THE THIN MAN by Dashiell Hammett

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.”

“WTe 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 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 good-night 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 not 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 gunman’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.

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