“Well?” I asked.
“I haven’t anything to say — not to you.”
I said, “Okay,” and started the motor.
“Where are we going?”
“Back to Bertha Cool’s apartment.”
“What’s at Bertha Cool’s apartment?”
“Sergeant Frank Sellers of Homicide.”
“And what are you going to do there?”
“Tell him what I told you and let him do the talking from then on. I’ve been a sucker long enough.”
She stuck it out for a dozen blocks, then reached over and twisted the key in the ignition. “Okay,” she said, “shut it off.”
“Going to talk?”
“Yes.”
I eased the car into the curb and settled back against the cushions. “Go ahead.”
She said, “I’d get killed if they knew I told you this.”
“You’ll be arrested for first-degree murder if you don’t.”
“You’re hard when you want to be.”
I fought against another spell of shivering as the cold damp fog penetrated into the marrow of my bones, and managed to say threateningly, “I’m as hard and as cold as the back of a barred jail door.”
She said in a tone of resignation, “All right, what do you want to know?”
“Everything.”
She said, “I can’t tell you everything, Donald. I can tell you the things that concern me. I can tell you enough so that you’ll realize you’re not being framed. But I can’t tell you the things that relate to others.”
I said, “You tell me the whole story here and now and without waiting for reinforcements or you get a third degree from Sergeant Frank Sellers. Make up your mind.”
She said, “That isn’t fair.”
“It’s fair to me.”
“It’s not fair to put me in that position.”
“Make up your mind. I’ve stuck my neck out for you a couple of times. Now I’m getting tired of it. You can start paying me back, beginning right now.”
She said, “I could get out of this car and start walking away. You wouldn’t dare try to wrestle me back into it.”
“Try it and see what happens.”
I was shivering again now, but she was so intent on her own predicament that she didn’t realize it.
She sat silently for about ten seconds, then she said, “How did you think Rufus Stanberry made his money?”
I said, “You’re doing the talking.”
“Blackmail.”
“Keep talking.”
“We didn’t know it for quite a while.”
“Who’s we?”
“Pittman Rimley.”
“What happened when he found out?”
“He got busy.”
“Tell me about the blackmail.”
“It wasn’t just the usual thing. He was clever as the very devil. He did lots of embellishment and embroidery — the little things that really got in the big money.”
“Mrs. Crail, for instance?”
“Exactly. He didn’t bother with her on the small stuff, but waited until she got married and then cashed in a big way — and he was doing it so that there wouldn’t really have been any comeback. He was selling her the building at a price about three times what it was worth.”
“Nice business if you can get it,” I said.
“He was getting it. He did it in such a way there was almost no comeback. Most of the time his victims didn’t even know him personally. He may have been blackmailing people he didn’t know by sight.”
“How come?”
“He has some sort of an organization, of course — a little secret service that gets the goods. But Stanberry’s cleverness was in the way he’d save information for months or years — until the time was ripe for a good killing. Then the victim would get a telephone call — just one.”
“What would be said?”
“A nice little threat and orders to pay money in cash to his dear nephew, Archie. After that there might be an anonymous letter or two, but usually that first telephone call was so devastating the rest was just a mop-up that Archie could handle.”
I said, “Archie’s eyes were all swollen with tearful grief — induced by breaking open a cigarette and putting a little grain of tobacco in each eye. I had to help him get one out. I saw the broken cigarette on his dresser.”
She didn’t say anything.
I said, “Archie had had your picture on his wall.”
“He’d taken it down, hadn’t he?” she asked quickly.
“Yes. He said it was a pin-up picture he’d bribed your publicity photographer...”
“Blackmailed was the word he should have used,” she said bitterly. “Archie’s a poor sap. His uncle had brains — dangerous brains.”
“And where did Rimley come in? Don’t make me laugh by telling me he was blackmailing Rimley.”
“He was, in a way. But, of course, it was indirect.”
“How?”
“Blackmailing Rimley’s clients, using the Rendezvous to pick up stuff that he could use later. But he was able to keep under cover and do a lot of his stuff before we found out what was happening. It was the Crail deal that really put us wise. And, of course, Rimley had quite a stake in that. His lease lapsed within ninety days after a bona fide sale.”
“So Mrs. Crail really didn’t want to buy, and Rimley really didn’t want to have Stanberry sell. Is that it?”
“Something like that.”
“What’s the rest of the deal?”
“I don’t know. All I know is that Stanberry had a whole safe full of papers and we got them.”
“Who did the getting?” I asked.
She said simply, “I did.”
I jerked up in my seat with the sheer surprise of that. “You got them!”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“This afternoon.”
“How?”
She said, “It worked out just about as you figured. You know the washrooms there at the Rendezvous, they have a colored grafter who turns on water in the bowl, sprinkles in a little toilet water, hands you some soap and a towel and stands poised solicitously with a brush, all ready to go to work as soon as your hands are dried, which, of course, means a nice tip. Stanberry always washed his hands as though he wanted to make the scrubbing last until Saturday night. He’d take off his wrist-watch and hand it to the attendant. Rimley simply instructed the attendant to set the watch ahead an hour.”
“Then what?”
“Then, almost as soon as Stanberry went back to the dining room, Rimley sent for him. And, of course, Rimley had fixed the watch and the clock in his own office.”
“All right,” I said, “that accounts for that much of it. Now tell me how he happened to be in your apartment.”
“Don’t you get the sketch?”
“No.”
“He was blackmailing me.”
“Over what?”
She laughed and said, “Over some bait that I gave him. When Rimley wanted to stop his blackmailing activities, he needed a decoy. I was it.”
“And so?”
“Archie Stanberry had been making little passes at me. I let Archie get the bait and take it to his uncle. The uncle swallowed it.”
“What did he find out about you?”
She smiled. “I was wanted for murder.”
“Any foundation?”
“Of course not. It was a plant. I had some old newspaper clippings and a couple of incriminating letters that I’d written to myself and a few other things in a drawer in the table where Archie could find them. He found them, read them and took them to uncle.”
“And what did uncle do?”
“Called on me this afternoon, you dope. Haven’t you got the play yet?”
“And you cracked him over the head with a hatchet?”
“Don’t be silly. I slipped him a drugged drink that was due to make him unconscious for just about an hour and fifteen minutes.”