“Good night,” I said.
I turned the agency car and made time back to the office. I looked at my wrist watch. I’d only been gone twenty-five minutes in all. I hoped Marian hadn’t called in during that time.
I sprawled out in a chair and was just lighting a cigarette when I heard the sound of a key in the lock of the door. I thought it was the janitor and called out, “We’re busy. Let it go until tomorrow, will, you, please?”
The latch clicked back and Bertha Cool, calmly placid, came walking into the office. She smiled at me and said, “Thought so,” then sailed on through the entrance office to seat herself in the big swivel chair behind her desk. She said, “You and I could get along a hell of a lot better, Donald, if we didn’t try to slip things over on each other.”
I was just starting to answer that when the telephone on Bertha Cool’s desk started to ring. Bertha, with a scooping motion of her thick right arm, pulled the telephone towards her, picked up the receiver, and said, “Hello.”
Her eyes were on me, half-closed eyes that glittered like diamonds. Her left arm was out across the desk ready to stiff-arm me back in case I made a lunge for the telephone.
I sat still and smoked.
Bertha Cool said, “Yes, this is Bertha Cool’s agency... No, dear, he isn’t here right now, but he told me you were going to telephone and said I’d take the message... Oh, yes, dearie. Well, he expects to be here in just a few minutes. He said for you to come right up... Yes, that’s right. That’s the address. Come right up, dearie. Don’t waste any time. Get a taxicab. He wants to see you.”
She dropped the receiver back into place and turned to face me. “Now then, Donald,” she said, “let this be a lesson to you. The next time you try to cut yourself a piece of cake, cut Bertha in on it, otherwise there’s going to be trouble.”
“You want in on it, do you?” I asked.
“I’m in,” she said.
I said, “You are, for a fact.”
She said, “You came to work for me, lover, a little runt that didn’t know anything about the detective business. I picked you up when you were down to your last cent. You hadn’t eaten for two days when you came to the office. I gave you a job. You’re learning the business. You have brains. The trouble is, you don’t keep in mind that I’m the boss. You get to thinking you’re running the business. It’s a case of the tail wagging the dog.”
“Anything else?” I asked.
“Isn’t that enough?” Bertha asked.
“It’s plenty,” I said. “Now would you like to know what you’ve cut yourself in on?”
She smiled and said, “Well, that might help some. No hard feelings, eh, Donald?”
“No hard feelings,” I said.
Bertha said, “I stick up for my rights. When I have to fight, I fight to win. I don’t hold any grudges. I fight because I want to accomplish something. When I’ve accomplished it, that’s all I ask.”
“She’s coming up here?” I asked.
“Right away. She said she had to see you right away. It didn’t sound like a date to me, lover. It sounded like business.”
“It is business.”
“All right, Donald. Suppose you tell Bertha what it is. I’ve declared myself in on the deal, so I’d like to see what cards are in my hand — and what the stakes are. But don’t forget that I hold the trumps.”
“All right,” I said. “You’re in on a murder.”
“I knew that already.”
I said, “The girl you were talking with was Marian Dunton. She was stranded in a hick town up in the foothills. She wanted to get out. She played a hunch that this Lintig case was something bigger than appeared on the surface. She followed my back trail and got a lead by which she figured she could dig up some information.”
“You mean with this Evaline girl?”
“Yes.”
Bertha said, “Never mind the history. I figured that all out myself. Tell me something I don’t know.”
I said, “I don’t know just what time the post-mortem will show Evaline Harris was murdered, probably about the time Marian Dunton went to her apartment for the first time.”
“For the first time?” Bertha asked.
“Yes. She opened the door of the apartment and saw Evaline lying on the bed. She thought she was asleep. A man had just left the apartment. Marian thought it wasn’t exactly a propitious moment for getting information, so she quietly closed, the door and went back to sit in the car where she could watch the door of the apartment house. After half an hour or so, she tried it again. She was bolder that time and more curious. She found Evaline Harris had a cord knotted around her neck and was quite dead. Marian lost her head, could only think of me, and came rushing up to my room to tell me about it. I sent her to the police, told her to say nothing about having been to me, nothing about the agency, nothing about Mrs. Lintig, simply that she was approaching Evaline to see about getting a job in the city, that she thought Evaline was asleep the first time, and had gone out to wait in the car.”
“I doubt if she gets away with that,” Bertha Cool said. “I think she will.”
“Why?”
“She’s from the country. She’s a simple, unsophisticated, darn nice girl. It sticks out all over her. She’s fresh and unspoiled. She hasn’t learned the chiselling tactics of the city. She’s just a square-shooting good kid.”
Bertha Cool sighed and said, “That’s one of your greatest weaknesses as a detective, lover. The women all knock you for a loop. You fall for them head over heels. The fact that you can’t get anywhere in a fight is bad enough, but this business of falling for women is twice as bad. You’ve got to learn to quit it. If you could only do that, your brains would get you places.”
“Anything else?” I asked.
Bertha Cool smiled and said, “Now, don’t be like that, Donald. This is business, you know.”
“All right,” I said. “Now I’ll tell you the rest of it. Marian got a pretty good look at the man who was coming out of the apartment. Her description won’t mean anything to the police — at least, I hope it won’t — but it meant something to me.”
“What do you mean?”
“The man who left the apartment,” I said, “was Dr. Charles Loring Alftmont, otherwise known as Dr. James C. Lintig. He prefers to have us refer to him as Mr. Smith.”
Bertha Cool stared at me. Her lids slowly raised until her eyes were round and startled. She said, so softly that it was almost under her breath, “I’ll be stewed for an oyster.”
“Now then,” I said, “the police don’t know anything about the Lintig angle. They don’t know anything about the Alftmont angle. There’s no particular reason why they should suspect the man whom we will refer to as Smith from now on. But if Marian Dunton should see him or should see his photograph, she’ll identify him in a minute.”
Bertha Cool gave a low whistle.
“Therefore,” I said, “you can play things in either one of two ways. You can turn her loose on her own, in which event the police will sooner or later get a lead to Smith, put him in a line-up, and ask Marian Dunton to identify him, in which event the fat will be in the fire and you won’t have any client; or you can keep Marian out of circulation as much as possible, tell Smith what we know, make him give us his side of the story, tell him we’re standing between him and a murder rap, get unlimited funds with which to work, and try to clean the thing up.”
“Won’t that be suppressing evidence, lover?”
“Yes.”
“That’s serious, you know, for a private detective agency. They’d hook me for my licence on that.”
“If you hadn’t known anything at all about it, they couldn’t have held you responsible.”