Bertha Cool took a notebook from her pocket and jotted down the mileage on the agency car when I arrived at her apartment.
“Just to make it businesslike, Donald, my love,” she said, “and to keep temptation out of your way.”
“Do you want me to leave the bus standing on the street?” I asked.
“No, lover, you can put it in a garage. Bertha will make allowances for that. Bertha is always just with you, Donald, but don’t think you can take that switchboard baby and do any joyriding with the agency car, precious, because you can’t get away with it.”
“How about keeping this bus in the garage where Gell kept his?”
“How far is that from the office?”
“About six blocks.”
“Too far, lover. Find someplace that’s closer.”
“Looking around will run up the odometer,” I said.
She turned to me. “Listen, Donald, I don’t know what you’re up to, and I don’t give a damn, but you’ll have exactly five miles leeway. After that, every mile that’s on the odometer costs you ten cents, and every week Bertha’s going to have a mechanic look at the odometer connections. If they’ve been disconnected, you lose your job, lover. Now get the hell out of here. Bertha has a lot of things to figure out.”
I checked on the odometer reading, and made time to the garage where Gell kept his car. I drove in and said to the parking attendant, “At least an hour—probably all night.”
He gave me a ticket. I slipped it in my pocket and walked out nonchalantly. Five minutes later, after he’d had a chance to park the car, I came back on foot. He was sitting in a customer’s car with the radio blaring away full tilt. I waved the ticket at him, said, “Going to get some things out of the glove compartment,” and walked toward the back part of the garage.
It took me three or four minutes to locate Gell’s car. The attendant hadn’t paid any attention to where I was going. He was still up in front playing the radio.
I went through the glove compartment of the Gell car. I found a compact, a pair of woman’s pigskin driving gloves, some slip-on dark glasses, and a couple of dozen oblongs of perforated silk. That silk puzzled me. They were black oblongs, about eight inches long by four inches wide, and perforated with two rows of “windows.” I noticed they weren’t all perforated the same.
It was too much junk to carry around in my pocket, so I crossed over and put the whole schmear in the glove compartment of the agency automobile. Then I went back and did some more investigating on the Gell car. There were still bits of mud imbedded in the nonskid marks on the tops of the tires. I figured the bus hadn’t been used since the rain of the night before. It had been raining when Cunner had put it in the garage. When the attendant had parked it, the mud and clay in the tire were still wet. It had dried out during the day. Any driving would have caused the dirt to drop off onto the road.
I couldn’t afford to use the agency car at ten cents a mile. I walked out and took a streetcar, giving the garage attendant the high sign on the way out.
It was around eleven when I took stock of the situation at the tradesmen’s entrance of the Orange Cove Apartments. The door was locked, but the lock was made so the key of any tenant would fit it, and it didn’t take much exploring to find a key that would do the work.
I walked into the back hallway. It was stuffy and smelly. Transoms were open for ventilation. I could hear a man snoring regularly. From behind another transom, I heard a giggle and a girl’s voice saying, “Don’t do that.” I didn’t pay any attention to the sounds, but found the back stairs and tiptoed up. I knew that 208 would be near the end of the corridor, but didn’t know whether it would be the back end or the front end.
It was the back end. The door was locked. It wasn’t much of a lock, but a lock just the same. I moved quietly out to the service porch to take a look around and saw a window that I figured would be over the sink in the kitchenette. It was a half window just like the one in the apartment I’d looked at—the one that the sun was supposed to come “pouring through in the morning.”
I slipped off my shoes and tied the laces together. I hung them around my neck, tested a garbage pail to make certain it was strong enough, and climbed up. I raised the sash and slid my legs through.
I groped for the kitchen sink with my stockinged feet, found it, squeezed in through the opening, and did a turn when I was halfway through the window so that I didn’t break my back. I let myself down on the floor of the apartment, put on my shoes, and walked on into the other room. I had a pocket flashlight and switched it on.
It was a crummy joint, just about like the one I’d looked at downstairs. The place was ancient, and needed to be done over. The wallpaper was grimy. The carpet was thin and faded. The upholstery on the chairs was shiny with age. The furniture had been given a new coat of varnish. It hadn’t done a hell of a lot of good.
A whiskey bottle and two empty glasses were on the table in the combined sitting and bedroom. The place stunk with the smell of a cold cigar. I located the half-smoked butt on one of the trays. Another held two cigarettes which had been ground out after less than an inch had been smoked. There were also half a dozen cigarette stubs. I turned them over carefully with my finger, looking for lipstick. I couldn’t find any.
