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.”
“We 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 to 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 goodnight 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 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 gunmen’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 both 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 trying 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: ‘When 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 1534, 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 four Urine at Home), a number of telephone-call memoranda slips, and a telegram from Philadelphia:
NICK CHARLES
THE NORMANDIE NEW YORK NY
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.
10
In the taxicab Nora asked: “You’re sure you feel all right?”
“Sure.”
“And this isn’t going to be too much for you?”
“I’m all right. What’d you think of the girl’s story?”