“I’ll tell him as soon as I see him,” I promised.
There was a pause, then she asked: “How’s Nora?”
“Looks all right to me. Want to talk to her?”
“Well, yes, but there’s something I want to ask you. Did–did Mamma say anything about me when you were over there today?”
“Not that I remember. Why?”
“And did Gil?”
“Only about the morphine.”
“Are you sure?”
“Pretty sure,” I said. “Why?”
“It’s nothing, really–if you’re sure. It’s just silly.”
“Right. I’ll call Nora.” I went into the living-room. “Dorothy wants to talk to you. Don’t ask her to eat with us.”
When Nora returned from the telephone she had a look in her eye.
“Now what’s up?” I asked.
“Nothing. Just ‘How are you’ and all that.”
I said: “If you’re lying to the old man, God’ll punish you.”
We went over to a Japanese place on Fifty-eighth Street for dinner and then I let Nora talk me into going to the Edges’ after all.
Halsey Edge was a tall scrawny man of fifty-something with a pinched yellow face and no hair at all. He called himself “a ghoul by profession and inclination”–his only joke, if that is what it was–by which he meant he was an archaeologist, and he was very proud of his collection of battleaxes. He was not so bad once you had resigned yourself to the fact that you were in for occasional cataloguings of his armory–stone axes, copper axes, bronze axes, double-bladed axes, faceted axes, polygonal axes, scalloped axes, hammer axes, adze axes, Mesopotamian axes, Hungarian axes, Nordic axes, and all of them looking pretty moth-eaten. It was his wife we objected to. Her name was Leda, but he called her Tip. She was very small and her hair, eyes, and skin, though naturally of different shades, were all muddy. She seldom sat–she perched on things–and liked to cock her head a little to one side. Nora had a theory that once when Edge opened an antique grave, Tip ran out of it, and Margot Innes always spoke of her as the gnome, pronouncing all the letters. She once told me that she did not think any literature of twenty years ago would live, because it had no psychiatry in it. They lived in a pleasant old three-story house on the edge of Greenwich Village and their liquor was excellent.
A dozen or more people were there when we arrived. Tip introduced us to the ones we did not know and then backed me into a corner. “Why didn’t you tell me that those people I met at your place Christmas were mixed up in a murder mystery?” she asked, tilting her head to the left until her ear was practically resting on her shoulder.
“I don’t know that they are. Besides, what’s one murder mystery nowadays?”
She tilted her head to the right. “You didn’t even tell me you had taken the case.”
“I had done what? Oh, I see what you mean. Well, I hadn’t and haven’t. My getting shot ought to prove I was an innocent bystander.”
“Does it hurt much?”
“It itches. I forgot to have the dressing changed this afternoon.”
“Wasn’t Nora utterly terrified?”
“So was I and so was the guy that shot me. There’s Halsey. I haven’t spoken to him yet.”
As I slid around her to escape she said: “Harrison promised to bring the daughter tonight.”
I talked to Edge for a few minutes–chiefly about a place in Pennsylvania he was buying–then found myself a drink and listened to Larry Crowley and Phil Thames swap dirty stories until some woman came over and asked Phil–he taught at Columbia–one of the questions about technocracy that people were asking that week. Larry and I moved away.
We went over to where Nora was sitting. “Watch yourself,” she told me. “The gnome’s hell-bent on getting the inside story of Julia Wolf’s murder out of you.”
“Let her get it out of Dorothy,” I said. “She’s coming with Quinn.”
“I know.”
Larry said: “He’s nuts over that girl, isn’t he? He told me he was going to divorce Alice and marry her.”
Nora said, “Poor Alice,” sympathetically. She did not like Alice.