The whiskey glasses were sticky. Two glasses of water for chasers hadn’t been touched. I tried to figure that. Two men had gone up to that apartment just before Cunner had left. Two visitors and Cunner should have meant three glasses. There were only two. Cunner, then, hadn’t bought these two cops a drink. The glasses were left over from the visit of the lone speed cop.
I scouted around looking for a telephone. I found it, and, figuring the number would be unlisted, took my notebook from my pocket, pulled out a pencil, and had just finished jotting down the number when the light switch clicked, and a man’s voice said, “I thought so.”
I whirled around.
Two men stood in the doorway. They’d let themselves in so quietly I hadn’t heard the sound of the key in the lock. One of the men still had his finger on the light switch. The other was holding a very businesslike gun.
“Oh, hello,” I said casually.
The shorter man kicked the door shut. “Stick ’em up,” he said.
I put the pencil back in my pocket, closed my notebook, and dropped it in my inside coat pocket.
The man came forward, jabbing the gun at me with nervous gestures. “I said, ‘Stick ’em up,’ ” he ordered.
The big man who was standing by the light switch watched me with narrowed eyes. “Take it easy, Alfred,” he said. “We don’t want any shooting. He isn’t going to try to pull a gun now.”
“The hell he isn’t,” Alfred said. “You can’t tell about these little bastards. They’re nervous and they have more guts than the big guys.”
I said quietly, “Why would I want to pull a gun?” and walked toward the door.
“Nuts,” the guy with the gun said.
The big man moved slowly around to meet me, his arms swinging loosely from his shoulders like a prizefighter walking toward the center of the ring, ready to lash out with either hand. He was in the early forties and was over six feet tall. He wore a neatly pressed, pearl gray suit, tan shoes, a striped silk shirt, and a tie of gray with fine red stripes running down it.
I heard motion behind me. The big man said, “Not with the gun, Al.”
I whirled and flung up my arm to protect my head against the gun barrel. The big man’s fist, crashing through under my upraised arm, caught me on the point of the jaw. I felt my heels dragging along the floor as I jerked backward, crashed into a chair, and lost interest in everything.
I came to as the big man was picking me up. He was keeping up a running fire of conversation. I was too groggy to understand all the words. They flowed through my consciousness in a steady stream of sound—sound that was, for the most part, without significance. “—unconscious—can’t talk—got to find out—how the hell he knew—can’t go through with this thing unless we know what we’re up against—playing with dynamite and haven’t sense enough to know—he’s coming around now. How do you feel, buddy?”
I wiggled my jaw to make certain that it wasn’t broken. The big man said, “Right down here in this chair,” and slammed me down in the overstuffed chair. He jerked my hands up, and Al held them by the wrists. The big man went through my pockets, pulling out everything I had, going over each article carefully before he put it back. Then he said, “Let him go, Al. He hasn’t a gun. He’s harmless as a fly.”
Alfred let go my wrists. The big man stepped back and looked at me appraisingly. Alfred said suddenly, “Someone coming, Ralph.”
The big man, moving with alacrity, stepped toward the light switch. “You hold him, Al,” he said, and clicked out the lights.
Alfred’s fingers gripped the collar of my coat.
I could hear boards creaking rhythmically as someone walked steadily down the corridor. There was no sound of footfalls, just the creaking of boards as though a heavy safe was being rolled along on rubber-tired wheels.
I knew the answer even before I heard the surreptitious turning of the doorknob. I started to say something, then decided we might as well make the party complete.
The door opened and closed. I could hear the rustle of motion, the sound of heavy breathing. The light switch clicked on. Bertha Cool stood just inside the doorway, blinking her eyes to accustom them to the light. I was hoping she’d have a gun in her hand, but she didn’t. Apparently, she was taken completely by surprise, but nothing in her face showed it. She said, “Hello, everybody,” and walked calmly over to the davenport and sat down.
The creaky davenport groaned in protest. I thought the legs were going to give way. It managed to stand the strain, although the high-pitched ping-g-g-g from the depths of the cushions indicated that a spring had given up the ghost.
Bertha Cool opened the bag she was carrying in her hand. I noticed automatically that the diamonds were all gone from her fingers—evidently Bertha was willing to take chances with her body, but not with her diamonds.
