“Who is this?” I asked.
“My name is Albert Norman, Mr. Charles, which probably means nothing to you, but I would like to lay a proposition before you. I am sure you will—”
“What kind of a proposition?”
“I can’t discuss it over the phone, Mr. Charles, but if you will give me half an hour of your time, I can promise—”
“Sorry,” I said. “I’m pretty busy and—”
“But, Mr. Charles, this is—” Then there was a loud noise: it could have been a shot or something falling or anything else that would make a loud noise. I said, “Hello,” a couple of times, got no answer, and hung up.
Nora had Dorothy over in front of a looking-glass soothing her with powder and rouge. I said, “A guy selling insurance,” and we went into the living-room for a drink. Some more people had come in. I spoke to them. Harrison Quinn left the sofa where he had been sitting with Margot Innes and said: “Now Ping-Pong.” Asta jumped up and punched me in the belly with her front feet. I shut off the radio and poured myself a cocktail. The man whose name I had not caught was saying: “Comes the revolution and we’ll all be lined up against the wall—first thing.” He seemed to think it was a good idea.
Quinn came over to refill his glass. He looked towards the bedroom door. “Where’d you find the little blonde?”
“Used to bounce it on my knee.”
“Which knee?” he asked. “Could I touch it?”
Nora and Dorothy came out of the bedroom. I saw an afternoon paper on the radio and picked it up. Headlines said:
JULIA WOLF ONCE RACKETEER’S GIRL;
ARTHUR NUNHEIM IDENTIFIES BODY;
WYNANT STILL MISSING
Nora, at my elbow, spoke in a low voice: “I asked her to have dinner with us. Be nice to the child”—Nora was twenty-six—“she’s all upset.”
“Whatever you say.” I turned around. Dorothy, across the room, was laughing at something Quinn was telling her. “But if you get mixed up in people’s troubles, don’t expect me to kiss you where you’re hurt.”
“I won’t. You’re a sweet old fool. Don’t read that here now.” She took the newspaper away from me and stuck it out of sight behind the radio.
5
Nora could not sleep that night. She read Chaliapin’s memoirs until I began to doze and then woke me up by asking: “Are you asleep?” I said I was. She lit a cigarette for me, one for herself. “Don’t you ever think you’d like to go back to detecting once in a while just for the fun of it? You know, when something special comes up, like the Lindb—”
“Darling,” I said, “my guess is that Wynant killed her, and the police’ll catch him without my help. Anyway, it’s nothing in my life.”
“I didn’t mean just that, but—”
“But besides I haven’t the time: I’m too busy trying to see that you don’t lose any of the money I married you for.” I kissed her. “Don’t you think maybe a drink would help you to sleep?”
“No, thanks.”
“Maybe it would if I took one.” When I brought my Scotch and soda back to bed, she was frowning into space. I said: “She’s cute, but she’s cuckoo. She wouldn’t be his daughter if she wasn’t. You can’t tell how much of what she says is what she thinks and you can’t tell how much of what she thinks ever really happened. I like her, but I think you’re letting—”
“I’m not sure I like her,” Nora said thoughtfully, “she’s probably a little bastard, but if a quarter of what she told us is true, she’s in a tough spot.”
“There’s nothing I can do to help her.”
“She thinks you can.”
“And so do you, which shows that no matter what you think, you can always get somebody else to go along with you.”
Nora sighed. “I wish you were sober enough to talk to.” She leaned over to take a sip of my drink. “I’ll give you your Christmas present now if you’ll give me mine.”
I shook my head. “At breakfast.”
“But it’s Christmas now.”
“Breakfast.”
“Whatever you’re giving me,” she said, “I hope I don’t like it.”
“You’ll have to keep them anyway, because the man at the Aquarium said he positively wouldn’t take them back. He said they’d already bitten the tails off the—”
“It wouldn’t hurt you any to find out if you can help her, would it? She’s got so much confidence in you, Nicky.”
“Everybody trusts Greeks.”
“Please.”
“You just want to poke your nose into things that—”
“I meant to ask you: did his wife know the Wolf girl was his mistress?”
“I don’t know. She didn’t like her.”
“What’s the wife like?”
“I don’t know—a woman.”
“Good-looking?”
“Used to be very.”
“She old?”
“Forty, forty-two. Cut it out, Nora. You don’t want any part of it. Let the Charleses stick to the Charleses’ troubles and the Wynants stick to the Wynants’.”
She pouted. “Maybe that drink would help me.”
I got out of bed and mixed her a drink. As I brought it into the bedroom, the telephone began to ring. I looked at my watch on the table. It was nearly five o’clock.
Nora was talking into the telephone: “Hello…. Yes, speaking.” She looked sidewise at me. I shook my head no. “Yes…. Why, certainly…. Yes, certainly.” She put the telephone down and grinned at me.
“You’re wonderful,” I said. “Now what?”
“Dorothy’s coming up. I think she’s tight.”
“That’s great.” I picked up my bathrobe. “I was afraid I was going to have to go to sleep.”
She was bending over looking for her slippers. “Don’t be such an old fluff. You can sleep all day.” She found her slippers and stood up in them. “Is she really as afraid of her mother as she says?”
“If she’s got any sense. Mimi’s poison.”
Nora screwed up her dark eyes at me and asked slowly: “What are you holding out on me?”
“Oh, dear,” I said, “I was hoping I wouldn’t have to tell you. Dorothy is really my daughter. I didn’t know what I was doing, Nora. It was spring in Venice and I was so young and there was a moon over the—”
“Be funny. Don’t you want something to eat?”
“If you do. What do you want?”
“Raw chopped beef sandwich with a lot of onion and some coffee.”
Dorothy arrived while I was telephoning an all-night delicatessen. When I went into the living-room, she stood up with some difficulty and said: “I’m awfully sorry, Nick, to keep bothering you and Nora like this, but I can’t go home this way tonight. I can’t. I’m afraid to. I don’t know what’d happen to me, what I’d do. Please don’t make me.” She was very drunk. Asta sniffed at her ankles.
I said: “Sh-h-h. You’re all right here. Sit down. There’ll be some coffee in a little while. Where’d you get the snoutful?”
She sat down and shook her head stupidly. “I don’t know. I’ve been everywhere since I left you. I’ve been everywhere except home because I can’t go home this way. Look what I got.” She stood up again and took a battered automatic pistol out of her coat pocket. “Look at that.” She waved it at me while Asta, wagging her tail, jumped happily at it.
Nora made a noise with her breathing. The back of my neck was cold. I pushed the dog aside and took the pistol away from Dorothy. “What kind of clowning is this? Sit down.” I dropped the pistol into a bathrobe pocket and pushed Dorothy down in her chair.
“Don’t be mad at me, Nick,” she whined. “You can keep it. I don’t want to make a nuisance of myself.”
“Where’d you get it?” I asked.
“In a speakeasy on Tenth Avenue. I gave a man my bracelet—the one with the emeralds and diamonds—for it.”
“And then won it back from him in a crap game,” I said. “You’ve still got it on.”
She stared at her bracelet. “I thought I did.”