Bertha Cool answered my knock on the door of her apartment.
She was clad in heavy silk pajamas which showed lots of her anatomy, both by clinging to the contours as well as through semitransparency. Seen in that garb, she didn’t look out of proportion, only big, massive, and powerful. She didn’t bulge and sag with soft fat, but was a huge power plant, immune to such human things as worry, fatigue, or despondency.
Her breath smelled of whiskey, but her eyes were cold, clear, and hard.
“My God, what’s happened to you!” she said. “Well, come on in. Don’t stand there gawking.”
I came in. She slammed the door and locked it, stood entirely without self-consciousness, looking me over, from the cut on the top of my head to the dust on my feet.
“My God, Donald,” she said, “don’t you know better than to come here? Of all the asinine things you’ve ever done, this takes the cake.”
“They’re not looking for me anymore,” I said.
“Don’t kid yourself they aren’t. That’s a way they have for trapping suckers. They pretend to relax their vigilance and—”
“They think I’m dead,” I said.
She said, “Oh,” walked across to the chair in front of the smoking stand, picked up the glass of whiskey and soda, and said, “Sit down.”
I went over to a chair and dropped.
She said, “I suppose you could use a jolt of whiskey?”
I said, “I suppose I could.”
She tossed off the whiskey and soda in her glass, and splashed straight Scotch into the tumbler. She got up from the chair as easily as though she’d only weighed a hundred and ten pounds and carried the glass across to me. “Drink as much as you need,” she said. “Don’t get drunk.—There aren’t any germs on the glass.—If there are, the whiskey will kill ’em.”
I drank about half of the glass of whiskey before I felt a choking sensation in my throat, and handed the balance back to her. I pulled out a bloody handkerchief and coughed into it.
She looked at the whiskey in the tumbler as though debating whether to dilute it with soda, then tossed if off neat, and walked back to her chair. She said, “Take your time, Donald. Wait until the whiskey takes effect. Don’t hurry. Tell Bertha all about it.”
After a while, I said, “Ralph Cerfitone is the guy who’s behind the thing. Judge Carter Longan is laying for him. He’ll play ball with us if we want to bring things to a showdown.”
“We don’t want to bring things to a showdown,” she said. “Bertha wants to cut herself a slice of cake.”
I closed my eyes and didn’t argue about it. The whiskey was warming up my gullet, sending warm life chasing the coldness of collapse out of my veins.
“Where have you been, Donald?” she asked.
“Taken for a ride,” I said.
She thought that over for a while, then asked casually, “They got you, I suppose, when you called for that letter?”
I nodded.
“It was a damn fool thing to do,” she said. “Elsie should have known better than to have told you over the telephone. The line was tapped.”
“How else could she have told me?” I asked.
“She could have been a little more subtle about it.”
“Well, that’s water under the bridge now.”
Bertha heaved a sigh, elevated her thick, powerful legs to an ottoman, crossed her ankles, looked at the half-empty whiskey bottle as though debating whether to have another drink, and then decided on a cigarette instead. “Want a cigarette, Donald?” she asked.
“Not now,” I said.
“Well,” she observed, “they didn’t mark your face up much. Now you’re getting some color back, you don’t look so bad. I suppose your body is sore. You move as though it was.”
“It is.”
She looked me over again, and shook her head dubiously. “You’re a little runt to be out on the firing line, Donald, but you do have guts and intelligence. Elsie tells me you’ve located the blonde.”
I nodded.
“Who is it?”
“Mrs. Premmer,” I said.
Bertha Cool sat upright, staring at me with cold, steady eyes. Then she began to curse under her breath, a low monotone of heartfelt profanity.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“Don’t pay any attention to me, Donald. I’m cussing me, not you. Of all the damn stupidity.—Christ, I should have known—certainly let myself get pushed into a corner easy.—Jesus, Donald, I must be getting old or soft or something.—Tell me, Donald does he know?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“No,” she said, after a moment’s thoughtful silence, “he wouldn’t. That’s the only way he could have put the act across with me. If he’d known, I’d have smelled that knowledge. It was his indignant sincerity that sent me hunting for cover. How did you find out, lover?”
“It’s a long story.”
“Tell it to me.”
“I’d rather not.”
“You have to, Donald.”
I said, “I went to see Judge Longan.”
“He didn’t tell you, did he?”
“No.”
“Give you any clue?”
“Not directly. He was gunning for Cerfitone.”
“What does he know about Cerfitone?”
“Not enough. He knows generally what’s going on in the Civil Service. He’s interested. I don’t think he has any proof—just suspicions. He didn’t talk. He listened.”
“Yes,” she said musingly, “he would.”
“I have a hunch he’s been investigating the thing from another angle. This tied in with something else he knows. He was a lot more interested than he would have been if the idea had been thrown at him out of a clear sky.”