Alfred yelled, “Look out, she has a gun in that bag!” The big man, peering over her shoulders, ready to grab her arm if necessary, relaxed as Bertha Cool took out a cigarette case, extracted a cigarette, and said, “How about a light, good-looking?”
He laughed then, snapped a match into flame, leaned forward, and gave Bertha Cool a light.
“Well,” she said. “We all seem to be here.” She looked across at me, and her eyes grew hard. “I didn’t think it of you, Donald,” she said.
I didn’t say anything. The big man said, “Don’t blame him. We’re holding him here against his will.”
Bertha said, “He should be home in bed.”
The tall man said, “You’ll pardon me if we go through your purse. We want to find who you are and what you’re doing.”
“I’m Bertha Cool,” she said, “head of the B. Cool Detective Agency.”
“Oh, you’re the one this guy’s working for,” the man said, indicating me with a jerk of the head.
“He was,” Bertha Cool said. “He’s fired now.”
“I’ll just take a look anyway,” the man told her, and took Bertha Cool’s purse from her unresisting fingers. Alfred watched him anxiously while he went through everything in the purse. When he was finished, he handed it back to her and looked significantly at Alfred. Then he turned to me and said, “How long were you here before we showed up?”
“About a minute,” I said.
“What did you find?”
“You searched me,” I told him.
The big man said, “You watch them, Al. Don’t let them talk, and don’t let them make any moves. Be careful they don’t make any jumps toward the telephone. I’m going to frisk the place.”
He made a methodical search, going through every nook and corner of the apartment. I sat silent. Bertha Cool smoked calmly. As nearly as I could judge, the big man found nothing. When he had finished, he said, “All right, Al, we scram.”
“How about these two?” Alfred asked.
“We leave them here.—Listen, you two, we’re going to give you a break. We’re going to leave you here. We’re not going to get rough about it, but if you try to leave within the next ten minutes, you’re going to run into a lot of hard luck. Do you understand?”
Bertha Cool said, “Nuts.”
Alfred said, “The little guy knows something. He knows something he held out on the agency. That’s what she meant by saying he was fired. How the hell did he know about this joint in the first place?”
The big man crossed over to stand in front of me. He raised his left hand to the back of his head, scratched his scalp, and frowned down at me. “Damned if I don’t believe Al is right,” he said.
I said nothing.
Suddenly he reached down, grabbed the knot of my necktie, jerked me to my feet, and said, “How about it, runt?”
I made a swing for his jaw, but he tightened his hand on my necktie, and choked off my wind. I kicked at him, and he slammed the heel of his hand into my face, jerking my head back until I thought it was going to break my neck.
Bertha Cool, watching us with calm impassivity, blew smoke through her wide nostrils, and said to the big man, “I wouldn’t do that if I were you. He’s poison.”
The big man let go of my tie and I stumbled backwards, felt the chair behind me, and sat down. He said, “The goddamn little runt. He kicked my shin.” He swung his left hand and then his right against my jaw in swift slaps. I came up out of the chair swinging with everything I had. Behind me I sensed motion from Alfred. Bertha Cool said, “Look out, lover.” I jerked my head to one side to see the gun barrel glittering over my head. I tried to duck—and all the lights went out. It felt as though the roof of the building had caved in on my head.
It seemed like hours later a white-hot gimlet was boring into my brain. I tried to get away from it and couldn’t. Then gradually my eyes focused on the incandescent bulb of an electric light which was making torture for my wounded head. I managed to move my head so the light wasn’t glaring into my eyes, made tasting noises with my mouth, and tried to get to my feet. My knees buckled, and I went down. I tried to twist my head around to see where I was. The motion nauseated me. I heard Bertha Cool’s voice seeming to come from a long ways off saying, “It’s all right, lover. They’re gone.” Her hands slid under my shoulders.
I made another try, and this time, with a lift from Bertha, got into the chair. I felt the back of my head. There was blood on my hand. Bertha Cool took a deep drag of cigarette smoke, exhaled through her distended nostrils, and asked, smokily, “Can you listen to talk, Donald?”
“I guess so,” I said wearily.
She said, “I thought better of you, Donald. Bertha wanted to cut herself a piece of cake, and you had to jump in and try to scrape off the frosting.”
“How long ago did they leave?” I asked.
“Three or four minutes,” she said. “You weren’t unconscious long, lover.”
