The Thin Man Read Online Free PDF Page B

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