“What’s that got to do with what?” I asked.

She smiled. “How about getting some clothes on, Dorry?”

Dorothy sulkily repeated that she didn’t see why she had to waste an afternoon at Aunt Alice’s.

Jorgensen turned to address his wife: “Mrs. Charles has the great kindness to suggest that we do not—”

“Yes,” Nora said, “Why don’t you stay awhile? There’ll be some people coming in. It won’t be very exciting, but—” She waved her glass a little to finish the sentence.

“I’d love to,” Mimi replied slowly, “but I’m afraid Alice—”

“Make our apologies to her by telephone,” Jorgensen suggested.

“I’ll do it,” Dorothy said.

Mimi nodded. “Be nice to her.” Dorothy went into the bedroom. Everybody seemed much brighter. Nora caught my eye and winked merrily and I had to take it and like it because Mimi was looking at me then. Mimi asked me: “You really didn’t want us to stay, did you?”

“Of course.”

“Chances are you’re lying. Weren’t you sort of fond of poor Julia?”

“ ‘Poor Julia’ sounds swell from you. I liked her all right.”

Mimi put her hand on my arm again. “She broke up my life with Clyde. Naturally I hated her—then—but that’s a long time ago. I had no feeling against her when I went to see her Friday. And, Nick, I saw her die. She didn’t deserve to die. It was horrible. No matter what I’d felt, there’d be nothing left but pity now. I meant ‘poor Julia’ when I said it.”

“I don’t know what you’re up to,” I said. “I don’t know what any of you are up to.”

“Any of us,” she repeated. “Has Dorry been—”

Dorothy came in from the bedroom. “I squared it.” She kissed her mother on the mouth and sat down beside her.

Mimi, looking in her compact-mirror to see her mouth had not been smeared, asked: “She wasn’t peevish about it?”

“No, I squared it. What do you have to do to get a drink?”

I said: “You have to walk over to that table where the ice and bottles are and pour it.”

Mimi said: “You drink too much.”

“I don’t drink as much as Nick.” She went over to the table.

Mimi shook her head. “These children! I mean you were pretty fond of Julia Wolf, weren’t you?”

Dorothy called: “You want one, Nick?”

“Thanks,” I said: then to Mimi, “I liked her well enough.”

“You’re the damnedest evasive man,” she complained. “Did you like her as much as you used to like me for instance?”

“You mean those couple of afternoons we killed?”

Her laugh was genuine. “That’s certainly an answer.” She turned to Dorothy, carrying glasses towards us. “You’ll have to get a robe that shade of blue, darling. It’s very becoming to you.” I took one of the glasses from Dorothy and said I thought I had better get dressed.

7

When I came out of the bathroom, Nora and Dorothy were in the bedroom, Nora combing her hair, Dorothy sitting on the side of the bed dangling a stocking. Nora made a kiss at me in the dressing-table mirror. She looked very happy.

“You like Nick a lot, don’t you, Nora?” Dorothy asked.

“He’s an old Greek fool, but I’m used to him.”

“Charles isn’t a Greek name.”

“It’s Charalambides,” I explained. “When the old man came over, the mugg that put him through Ellis Island said Charalambides was too long—too much trouble to write—and whittled it down to Charles. It was all right with the old man; they could have called him X so they let him in.”

Dorothy stared at me. “I never know when you’re lying.” She started to put on the stocking, stopped. “What’s Mamma trying to do to you?”

“Nothing. Pump me. She’d like to know what you did and said last night.”

“I thought so. What’d you tell her?”

“What could I tell her? You don’t do or say anything.”

She wrinkled her forehead over that, but when she spoke again it was about something else: “I never knew there was anything between you and Mamma. Of course I was only a kid then and wouldn’t have known what it was all about even if I’d noticed anything, but I didn’t even know you called each other by your first names.”

Nora turned from the mirror laughing. “Now we’re getting somewhere.” She waved the comb at Dorothy. “Go on, dear.”

Dorothy said earnestly: “Well, I didn’t know.”

I was taking laundry pins out of a shirt. “What do you know now?” I asked.

“Nothing,” she said slowly, and her face began to grow pink, “but I can guess.” She bent over her stocking.

“Can and do,” I growled. “You’re a dope, but don’t look so embarrassed. You can’t help it if you’ve got a dirty mind.”

She raised her head and laughed, but when she asked, “Do you think I take after Mamma much?” she was serious.

“I wouldn’t be surprised.”

“But do you?”

“You want me to say no. No.”

“That’s what I have to live with,” Nora said cheerfully. “You can’t do anything with him.”

I finished dressing first and went out to the living-room. Mimi was sitting on Jorgensen’s knee. She stood up and asked: “What’d you get for Christmas?”

“Nora gave me a watch.” I showed it to her.

She said it was lovely, and it was. “What’d you give her?”

“Necklace.”

Jorgensen said, “May I?” and rose to mix himself a drink.

The doorbell rang. I let the Quinns and Margot Innes in, introduced them to the Jorgensens. Presently Nora and Dorothy finished dressing and came out of the bedroom, and Quinn attached himself to Dorothy. Larry Crowley arrived with a girl named Denis, and a few minutes later the Edges. I won thirty-two dollars—on the cuff—from Margot at backgammon. The Denis girl had to go into the bedroom and lie down awhile. Alice Quinn, with Margot’s help, tore her husband away from Dorothy at a little after six and carried him off to keep a date they had. The Edges left. Mimi put on her coat, got her husband and daughter into their coats.

“It’s awful short notice,” she said, “but can’t you come to dinner tomorrow night?”

Nora said: “Certainly.” We shook hands and made polite speeches all around and they went away. Nora shut the door after them and leaned her back against it. “Jesus, he’s a handsome guy,” she said.

8

So far I had known just where I stood on the Wolf-Wynant-Jorgensen troubles and what I was doing—the answers were, respectively, nowhere and nothing—but when we stopped at Reuben’s for coffee on our way home at four the next morning, Nora opened a newspaper and found a line in one of the gossip columns: “Nick Charles, former Trans-American Detective Agency ace, on from Coast to sift the Julia Wolf murder mystery”; and when I opened my eyes and sat up in bed some six hours later Nora was shaking me and a man with a gun in his hand was standing in the bedroom doorway.

He was a plump dark youngish man of medium height, broad through the jaws, narrow between the eyes. He wore a black derby hat, a black overcoat that fitted him very snugly, a dark suit, and black shoes, all looking as if he had bought them within the past fifteen minutes. The gun, a blunt black .38-calibre automatic, lay comfortably in his hand, not pointing at anything. Nora was saying: “He made me let him in, Nick. He said he had to—”

“I got to talk to you,” the man with the gun said. “That’s all, but I got to do that.” His voice was low, rasping. I had blinked myself awake by then. I looked at Nora. She was excited, but apparently not frightened: she might have been watching a horse she had a bet on coming down the stretch with a nose lead.

I said: “All right, talk, but do you mind putting the gun away? My wife doesn’t care, but I’m pregnant and I don’t want the child to be born with—”

He smiled with his lower lip. “You don’t have to tell me you’re tough. I heard about you.” He put the pistol in his overcoat pocket. “I’m Shep Morelli.”