“We’ve got to get out of here,” I told her. “Don’t you see? They’ll notify the cops.”
“Why the cops?” she asked.
“Because,” I said, “they want a fall guy for that murder.”
It hurt me to talk. It hurt me to think. My head was throbbing, but I knew what had to be done. Bertha Cool took another drag at her cigarette and said, “You may be right, Donald. There’s nothing left for us here. Come on, lover.”
I lurched to my feet, looked around, and found my hat. When I tried to put it on my head, it irritated my scalp wound. So I crumpled it and held it under my arm.
Bertha Cool was big, but her muscles were big enough and powerful enough to move her body easily. She got up from the davenport as smoothly as though she’d been a slim-waisted dancer. “All right, lover,” she said, “we’ll talk it over outside.”
“Better take the back stairs,” I suggested.
“No, Donald,” she said. “The back stairs look furtive. Come right down the front stairs with Bertha. Better switch out the lights, Donald. Wipe things off with your handkerchief—the doorknob, and the whiskey bottle if you’ve touched that. I wouldn’t leave fingerprints if I were you.”
I switched out the lights. We walked together down the corridor. A party was going on somewhere in the front of the house with women laughing in that shrill-voiced, uncontrollable hysteria which comes from too much liquor.
Bertha Cool moved on toward the open air, majestically as a big liner plowing out toward the sea. When we reached the sidewalk, she turned to the left, tucked her arm through mine, and said, “So you chiseled on me, you little bastard.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“You know what I mean, Donald. You knew Bertha was trying to cut herself a piece of cake. You thought you’d get in on the ground floor and sell Bertha out.”
“Bunk,” I said. “I knew they were going to try and frame the murder on Ruth Marr, and I intended to stop them.”
She missed a step while she thought that over, then she laughed, and said, “Donald, lover, you’re just damn fool enough to do that very thing. I believe you’re telling the truth.”
“Of course, I’m telling the truth,” I said. “What the hell did you think I went there for?”
She gave me a sidelong glance, and said, “Let’s turn down to this other boulevard, Donald, darling. You may be able to get me a taxi.—You didn’t come in the agency car?”
“Not at ten cents a mile,” I said. “I could walk cheaper than that.”
She chuckled, and then said abruptly, “Donald, you were messing around that Gell car, weren’t you?”
“I looked it over,” I said.
“What did you find?”
“Not much of anything. Some gloves and some pieces of silk.”
“Pieces of silk, Donald?”
“Yes.”
“What kind of silk, lover?”
“Black silk oblongs with parallel rows of perforations in them.”
“All the same?” she asked.
“No. They weren’t all the same. I didn’t think they were all different either, probably three or four different patterns, and—”
I could feel her fingers grip my arm until it seemed as though she was crushing the flesh against the bone. “Where are they now, Donald? What did you do with them?”
“I put them in a safe place,” I said.
She took a deep breath. “Donald, you little bastard, are you trying to hold out on me?”
“I want to know where I stand,” I said.
She said, “Donald, darling, you don’t have to ask that. You know where you stand with Bertha. Bertha’s for you. Bertha’s always been for you. She picked you up when you were down and out, Donald, and gave you a job. You don’t know much about the business, but Bertha is teaching it to you.”
“I’ll say you are!” I said bitterly. “What was this about being fired?”
“That was because I thought you’d been trying to chisel on me, lover. It’s all right now. Where are those pieces of silk?”
“Look here,” I said. “Let’s be fair about this. They’re going to try and pin that kill on Ruth Marr. I know they are. I’m going to protect her.”
“Has she any money, Donald?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“If she doesn’t employ the agency to protect her interests, lover, you can’t do anything except in your spare time.”
“I’m not talking about time,” I said. “I’m just warning you that I’m going to protect her.”
“Do anything you want to, lover—on your own time.”
“All right,” I said. “I just want that understood. There’s not going to be any argument about that.”
“Not if you don’t do it on agency time, lover.”
“All right,” I said. “The pieces of silk are in the glove compartment of the agency car.”
Bertha Cool stepped in under a streetlight and touched my scalp with tender fingers. “Poor boy,” she said. “He’s always getting beaten up. That’s a nasty wound. You’d better come up to the apartment with me, Donald, and let me wash it out with antiseptic.—I think this is a taxi coming, lover. Hold up your arm and flag him down.”