Again I nodded.
“Okay,” Sellers went on wearily, “they cased the back of the car and there was a nice little short-handled hand ax. They gave it a once over and there was blood on it. They handled it too damn much, but you can’t blame them for that. After all, they were just a couple of leg men on a routine chore.”
The aroma of bacon mingled with that of coffee. Bertha carefully poured grease off the bacon, turned it over in the frying pan and switched on the electric toaster, dropped in a couple of pieces of bread and pulled down the control mechanism. “How did that murder weapon get in your car, Donald?”
“It was the murder weapon?” I asked Sellers.
He nodded.
I said, “I’m darned if I know.”
“You’ll have to do better than that,” Sellers said.
“The little bastard’s telling the truth,” Bertha announced.
“How do you know?” Sellers asked.
“Because,” Bertha flared at him, “if he was telling a lie, he’d have one that sounded convincing as hell, and he’d have it all ready. That business of saying, ‘I don’t know’ is because he’s either dumb or innocent, and he isn’t dumb.”
Sellers sighed, turned his eyes back to mine.
I said wearily, “Okay. Let’s start in at the beginning. I got the agency car. I went down to the County Clerk’s Office to look up some records. I fooled around the Bureau of Vital Statistics. I went out to the Rimley Rendezvous. I got kicked out and came back to the office. Then I went out to look up a witness and left the car parked there...”
“You’ll have to do better than that,” Sellers said. “On the witness, I mean.”
“A witness that doesn’t have anything to do with the murder.”
“You’re in a jam, Donald.”
I said, “All right. This witness lived out on Graylord Avenue.”
“What number?”
I said, “Nix on it. You’d rock the boat.”
He shook his head and said, “It’s the hammer they killed him with, Donald. I’m standing between you and the D.A.’s office right now.”
I said, “Philip E. Cullingdon, 906 East Graylord Avenue.”
“What’s he got to do with it?”
“It’s another case.”
“What time did you get out there?”
“I don’t know.”
“How long were you there?”
I rubbed my chin and said, “I can’t say, Frank. Long enough for an ax to have been planted, I guess.”
“Cullingdon, eh?” Sellers said.
I nodded.
Sellers lurched up from the little bench in the breakfast nook, hitting the table and all but upsetting the drinks.
Bertha looked up from the stove and said, “Damn you, Frank Sellers, if you spill any of that whisky I’ll brain you. That’s customers’ whisky.”
He didn’t even look at her, and went in to the telephone. I heard him turning the pages of the telephone book, then after a while heard the sound of the dial on the telephone and low-voiced conversation.
“You’re in Dutch,” Bertha said to me.
I didn’t say anything. There was no use.
Bertha tore off a paper towel, folded it, put it on the top of a shelf over the stove, put the bacon on that to drain, poured a little thick cream into the eggs, beat them up, dumped them into the frying pan and started stirring.
The whisky felt warm in my stomach and I didn’t feel quite as much as though someone had pulled out the plug and let all of my vitality drain out through my toes.
“You poor little bastard!” Bertha said sympathetically.
“I’m all right.”
“Have another drink.”
“I don’t want any more, thanks.”
“Food’s what you need,” Bertha said. “Food and rest.”
Sellers hung up the telephone, then dialed another number and talked. Then he hung up the telephone and came back to the table. He’d refilled his whisky glass while he was in the sitting-room. He looked at me with puzzled scrutiny, started to say something, then checked himself and jiggled the table once more as he sat down.
Bertha glowered at him for his clumsiness, but didn’t say anything.
A moment later, Bertha slid a plate over to me that had hot scrambled eggs, toast with lots of butter, golden bacon, fried just right, and a big cup of coffee with little cream globules floating on the top. “Sugar it to suit yourself,” she said. “I remember you take cream.”
I dumped in sugar and nodded my thanks. The coffee turned the warmth that had been kindled in my stomach into a solid, substantial glow. The food tasted good. It was the first time I’d had a real appetite for months.
Bertha watched me eat. Sellers frowned into his drink.
“Well,” Bertha said, “this is a hell of a party.”
No one said anything.
“Did you get him?” Bertha asked Sellers.
He nodded.
“Well?” Bertha said.
Sellers shook his head.
“All right, clam up if you want to,” Bertha snapped at him.
Bertha sat down and Sellers reached out and put his hand over hers. “You’re a good egg,” he said.
Bertha glared at him. “It wouldn’t hurt you to say what’s on your mind.”
Sellers said, “Cullingdon is gun-shy. Too many people have tried to get him to talk by too many different arguments. What’s more, he’d gone to bed. He was sore.”
“So what?” Bertha asked.
Sellers just shook his head.
I took another sip of coffee and said to Bertha, “Be your age. He contacted a prowl car and officers are on their way out. He’s waiting for a report.”
Bertha looked at Sellers.
Sellers looked at me, then back at Bertha. “Bright kid,” he said.
“I told you the bastard had brains,” Bertha announced.
“Let’s go back to your story,” Sellers said to me. “You left the car out there. You didn’t say how long. See anyone else out there?”
“I could have — but no one who had any chance to plant that murder weapon.”
“You tell me facts, names and places. I’ll draw the conclusions.”
“Not some names.”
“How many?”
“One.”
“I want it.”
“You don’t get it — yet.”
“You’re in bad.”
“Not that bad,” I told him.
“I think you are.”
I just kept on eating.
Bertha glared at me as though she could bite my head off. “If you don’t tell him, I will,” she said.
“Shut up,” I told her.
Sellers looked at her expectantly.
“I’m going to,” Bertha said.
“You don’t even know,” I pointed out.
“The hell I don’t. Any time you’ve been spending the partnership funds to get three packages of cigarettes and then get that moony expression on your face when the sergeant asks you a simple question, I know the answer, and don’t think for a damn minute that I don’t. After all, in one way you can’t be blamed. You’ve been down in the South Seas for so long you’ve got your head filled with a lot of romantic ideas about womanhood. You come back and the jane that you’d have called a broad a couple of years ago looks like a vision of loveliness made and handed down with a heavenly aura still clinging to her.”
Sergeant Sellers looked at Bertha with admiration. “Hell, you’re romantic,” he said. He reached out and took her hand.
Bertha jerked her hand out from under his and said, “I’ll bust you on the jaw one of these days, if you keep making passes at me.”
Sellers grinned. “That’s the way I like women — practical and hard.”
Bertha simply glared at him.
I said, “Women like to think they’re soft and feminine, Frank.”