Bertha didn’t want to talk just then. She dived into the security of the taxicab, and slammed the door. The body lurched as the driver slid in behind the wheel started the motor, and spun the car in a U-turn.
“No, no,” Bertha said.
He turned to look back at her curiously.
“There’s — I must get the police.”
“What’s the matter?”
“A man’s dead in that house.”
The curiosity in the eyes of the cab driver suddenly gave place to a cold appraisal, a calculating suspicion. He looked down at the glint of metal in Bertha Cool’s right hand.
Bertha nervously shoved her flashlight back into her purse. “The nearest telephone,” she said, “and don’t stare at me like that.”
The cab went through the gears into rapid motion, but Bertha realized that the driver kept watching her in the rearview mirror which he had surreptitiously adjusted so that it showed her every motion. When they came to a drugstore, the cab driver didn’t let her go in alone to telephone, but followed her, standing at her elbow while she notified police headquarters and waiting with her until they heard the reassuring siren of the police car.
Sergeant Frank Sellers was in the car, and Bertha knew Frank Sellers slightly by previous meetings and largely by reputation. Sergeant Sellers didn’t care particularly for private detectives. His entire approach to a police problem was that of frank skepticism. As a colleague had once expressed it to Bertha, “He just looks at you and chews his cigar. His eyes call you a damn liar, but he doesn’t say anything. Hell’s bells, he don’t have to.”
Sergeant Sellers seemed in no great rush to get started for the scene of the crime. He seemed more anxious to get Bertha’s story down to the last detail.
“Now, let’s get this straight,” he said, chewing his cigar over to a corner of his mouth. “You went out there to see this blind man. That right?”
“Yes.”
“You knew him?”
“Yes.”
“He’d been to you and hired you to do a job?”
“Yes.”
“And you’d done it?”
“Yes.”
“Then what did you want to see him about?”
That question caught Bertha slightly off guard. She said, “It was another matter.”
“What?”
“I wanted to checkup with him on some of the angles.”
“You’d already done what he hired you to?”
“Yes — in a way.”
“Well, what does that mean? What hadn’t you done?”
“I’d done everything he wanted. There was something on which I wanted his assistance, something on which I wanted him to check up.”
“I see,” Sellers said with ponderous disbelief. “You wanted a blind man to help you on some of your problems, is that it?”
“I wanted to see the man,” Bertha Cool said, getting back some of her customary belligerency, “and I’m not going to tell you what I wanted to see him about. It’s an entirely different case, and I can’t afford to tip my hand on it. Now, does that clear things up?”
“Very definitely,” Sergeant Sellers said, as though Bertha Cool’s statement made her definitely the number one suspect in the case. “And this blind man was lying there dead, is that right?”
“Yes.”
“Face down you say?”
“Yes.”
“He’d been shot?”
“I think so.”
“You don’t know?”
“No, I didn’t perform any post-mortem on the body. There was a small shotgun there. I didn’t stop to examine it. I saw what the score was and got out of there.”
“He’d crawled along on the carpet from the place where he was shot to the place where he’d died?”
“Yes.”
“How far?”
“I don’t know. Ten or fifteen feet.”
“Crawling?”
“Yes.”
“And died while he was crawling?”
“He may have died while he was resting,” Bertha said.
“I know but he was in a crawling position, stomach next to the carpet, is that right?”
“Yes.”
“Face turned to one side or the other?”
“I don’t think so. I think his face was pressed down against the floor. I saw the back of his head.”
“Then how’d you know it was the blind man?”
“Why — from his build, I guess. The blind man lives there.”
“You didn’t turn the body over?”
“No. I didn’t touch the body. I didn’t touch anything. I got out of there and called you.”
“All right,” Sellers said, “let’s go. You’ve got a taxicab out there?”
“Yes.”
“You’d better ride with me. Knowing it’s the blind man, when you admit you didn’t look at the face, makes things look kinda funny.”
Sergeant Sellers turned to the taxi driver. “What’s your name.”
“Harry Simms.”
“What do you know about this?”
“Nothing at all. I takes this dame out looking for the place. She has the street number, but doesn’t know where it is. There’s no street lights because of the dim out. I have a map that shows me where the place should be — that is, what block. It’s pretty dark, and she’s got a dim-out flashlight. When we get to the block where the house is located, I tell her about where it should be. She tells me to stop, and she’ll find it herself on foot. She goes ahead and is gone for — oh, I don’t know — maybe five minutes, maybe ten minutes.”
“You were charging waiting time?”
“No. She was pretty cagey about that. I told her I’d wait up to fifteen minutes in case she wanted to go back before then. After that, I’d either charge her waiting time or go back. We do that once in a while when we’re pretty sure of a fare back to town.”
Sergeant Sellers nodded. “You sat there in the car?”
“Yes.”
“What did you do?”
“Just sat there and waited.”
“Radio in your bus?”
“Yes.”
“Was it on?”
“Yes.”
“Musical programme?”
“Uh huh.”
“Wouldn’t have heard a shot then, would you?”
The cab driver thought that over and said, “No, I don’t suppose I would — not so far down the street as where she made me stop.”
As the full implications of that dawned on Bertha Cool, she said, “What are you getting at? There wasn’t any shot.”
“How do you know?”
“I’d have heard it if there had been.”
Sergeant Sellers’s eyes regarded her with an appraisal in which there was no friendliness whatever. She might have been some building on which he was making a cash appraisal.
“That all you know?” he asked the cab driver.
“That’s all.”
“Simms, eh?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Let’s take a look at your licence.”
The cab driver showed him his licence. Sergeant Sellers took the number of the cab and said, “Okay, no reason to send you back out there. That’s all. You get in my car, Mrs. Cool.”
The cab driver said, “The fare’s one-eighty-five.”
“What do you mean?” Bertha Cool snorted. “It was only seventy-five cents going out there, and—”
“Waiting-time.”
“I thought you weren’t charging me any waiting time.”
“Not out there. I charged you waiting time here while you were telephoning the police and waiting for the squad car.”
“Well, I won’t pay it,” Bertha said indignantly. “The idea of charging waiting time on anything like that—”
“What did you expect I was going to do, stick around here and keep myself out of circulation? You’re the one that stopped and—”
“Give him one eighty-five,” Sergeant Sellers said to Bertha Cool.