Bertha said, “We’re not in business for our health, Donald. We’re not going to hand Judge Longan anything on a silver platter.”
“We may not be in business for our health,” I said bitterly, “but we’ve got to watch our step if we want to keep our health.”
She wagged her head slowly from side to side and said, “You shouldn’t have gone after that letter—not after the way Elsie spilled the beans over the telephone.”
I kept silent, feeling the whiskey doing its stuff. The warmth of the apartment felt good after the cold night air.
“How about that girl, Donald?” she asked abruptly.
“What girl?” I asked.
She said, “Don’t try to hand Bertha a line, Donald. Kick through and tell her about the girl.”
“You mean the blonde?”
“Christ, no. I mean Ruth Marr. Snap out of it, Donald, and give Bertha the lowdown.”
“I don’t know as there is any. She hasn’t been picked up by the police, has she?”
“You know she hasn’t.”
“She’s a good kid,” I defended.
“She was laying up with Cunner, Donald. Epsworth, the night clerk, had caught her at it. She didn’t know that he knew.”
“Listen,” I said hotly, “she’s a good kid. She came from the country. She’d been brought up in an environment where she knew little about life and nothing about sex. She came to the city, and they took her.”
Bertha Cool heaved a sigh which might as well have been a yawn, and said, “Uh huh. I’ve heard that story before.”
“This time it happens to be true.”
“Nuts,” she said. “It’s never true. A girl sometimes gets seduced before she knows what it’s all about. By the time the first man gets done with her, she knows.—I don’t think Cunner was the first man, not by a damn sight.”
“If you are interested in statistics,” I said weakly, “he was the fourth.”
“How old is she?”
“Twenty-three or four.”
“The fourth,” Bertha said. “Humph!”
I opened my eyes and said irritably, “For Christ’s sake, leave her out of this.”
“She’s in,” Bertha said.
“Well, you and I’ll leave her out.”
“Where are you keeping her, Donald?”
“I’m not keeping her,” I said.
“Don’t lie to Bertha, Donald, because Bertha has ways of finding things out.”
“Go ahead and find out then,” I said, “and quit asking me questions.”
“What time is it, Donald?”
“I don’t know. My wristwatch is broken.”
She said, “My watch is in the bathroom,” seemed to debate with herself whether she should go and get it, noticed the telephone. She picked it up, called time information, said, “Thank you,” hung up, and said to me, “It’s twelve minutes and forty seconds past eleven.”
I nodded wearily. Time didn’t mean a great deal to me.
“What did you come here for, Donald?”
I said, “We’ve got to get a showdown on this thing before morning. We have enough to go on now. We can’t sit back and let them push us around.”
She studied me thoughtfully. “Feel up to it, Donald?”
“I will in a minute.”
“Want another drink of whiskey?”
“No.”
She said, “I guess we have to call on the Premmers.”
I said, “Naturally. What did you think I came here for?”
She said, “Don’t be sarcastic, lover. You’ve dealt me a lot of low cards.—They’ll find out you’ve been here.”
“Who will?”
“The ring that’s running this thing. This afternoon, you were the only one that had the information. They could bump you off and take a chance on getting by. Now that you’ve found out about Mrs. Premmer and have come here, they’ll have to kill us both if they want to bottle up the information.”
I was too tired to even nod my head. I let it sink back against the cushions of the chair.
She said, musingly, “I’ll take a hell of a lot more killing than you will, Donald.”
“I’m still here,” I said indignantly.
“Yes,” she said thoughtfully, “and that’s all.”
After a minute, I said, “Well, what do you want to do?”
“Donald,” she said, “you have to put on evening clothes.”
“Evening clothes?”
“Yes.”
“You mean a tuxedo?”
“Hell, no. I mean tails, a top hat, white gloves, a gardenia, the whole damned outfit.”
“You’re crazy,” I said.
“No, I’m not crazy. It’ll be eleven-thirty before we can get there. Try to bust in like that and we’d be on our way to the morgue by midnight.—But who the hell ever heard of a detective wandering around in tails?—No, Donald, there’s an outfitter in this block. He’s a friend of mine. He was a client once. That was before he got his divorce. He’s married now, a cute little trick who used to work for him in the front office. He’ll come up, Donald, measure you. They keep open until one-thirty, not so much to send out suits as to get them back. He likes to get them back the same night wherever possible. He’s a canny Scotchman. You’ll like him.—No, you won’t either. You don’t have enough vitality to like anyone who’s continually trying to put you on the defensive.—I’ll call him.”
