“Oh, you get used to it.” Jack lowered his eyelids. “Worst of it is that it gets your eyes after a while — the lights hurt. Close ’em once in a while and rest ’em — does ’em good. Doctor says there’s nothing like giving your eyes a rest once’n while.”
Bertha watched him with the intent speculation of a cat concealed in the shadows watching a bird hopping around in the nearby sunlight.
Jack’s head nodded a couple of times, jerked forward, then snapped back and his eyes popped open with instant wakefulness.
Bertha picked up the pencil and started on her triangles. She was, she realized, having some trouble getting the lines of the triangles to meet. There was a roaring in her ears, and when she turned her head quickly, the room had a tendency to keep on spinning for a moment after she brought her head to a rest; but her mind was perfectly clear.
“Did Sellers arrest Imogene Dearborne?” she asked.
“I don’t think so. Why?”
“In order to pull the job, Belder needed some feminine accomplice. He needed someone to telephone his wife and get her to go down to that garage. If he was playing around with that Dearborne girl, my best guess is she’s the one we want.”
“Say!” Jack exclaimed with alcoholic enthusiasm, “thaa’sh a hell of a swell idea!”
“And I bet that little bitch wrote the — that estimable little bitch wrote the letters after all.”
Jack peered at her owlishly. “Why should she write a letter acushing herself?” he asked.
Bertha had a flash of inspiration. “To divert suspicion from herself, of course. She knew that Mrs. Belder was dead before that letter was mailed. She also knew that things hadn’t worked quite as smoothly as she had anticipated, and she was smart enough to know that a letter of that sort would divert suspicion of the murder from her. She’d rather be Everett Belder’s mistress than his accomplice — in the eyes of the police.”
“Shay, you’ve got sump’n there.” Jack lumbered over to the telephone. “Going to call the Sarge on that. Let’sh shee — what’sh his number? Gotta think.”
Jack placed his head on his hand, his elbow on the desk, closed his eyes the better to concentrate.
A few seconds later Bertha saw the big shoulders sag, the arm stretch out flat on the desk. Jack brushed the telephone to one side as though it had been an annoying obstacle. His head sagged to his arm, then after several anxious seconds, a gentle snore sounded through the whisky-steeped atmosphere of the office.
Bertha eased gently back in the swivel chair so that it wouldn’t creak. She got to her feet, swaying slightly. She gripped the edge of the desk to steady herself, and tiptoeing cautiously, reached the door to the entrance office. Jack moved restlessly, muttering something unintelligible under his breath, his tongue thick with alcohol.
Bertha noiselessly opened the door, inched her way through, and then carefully turned back the knob so that there would be no tell-tale click of the latch.
It was dark now, but there was enough light to enable Bertha to walk across the length of the reception-room without stumbling over anything. She groped for the knob of the outer door, found it, and made certain that the night-latch was on before tiptoeing out into the corridor.
22
The Perils of Housebreaking
Everett Belder’s house was a typical southern Californian Monterey bungalow with a built-in garage. There were grounds which in a less outlying district would have been considered unusually spacious.
Bertha slowed her car to a crawl and sized up the situation. Behind her was a hectic half-hour of wild driving, an attempt to shake any shadows who might have been trying to trail her. Not that she had any reason to believe she was being followed, but she simply proposed to make certain no one could “put the finger” on her.
The day, which had started out fair enough, had clouded up by noon, and with the coming of darkness had developed a steady, cold drizzle. Wet pavements cast shimmering reflections of street lights at the corners, made the cold seem even more damp and penetrating.
Behind the low clouds somewhere was a moon sufficiently progressed toward the full to give a faintly diffused illumination which seeped through the drizzling clouds.
Belder’s house was dark, but Bertha, mindful of the dim-out regulations, couldn’t be certain it was unoccupied at the moment. She drove her car half-way to the corner, switched out the lights, locked both the ignition and the doors, and dropped the keys into her purse. She walked slowly back along the wet sidewalks, climbed the stairs to the cement stoop of the Belder house, and pressed the button. She waited fifteen seconds, pressed again — this time longer.
When she heard no sound of motion from the interior of the house, she tried the front door, found it locked, and walked around toward the back of the house. The built-in garage, set back some twenty feet, was on the west side of the house. The walk which led around to the back door skirted the house to the east.
Bertha followed this walk, noticing the half-windows which gave light and ventilation to the basement where the body of Sally Brentner had been found. Circling the house, Bertha tried windows and doors, finding that everything was locked. She returned to the front of the house and tried the garage door. It too was locked.
Bertha, far from the end of her resources, climbed the stoop once more and opened the lacquered mail-box, probing inside with eager fingers.
Her fingertips encountered a key.
Bertha removed the key and inserted it in the lock of the front door. It clicked back the night-latch. She dropped the key back into the mail-box, snapped the box shut, and entered the house, closing the door behind her, listening to the spring lock click shut.
Mindful of the rule of the housebreaking profession, that the most essential thing in entering a house is to arrange for a getaway, Bertha took a small fountain-pen flashlight from her purse, and, using it to guide her, padded her way through a living-room, dining-room, serving-pantry, and kitchen. She found a key on the inside of the back door. Unlocking the back door with this key, Bertha started an appraisal of the premises.
A disquieting aura hung over the entire house. Bertha Cool claimed that she could tell something about the people who had lived in a house simply from entering a place and walking through it. Now she couldn’t tell whether she was feeling vibrations which, by some unexplained physical laws, were thrown out from the walls of the house as psychic echoes of the personalities that tenanted the place, or whether a knowledge of the discord which had existed between Belder and his wife, of the hatred which Carlotta and Mrs. Goldring held for Belder, plus the knowledge that Sally Brentner had been murdered somewhere on the premises, had excited her imagination so that she saw her surroundings in the light of what had happened.
She was only conscious of the feeling that here was a house of jangling personalities, a house which had lent itself to murder, which seemed now to be brooding and expectant — waiting only for another murder to be committed.
Big and strong as she was, Bertha had a hard time shaking off the presentiment of impending evil. Snap out of it, you big boob, she muttered angrily to herself. Nothin’s going to happen here. You’re in bad. If you don’t turn up some evidence that will square things with Sergeant Sellers, you’re going to jail.
She completed her tour of inspection of the east rooms of the house, opened a door and found herself in a long corridor from which several doors opened. The one on the right led down another passage, a back bedroom on one side — on the other, a door leading into the rear of the garage, Bertha sniffed the musty odour of the dank interior. The beam of her flashlight was swallowed up in the dark loneliness of the big double garage. A work-bench ran along one wall. There was the usual assortment of discarded junk; also an overflow of objects to which the house could apparently give no adequate room — an old wardrobe trunk, a man’s coat, a pair of grease-stained overalls, a couple of boxes, a litter of old spark plugs, odds and ends of wires, a dilapidated tyre cover.