Mimi said: “Now, Dorry, don’t let’s have one of those idiotic dramatic performances.”
Dorothy said: “You can beat me after they’ve gone. You will.” She said it without taking her eyes off mine. Mimi tried to look as if she did not know what her daughter was talking about.
“Who does he know killed her?” I asked.
Gilbert said: “You’re making an ass of yourself, Dorry, you’re—”
I interrupted him: “Let her. Let her say what she’s got to say. Who killed her, Dorothy?”
She looked at her brother and lowered her eyes and no longer held herself erect. Looking at the floor, she said indistinctly: “I don’t know. He knows.” She raised her eyes to mine and began to tremble. “Can’t you see I’m afraid?” she cried. “I’m afraid of them. Take me away and I’ll tell you, but I’m afraid of them.”
Mimi laughed at me. “You asked for it. It serves you right.”
Gilbert was blushing. “It’s so silly,” he mumbled.
I said: “Sure, I’ll take you away, but I’d like to have it out now while we’re all together.”
Dorothy shook her head. “I’m afraid.”
Mimi said: “I wish you wouldn’t baby her so, Nick. It only makes her worse. She—”
I asked Nora: “What do you say?”
She stood up and stretched without lifting her arms. Her face was pink and lovely as it always is when she has been sleeping. She smiled drowsily at me and said: “Let’s go home. I don’t like these people. Come on, get your hat and coat, Dorothy.”
Mimi said to Dorothy: “Go to bed.”
Dorothy put the tips of the fingers of her left hand to her mouth and whimpered through them: “Don’t let her beat me, Nick.” I was watching Mimi, whose face wore a placid half-smile, but her nostrils moved with her breathing and I could hear her breathing.
Nora went around to Dorothy. “Come on, we’ll wash your face and—” Mimi made an animal noise in her throat, muscles thickened on the back of her neck, and she put her weight on the balls of her feet.
Nora stepped between Mimi and Dorothy. I caught Mimi by a shoulder as she started forward, put my other arm around her waist from behind, and lifted her off her feet. She screamed and hit back at me with her fists and her hard sharp high heels made dents in my shins.
Nora pushed Dorothy out of the room and stood in the doorway watching us. Her face was very live. I saw it clearly, sharply. everything else was blurred. When clumsy, ineffectual blows on my back and shoulder brought me around to find Gilbert pommeling me, I could see him but dimly and I hardly felt the contact when I shoved him aside. “Cut it out. I don’t want to hurt you, Gilbert.” I carried Mimi over to the sofa and dumped her on her back on it, sat on her knees, got a wrist in each hand.
Gilbert was at me again. I tried to pop his kneecap, but kicked him too low, kicked his leg from under him. He went down on the floor in a tangle. I kicked at him again, missed, and said: “We can fight afterwards. Get some water.”
Mimi’s face was becoming purple. Her eyes protruded, glassy, senseless, enormous. Saliva bubbled and hissed between clenched teeth with her breathing, and her red throat—her whole body—was a squirming mass of veins and muscles swollen until it seemed they must burst. Her wrists were hot in my hands and sweat made them hard to hold. Nora beside me with a glass of water was a welcome sight. “Chuck it in her face,” I said.
Nora chucked it. Mimi separated her teeth to gasp and she shut her eyes. She moved her head violently from side to side, but there was less violence in the squirming of her body. “Do it again,” I said. The second glass of water brought a spluttering protest from Mimi and the fight went out of her body. She lay still, limp, panting.
I took my hands away from her wrists and stood up. Gilbert, standing on one foot, was leaning against a table nursing the leg I kicked. Dorothy, big-eyed and pale, was in the doorway, undecided whether to come in or run off and hide. Nora, beside me, holding the empty glass in her hand, asked: “Think she’s all right?”
“Sure.”
Presently Mimi opened her eyes, tried to blink the water out of them. I put a handkerchief in her hand. She wiped her face, gave a long shivering sigh, and sat up on the sofa. She looked around the room, still blinking a little. When she saw me she smiled feebly. There was guilt in her smile, but nothing you could call remorse. She touched her hair with an unsteady hand and said: “I’ve certainly been drowned.”
I said: “Some day you’re going into one of those things and not come out of it.”
She looked past me at her son. “Gil. What’s happened to you?” she asked.
He hastily took his hand off his leg and put his foot down on the floor. “I—uh—nothing,” he stammered. “I’m perfectly all right.” He smoothed his hair, straightened his necktie.
She began to laugh. “Oh, Gil, did your really try to protect me? And from Nick?” Her laughter increased. “It was awfully sweet of you, but awfully silly. Why, he’s a monster, Gil. Nobody could—” She put my handkerchief over her mouth and rocked back and forth.
I looked sidewise at Nora. Her mouth was set and her eyes were almost black with anger. I touched her arm. “Let’s blow. Give your mother a drink, Gilbert. She’ll be all right in a minute or two.”
Dorothy, hat and coat in her hands, tiptoed to the outer door. Nora and I found our hats and coats and followed her out, leaving Mimi laughing into my handkerchief on the sofa. None of the three of us had much to say in the taxicab that carried us over to the Normandie. Nora was brooding, Dorothy seemed still pretty frightened, and I was tired—it had been a full day.
It was nearly five o’clock when we got home. Asta greeted us boisterously. I lay down on the floor to play with her while Nora went into the pantry to make coffee. Dorothy wanted to tell me something that happened to her when she was a little child. I said: “No. You tried that Monday. What is it? a gag? It’s late. What was it you were afraid to tell me over there?”
“But you’d understand better if you’d let me—”
“You said that Monday. I’m not a psychoanalyst. I don’t know anything about early influences. I don’t give a damn about them. And I’m tired—I been ironing all day.”
She pouted at me. “You seem to be trying to make it as hard for me as you can.”
“Listen, Dorothy,” I said, “you either know something you were afraid to say in front of Mimi and Gilbert or you don’t. If you do, spit it out. I’ll ask you about any of it I find myself not understanding.”
She twisted a fold of her skirt and looked sulkily at it, but when she raised her eyes they became bright and excited. She spoke in a whisper loud enough for anybody in the room to hear: “Gil’s been seeing my father and he saw him today and my father told him who killed Miss Wolf.”
“Who?”
She shook her head. “He wouldn’t tell me. He’d just tell me that.”
“And that’s what you were afraid to say in front of Gil and Mimi?”
“Yes. You’d understand that if you’d let me tell you—”
“Something that happened when you were a little child. Well, I won’t. Stop it. What else did he tell you?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing about Nunheim?”
“No, nothing.”
“Where is your father?”
“Gil didn’t tell me.”
“When did he meet him?”
“He didn’t tell me. Please don’t be mad, Nick. I’ve told you everything he told me.”
“And a fat lot it is,” I growled. “When’d he tell you this?”
“Tonight. He was telling me when you came in my room, and, honest, that’s all he told me.”
I said: “It’d be swell if just once one of you people would make a clear and complete statement about something—it wouldn’t matter what.”
Nora came in with the coffee. “What’s worrying you now, son?” she asked.
“Things,” I said, “riddles, lies, and I’m too old and too tired for them to be any fun. Let’s go back to San Francisco.”
“Before New Year’s?”
“Tomorrow, today.”
“I’m willing.” She gave me a cup. “We can fly back, if you want, and be there for New Year’s Eve.”