“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-bane 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–yoa 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 Cod, 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.”