“Because she wasn’t ready,” I said. “She didn’t intend to tell the story at that time. That appearance was just for the purpose of laying the foundation. She wanted the people around the hotel to see her and get accustomed to regarding her as Mrs. Lintig.”
“Then you think she wasn’t Mrs. Lintig?”
I shook my head and said, “The Santa Carlotta police couldn’t find her. They found Flo Danzer who used to be Flo Mortinson who roomed with Amelia Sellar in San Francisco. Then they hit a brick wall. Flo knows what it is. They wouldn’t have taken the risk of planting another woman as a ringer unless they’d first decided there was no possibility of getting the real Mrs. Lintig.”
“But look here, lover,” Bertha said, “how did they know Steve Dunton would go fishing. He’d have exposed her.”
I said, “That’s one thing they didn’t know. They didn’t know it either because Mrs. Lintig never confessed it to Flo, or, what’s more likely, because Flo didn’t remember such details as names. She knew Mrs. Lintig had been playing around, and that’s all.”
Bertha Cool smoked for a while in thoughtful silence.
“Now then,” I said, “Dr. Alftmont got a letter recently which purported to come from his wife. He says it’s her handwriting. I examined that last letter, and it looks like a forgery to me.”
Bertha Cool’s face lit. “Well, shucks,” she said, “there’s nothing to it, lover. All we need to do is to prove that Mrs. Lintig is an impostor.”
“What good will that do?”
“It’ll put Alftmont in the clear, and that’s all we want.”
I said, “It would have a short time ago. It won’t now. They’re after Alftmont on a murder charge now. Unless we can find some way of beating it, the case is going to break by tomorrow morning at ten o’clock.”
Bertha Cool said, “Look, lover. You can do anything with Marian. You can make her look Alftmont square in the face and say that he wasn’t the man who came out of that room.”
“Wouldn’t that be nice,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
I said, “The other people know all about Alftmont. By this time, they’ve traced him to Los Angeles. They know damn well he was the man who was in that room. They’re just waiting to spring the identificaion on him. They’ve told the D.A. here they think the case has a Santa Carlotta angle. He’s asked them to lay off until he can get Marian Dunton’s mind firmly convinced that the man she saw was coming out of apartment 309 and not out of either of the adjoining apartments. They’re ready to shoot now.
“They flash a photograph of Dr. Alftmont on Marian Dunton, and she refuses to identify it. What happens? They give her a regular, old-time third-degree gruelling. She can’t stand up to that. No girl her age could unless she’d had a lot more experience and a lot more hard knocks than Marian has.
“Marian gets hysterical. She blurts out the whole story or enough of it so they can fill in all the gaps. They find out that we’ve been acting as official host and hostess while she’s been in the city. They don’t bother about asking for an explanation or trying to take your licence away. They simply arrest both of us as accessories after the fact, accuse us of trying to bribe and browbeat a prosecution witness, charge us with subornation of perjury, with trying to square a murder rap for Alftmont — and we’re all in jail together.”
Bertha Cool’s eyes showed that she appreciated the logic of my remark, but didn’t like the word picture I’d painted. After a minute, she said, “Cripes, lover, let’s get out of it. We’ve done everything we could. We can allege that Mrs. Lintig is an impostor and challenge them to prove it. That will clear our skirts.”
I said, “It may clear our skirts, but it won’t be getting results for our client.”
“I’d rather not get results for our client than spend the next twenty years in the women’s penitentiary at Tehachapi.”
I said, “What we want to do is to keep out of jail, give our client a break, and let him get elected mayor of Santa Carlotta. What you want is business. With the mayor of Santa Carlotta plugging for you, you’ve got an asset that’s worth a lot of money.”
Bertha thought for a minute, and then said, “You went to San Francisco on the bus, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“And left your car in Santa Carlotta?”
“Yes.”
“And picked it up late this morning?”
“Yes.”
“Then it was someone in Santa Carlotta who pushed your nose back?”
“It was.”
“A cop?” she asked.
I nodded.
“The same one who tried to throw a scare into you at Oakview?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t like it, lover,” she said. “A crooked cop can frame you with something you can’t get out of.”
I grinned and said, “I know it.”
“Well, what are you grinning about?”
“I’m grinning,” I said, “because that’s a game two can play. A clever man can frame a cop so the cop won’t have time to frame anyone else. Right now, in case you want to know it, Sergeant John Harbet is a very busy individual, and I wouldn’t doubt at all if he was making a lot of explanations.”
“Why?” she asked suspiciously. “What’s happened?”
“For one thing,” I said, “he had been hanging around the Blue Cave with Evaline Harris. When they wanted someone to go up to Oakview and get the lay of the land and pick up all the outstanding pictures of Mrs. Lintig, they sent Evaline. When Evaline got murdered and the police started asking questions about who her boy friends were, Harbet brought a lot of pull to hear on the management. I don’t know how much pull, but it was a hell of a lot, and the word was passed around to the girls not to talk about Harbet. Trying to cover it up that way makes it that much worse when the lid is blown off.”
“And is the lid blown off?” she asked.
I nodded.
Bertha Cool looked at me speculatively and said, “Donald, I’d hate to be one to push you in the nose. I have an idea you might find a way to make things awfully uncomfortable for me afterwards.”
“I would,” I promised.
She said, “Come on. Let’s go steal a trunk.”
“You send yourself a telegram first,” I said.
We went around to the Mapleleaf Hotel. The clerk said, “Good evening, Mrs. Cool,” and looked at me suspiciously.
Bertha beamed at him and said, “My son — from military academy.”
The clerk said, “Oh.”
We went up to Bertha Cool’s room and sat around for about fifteen minutes, then the telegram which Bertha Cool had sent herself was delivered. We went down to talk with the night clerk. “Very bad news,” Bertha Cool said. “I have to take an early-morning plane east. I’ll have to get my trunk sent up to my room and pack.”
The clerk said, “The porter isn’t on duty now, but I think we can get it up for you.”
I said, “I can get it into the elevator if you can find a hand truck.”
“There’s one down in the basement,” he said.
Bertha Cool said, “I’ll have to do some packing and unpacking. I’ll have to shift baggage around. I want to take just one trunk and one suitcase. Donald, do you suppose you could get that trunk up for me?”
“Sure,” I said.
The clerk obligingly gave us a key to the basement. We went down and snooped around. Within two minutes we found a trunk with the initials F.D. on it, and a tar: Property of Florence Danzer, Room 602.
We opened Bertha Cool’s trunk and between us managed to lift FIo’s trunk into place. There was quite a bit of room on the sides, and we wadded that with old clothes and newspapers. Then I closed and strapped Bertha’s trunk, got it on a hand truck, and got it to the elevator. Thirty minutes later, a taxicab had the trunk strapped on to a trunk rack, and we were headed for the Union Depot. We switched at the Union Depot just so we wouldn’t leave a back trail, and went to Bertha’s apartment.