She picked up the telephone and dialed a number. After a while, she said, “Let me talk with Angus,” then after a few moments, “Angus, this is Bertha Cool. Come up here. I have a job for you.—No, a job.—Yes, up here.—Now.—For Christ’s sake, Angus, don’t try to pull that line with me. When I tell you I have a job for you, I mean I have a job for you. When I say come up here, I mean come up here.—No, I don’t know what time it is, and I don’t give a damn. A few minutes ago, it was twelve minutes and forty seconds past eleven. It’s later than that now, and I don’t give a damn how much later. You can make it up here in three minutes if you hurry. Hurry.”
She hung up the telephone without waiting to hear anything more and without saying goodbye. She opened the drawer in her desk, took out her long cigarette holder, and with some difficulty fitted the moist end of the cigarette into the end of the holder. “Christ,” she said, apropos of nothing, “I get tired of men who want to argue all the time.”
I felt the warmth of the apartment on my skin, the warmth of the whiskey in my veins. The cushions of the chair were soft. I kept my eyes closed, thought I should say something, but couldn’t think of just what I should say. A delicious drowsiness crept over me.
The sound of voices wakened me. They seemed to have been going on for some time. I heard Bertha Cool’s voice break through the languor of fatigue. “—no, he doesn’t have to stand up. Run your tape measure up under his coat.”
I heard a man’s voice grumble something in an undertone, and Bertha Cool say, “Jesus Christ, do I have to hit you with a club every time I want something? You know damn well, Angus, that all I have to do is to give a certain party a hint of what I know, and you’d be on the inside looking out.”
I heard the sound of swift motion, heard the man say something in a whisper, heard Bertha Cool go on, in the same even voice, “God knows I hate to have to do it, but you keep asking for it. You never will be properly polite about things. I have to beat you over the head with a club in order to let any sense in. For Christ’s sake, get those measurements, and then get down and send up the clothes. Don’t tell me you can’t do it because you can. Measure his sleeves. Measure his pants. Measure his neck.—No, we aren’t going to get blood on your white shirt front, and if we do, it’ll launder off. Get busy.”
I tried to wake up enough to at least register a protest to the hands which did things to me, but the whiskey had sent alcoholic fumes into my brain, and I didn’t have enough resistance to cope with them. I was warm and tired—awfully tired.
After a while, the hands quit tugging at me. I had a short period of restful oblivion, and then Bertha Cool was pulling my pants off. “Come on, Donald,” she said. “Snap into it. We haven’t got all night. Here, Angus, get that shirt off.”
They got me up on my feet. The light hurt my eyes. I had a hard time standing still, but gradually I fought off the lassitude so that I could help them. Bertha Cool said, “There you are, lover. You’ll have to button up the pants in front. Bertha will make a nice neat job with the tie. You can carry the hat in your hand if it hurts your head to put it on.”
Angus was a short, stubby man with a cold eye and a bulldog jaw. He was thick of shoulder and chest, heavy of waist, but not fat. His fingers were powerful, stubby, and active. He acted as though he was frightened to death. The grumble had gone out of his voice, and he was almost servile when he said anything to Bertha. For the most part, she didn’t give him an opportunity to say anything. She told him.
They had me dressed after a while and after a fashion. I felt better going down the stairs, and then Bertha summoned a taxicab.
“How’d you get here, Donald?” she asked, as the cab driver held the door open.
“I stole the car they used in taking me for a ride. I think it belonged to the guy whose name I mentioned.”
“You didn’t park it near here?”
“Two or three blocks away,” I said.
She said, “Hell, Donald, that’s bad. We should have moved it.”
“No use now,” I said. “It’s whole hog or nothing.”
I felt the taxi sway as Bertha Cool’s weight pulled the springs far over to one side. “Don’t you worry, lover,” she said reassuringly, the body of the taxicab rocking violently back and forth as she adjusted herself into a comfortable position, “it’ll be the whole hog with Bertha.”
“Where to?” the cab driver asked.
Bertha snapped a street number at him. I presumed she’d looked up Premmer’s address, or else she knew it already. I settled back to another period of restful inactivity.
After a while, I heard Bertha Cool saying tartly, “And don’t look at me like that, my man. Ten cents is plenty for a tip. The way business conditions are now, you’re goddamn lucky to get that. Come on, Donald.”
I’d been left sitting there while Bertha Cool got out and paid off the taxi. I could see that the taxi driver thought I was drunk, which was all right by me.
There was a night clerk on duty in the apartment house. Bertha Cool beamed at him with her best dowager air. She looked very stately and dignified in a light-colored creation that was full of satiny sheen with a transparent lacy effect minimizing the huge expanse of her chest and the powerful muscles of her straight back. “Tell Mrs. Premmer that we’ve just dropped in from the opera,” she said, “and must see her at once on a matter of the greatest importance. Tell her it’s Bertha calling.” She flashed the diamonds at him and smiled.
