARDS

CLYDE MILLER WYNANT

I put the telegram in an envelope with a note saying it had just reached me and sent it by messenger to the Police Department Homicide Bureau.