I nodded absently.
“Come on,” Bertha said. “Sit down and quit frowning. Give me the low-down. Otherwise—”
“Otherwise what?” I asked.
Bertha thought for a minute, then grinned and said, “Damned if I know, Donald — unless I pasted you on your sore nose. We’re in this together, but Bertha wants to know what she’s in and how deep.”
I said, “All right. It’s just a theory so far.”
“Never mind that part of it. I know it’s a theory. It has to be, but I want it.”
I said, “Here it comes. Mrs. Lintig and her husband split up twenty-one years ago. Mrs. Lintig leaves Oakview. Oakview becomes afflicted with economic atrophy. The town dries up until the money in the bank vaults dies of inaction and loneliness.”
“What’s all that got to do with it?” Bertha asked.
I said, “Simply this. The Lintigs associated with the younger set. After the town dried up, the younger set moved away looking for more action, more opportunities. The last place on earth where Mrs. Lintig would find any of her own crowd would be in Oakview.”
“All right,” she said, “I don’t follow you all the way, but go ahead.”
I said, “For twenty-one years no one in Oakview cares anything about Mrs. Lintig. Then all of a sudden a man shows up and starts asking questions. Two or three weeks later, Evaline Harris shows up and starts collecting photographs. Now, why did she want those photographs? Apparently she snooped out every single photograph in existence that had Mrs. Lintig in it, and bought those photographs.”
Bertha Cool’s eyes showed interest.
“Then,” I. said, “she comes back to the city and gets murdered.”
“For the photographs?” Bertha asked. “Surely net for those, lover. They aren’t that important.”
I said, “I go to Oakview to look the situation over. Twenty-four hours after I hit town, a cop in Santa Carlotta knows all about it. He shows up, gives me a spanking, takes me out of town, and drops me. Why?”
“So you’d get out of town,” Bertha said.
“But why did he want me out of town?”
“So you wouldn’t get the information.”
I shook my head and said, “No, because he knew Mrs. Lintig was going to come to town, and he didn’t want me there while Mrs. Lintig was there.”
Bertha Cool puffed thoughtfully on the cigarette for a few seconds, and then said with interest, “Donald, you may have something there.”
“I’m pretty certain I have something there,” I said. “This big cop is a bully, and he’s yellow. If someone had beat him up and kicked him out of town, he’d have been afraid to go back. I’ve always noticed that people consider the most deadly weapon is one that they fear the most, without regard to what the other man may fear the most. That’s psychology and human nature. If a man’s afraid of a knife, he figures the other guy is afraid of a knife. If he’s afraid of a gun, he thinks a gun is his best bet in a jam.”
“Go ahead, lover,” Bertha said, her eyes glistening with interest.
“All right. Mrs. Lintig shows up. That was a programmed appearance. There was nothing accidental about it. She breaks her glasses or fixes it so the bellboy breaks them for her. She says she’s ordered another pair. The other pair never came. Why?”
Bertha said, “I told you about that tonight, lover. It’s because the man from whom she had ordered the glasses knew she wasn’t going to stay there long enough to receive them.”
I said, “No. There’s one other explanation.”
“What?” she asked.
“That she never ordered them.”
Bertha Cool frowned. “But I don’t see—”
I said, “She wanted to dismiss that divorce action. She knew her close friends had moved away. But there would be some people left in town who would know her, people she’d be expected to know. They’d be ones who remembered her vaguely, not former intimates, but people who had seen her simply as part of the social background of twenty-one years ago. Twenty-one years is a long time.”
Bertha Cool said, “Phooey! There’s no sense to it.”
“There were no photographs of her available,” I went on. “No one could check back on her appearance. What’s more, they didn’t get a chance. She went to the hotel. From all I can find out, that’s about the only place she went. She registered and put in an appearance so the hotel people would know her. She didn’t recognize any of her old friends. Why? Because she’d broken her glasses and couldn’t see a thing. She put off looking up any of her former friends on that account. She called on a lawyer — a perfectly strange lawyer, by the way — and arranged to have the old divorce case dismissed. She gave me an interview which she hoped would be published in the local press, and she heat it.
“Now get this. This is the significant high light of the whole business. When Dr. Lintig and his wife had their slip-up, the fly in the ointment was a young chap named Steve Dunton who was running the Blade. Steve Dunton was a dashing young gallant, somewhere in the middle thirties. He’s in the middle fifties now. He wears a green eyeshade, has put on weight, and chews tobacco.
“Now then, I told Mrs. Lintig that I was a reporter from the Blade. She didn’t even know the paper, and she never once asked me anything about Steve Dunton.”
“And what was Dunton doing all this time?” Bertha asked.
“He’d quit being a gay blade. He beat it and went fishing. He didn’t come back until she’d left.”
Bertha Cool said, “Pickle me for a herring, Donald. You may be right. If you are, it’s blackmail.”
“Bigger stake than that,” I said. “Dr. Lintig starts running for office on a reform ticket in a rich little city that’s honeycombed with graft. He’s too innocent and unsophisticated to know what the opposition would be certain to do — dig back in his past trying to find something sour.
“Naturally, the first thing they looked up was his professional standing. When they started digging into that, they found he’d changed his name from Lintig to Alftmont, so naturally they started looking up Dr. Lintig. They found that Lintig had been registered in Oakview. They went to Oakview and made an investigation. That was when the first man showed up on the job. That was about two months ago, a chap who gave the name of Cross. He was the one who made the original investigation.”
Bertha Cool nodded.
“That gave them everything they wanted right there,” I went on, “but they couldn’t be certain that Mrs. Lintig hadn’t died or secured a divorce. They could throw the old scandal in Dr. Alftmont’s teeth, but it had all the earmarks of mud-slinging for political purposes. What they wanted to do was to have Mrs. Lintig enter the picture. Then they could play it in either one of two ways. First, they could have her write to the doctor and tell him to withdraw from the campaign. Secondly, they could have her show up and make a statement to the newspapers — not in Santa Carlotta, but in Oakview.
“You can see what would happen then. By showing up in Oakview, it certainly wouldn’t look as though it was a case of political mud-slinging. The Oakview papers would publish the statement that she had located Dr. Lintig living under the name of Dr. Alftmont in Santa Carlotta and residing with the co-respondent in the divorce action as man and wife. The Oakview newspaper would telephone Santa Carlotta asking them to verify the tip before they ran it as news. Then Santa Carlotta would let the Oakview paper run it first, and then they’d publish it as an exchange item.”
“Then why didn’t she tell you that story when you contacted her there in the hotel, Donald?”