“I’ll be damned if I do,” Bertha blazed. She took a dollar and fifty cents from her pocket, handed it to the cab driver, and said, “Take it or leave it. It’s all one with me.”
The cab driver hesitated a moment, looked at the police sergeant, then took the dollar and a half. When it was safely in his pocket, he delivered his parting shot. “She was in the house quite a while, Sergeant,” he said. “When she came out, she was running, but she was certainly in there long enough.”
“Thanks,” Sellers said.
Bertha glared at the cab driver as though she could have slapped his face.
“All right,” Sellers said to Bertha, “let’s go.”
She climbed into the automobile, taking the back seat which Sellers indicated. Sellers climbed in beside her, a police chauffeur doing the driving. There was one other man in the front seat and another beside Sergeant Sellers in the rear seat. Bertha Cool knew neither of them, and Sellers made no effort to perform introductions.
The chauffeur drove with swift skill, dimming his lights, however, as he topped the rise of ground and came within the area subjected to stringent dim-out regulations on the part of cars driving toward the ocean.
“I think it’s right after the next cross street,” Bertha said.
The police car slowed, crawling along close to the curb until Bertha said, “This is it.”
The men climbed out. Bertha said, “I don’t have to go in, do I?”
“No, not now. You can wait here.”
“All right, I’ll wait.”
Bertha opened her purse took out her cigarette case, and asked, “Is it going to be long?”
“I can’t tell you yet,” Sellers said cheerfully. “I’ll be seeing you.”
The men went on into the house. One of them came out after a few moments to get a camera, a tripod, and some floodlights. A few minutes later and he was back again, grumbling. “Not a damn bit of current in the whole house.”
“The man was blind,” Bertha said. “He didn’t need lights.”
“Well, I need a socket to hook up my floodlights.”
“Can’t you use flash bulbs?”
“I’ve got to,” the man said. “Don’t like ’em — not for the kind of stuff the sergeant wants. Can’t control the lighting as well as you can with floodlights. Can’t take the time to arrange things and see what you’re getting, and then sometimes you get reflections. Oh, well, it’s all in a lifetime.”
A few minutes later, Sergeant Sellers was back. “Well,” he said, “let’s get some particulars. What was this man’s name?”
“Rodney Kosling.”
“Know anything about his family?”
“No. I doubt very much if he has one. He seemed very much alone.”
“Know how long he’s been living here?”
“No.”
“All in all, you don’t know very much about him?”
“That’s right.”
“What did he want you to do for him? How did he happen to get in touch with you?”
“He wanted me to find someone.”
“Who?”
“A person to whom he had become attached.”
“Woman?”
“Yes.”
“Blind?”
“No.”
“Young?”
“Yes.”
“Find her?”
“Yes.”
“Then what?”
“I reported to him.”
“Who was the woman?”
Bertha shook her head.
“Not related to him?”
“No.”
“You’re certain?”
“Virtually.”
“Couldn’t have been that she was related to him and was tangled up with some man, and Kosling wanted to do something about it?”
“No.”
“You’re not being a great deal of help, Mrs. Cool.”
“Hell’s bells,” Bertha said. “I told you about finding the body, didn’t I? I could have walked out and left you holding the sack.”
Sellers grinned. “I’ll bet you’d have done just that too, if it hadn’t been for the taxi driver. That put you in something of a spot. You knew that after the body was discovered, he’d remember having driven you out here, and given the police a good description.”
Bertha Cool maintained a dignified silence.
“Ever occur to you that this fellow is a faker?” Sergeant Sellers asked.
“What do you mean?”
“That he wasn’t blind at all.”
“No,” Bertha said. “He was blind. I know.”
“How?”
“Well, in the first place, some of the things he told me about people — about what he’d deduced from sounds, voices, and steps and things of that sort. Only a blind man could have developed his faculties that way, and — well, look at the house. Not a light in it.”
“Oh, so you noticed that, did you?”
“Yes.”
“Try to switch on a light, did you?”
“Yes.”
“Rather unusual for you to go walking into strange houses, isn’t it?”
“Well, the door was open.”
Sellers said, “If you’re telling the truth, you can thank your lucky stars that the blind man got home first.”
“What do you mean?”
“A trap gun had been arranged so that when a person entered the house, he pulled against a thin wire, and that pulled the trigger on this four hundred and ten gauge shotgun. The moral of that is not to go wandering around strange houses just because the door’s open.”
“Why kill a man that way?” Bertha asked.
“Probably so someone would cook up a good alibi.”
Bertha thought that over.
“Well,” Sergeant Sellers said, “you’ll have to come in and take a look at him to make an identification. How old would you say this man was?”
“Oh, fifty-five or sixty.”
“He doesn’t look that old to me, and his eyes look all right.”
“How long’s he been dead?” Bertha asked.
Sergeant Sellers looked at her and grinned. “How long ago were you out here?”
“Oh, perhaps thirty or forty minutes.”
Sellers nodded. “I’d say he’d been dead just about that long.”
“You mean—”
“I mean,” Sellers interrupted, “that the man can’t have been dead more than an hour. If you were out here forty-five minutes ago, it’s very possible that he was killed just about the time you got here. Don’t bother to say anything, Mrs. Cool. Just come in and look at the body.”
Bertha followed him on up the walk to the house. The men apparently had completed their investigations and were sitting on a wooden bench at the far end of the porch. Bertha could make them out as a dark huddle of humanity distinguished by three glowing red spots which marked the ends of their cigarettes, spots which streaked up and down occasionally as the men removed the cigarettes from their mouths.
“Right in this way,” Sergeant Sellers said, and switched on a powerful, five cell spotlight which turned the darkness into dazzling brilliance.
“Not over there,” he said, as Bertha turned. “We’ve moved him. Take a look.”
The body had been placed on the table, and seemed terribly inanimate as it sprawled in the immobility of death.
The beam of Sergeant Sellers’s flashlight slid along the man’s clothes, paused momentarily on the red-matted garments where the bullet had entered, then slid up to come to rest on the man’s face.
Bertha Cool’s gasp of startled surprise gave Sergeant Sellers all the cue he needed. “It isn’t Kosling?” he asked.
“No,” she said.
The beam from the flashlight slid abruptly from the face of the dead man to shine full on Bertha Cool’s features.
“All right,” Sergeant Sellers said crisply. “Who is it?”
Bertha said dully and without thinking, “He’s a dirty, two-timing chiseler by the name of Bollman. He had a good killing coming to him — and you get that damn spotlight out of my face, or I’ll bust it.”