Nora can smile very nicely. She gave him one of her nicest smiles. “Mind? I liked it.” She let the policemen and their prisoner out. Keyser had gone a few minutes before.

“He’s sweet,” she said when she came back from the door. “Hurt much?”

“No.”

“It’s pretty much my fault, isn’t it?”

“Nonsense. How about another drink?”

She poured me one. “I wouldn’t take too many of these today.”

“I won’t,” I promised. “I could do with some kippers for breakfast. And, now our troubles seem to be over for a while, you might have them send up our absentee watchdog. And tell the operator not to give us any calls; there’ll probably be reporters.”

“What are you going to tell the police about Dorothy’s pistol? You’ll have to tell them something, won’t you?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Tell me the truth, Nick: have I been too silly?”

I shook my head. “Just silly enough.”

She laughed, said, “You’re a Greek louse,” and went around to the telephone.

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-bone 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—you 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 God, 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.”

“We won’t interfere,” Dorothy said. “Will we, Nora?”