There was a doo-dad on the telephone which enabled the clerk to talk into the mouthpiece without his conversation being audible to the persons who stood at the desk. For a moment, he seemed to have a bit of an argument, but he didn’t ask us any more questions. The full dress put it across just as Bertha had figured it would. He talked and listened, then talked some more, listened and smiled affably at us. “You may go up,” he said. “It’s apartment B on the twelfth floor.”
The elevator boy seemed duly impressed by our correct attire. He shot us up to the twelfth. Bertha Cool took the lead and barged down the corridor toward the mahogany door which had “B” stamped on it in gold leaf.
It was the blonde all right. I knew her the moment she opened the door, even before my eyes came to a sharp focus on her. She was wearing a long, dark formal. Her breasts were beautiful, and the gown barely covered just what the law would require having covered. There was puzzled perplexity in her eyes and in the sudden parting of her lips as she saw Bertha Cool and me standing on the threshold.
Bertha Cool moved forward.
There was nothing ostentatious about it, certainly nothing violent, but it was as irresistible as the progress of a steam roller. Before the firm finality of that approach, the blonde fell back into the room.
Bertha Cool, beaming, held out a diamond-encrusted hand in greeting. She was halfway into the room before the blonde got her breath enough to say, “Won’t—won’t you come in?”
Bertha Cool took the blonde’s hand, and said, “So glad to meet you, Mrs. Premmer,” looked around with a motherly eye, and said, “Sit down over on that chair, Donald. It’s the most comfortable one. Just relax and take it easy.”
Bertha Cool smiled affably at her surprised hostess, and said, “And if you’ll pardon me, Mrs. Premmer, I’ll take the most substantial chair. I like substantial chairs. How about it, Donald? Is this the woman?”
“That’s the woman,” I said, sitting down and relaxing.
Bertha Cool positively beamed effusive cordiality. “I’m Bertha Cool,” she said. “This is Donald.”
The blonde looked at me, her manner hard, suspicious, and poised as a cat looks on an approaching dog from the vantage point of a fence post. “I’ve seen you before somewhere,” she said.
Bertha Cool said, “Tell her, Donald.”
“I’m a detective,” I said. “I followed you when you went out with Cunner.—You knew him as Gell. I’m Donald Lam.”
Mrs. Premmer stiffened and said, “I certainly don’t know to what you are referring. If this is some form of blackmail, you may as well understand now as later that you’re wasting your effort. I have no secrets from my husband. I have his perfect confidence. Will you please state the nature of your errand?”
I said, somewhat wearily, “Oh, don’t try the high-and-mighty act. There are too many people who can identify you, the night clerk at the Mountain Crest for one, the garage man for the other.”
I was dog tired. I knew I’d made a mistake as soon as I mentioned that about the garage man. That’s why Cunner had never taken her into the garage with him, but had picked up the car and met her out on the road to the apartment. I saw hard triumph in her eyes.
“For your information,” she said, “I am quite certain that the night clerk at the Mountain Crest Apartments will say that he has never seen me before, because I have no knowledge of having seen him, and, as far as any garage men are concerned, I don’t know what you’re talking about. My husband has already been annoyed by a blackmailing detective agency. While, of course, I have no way of knowing, I presume that you represent the same agency. I am going to ask you to terminate this visit at once. Otherwise, I shall call the police.”
“Listen,” I said, “you went out to the Yucca Club with Cunner. You sat there at the bar while you drank some cocktails, and then—”
Mrs. Premmer spun toward the telephone. I had a chance to study the smooth lines of her figure flowing gracefully underneath the thin cloth of the dress. She picked up the telephone and said icily, “Will you leave, or shall I call the police? You have just ten seconds to decide.”
Bertha Cool said amiably, “Now just sit right back and relax, Donald. Don’t strain yourself with a lot of unnecessary effort. You just leave this bitch to me.”
Mrs. Premmer almost dropped the telephone. “What did you say?” she asked. “What was that word?”
“Bitch,” Bertha Cool said, “b-i-t-c-h, dearie. It means slut. In this particular case, a two-timing tart who was acting as go-between in the sale of Civil Service examination questions. Now sit down, dearie, and take a load off your feet before Bertha has to help you to a chair.”
I could see the woman’s face losing color.
“My husband will be here soon. He’ll put you in your place.”
“No husband ever has so far,” Bertha Cool remarked affably. “I don’t know how well you thought you were covering your tracks, but Donald here got a good look at you. I suppose you’re standing in with the night clerk at the apartment, but don’t forget the girl at the telephone desk, dearie. She has no reason to lie awake nights worrying about any trouble you’re going to get into.”
“That woman,” Mrs. Premmer said. “I think I know now what you have reference to. I read about it in the newspaper. She was, I believe, the—mistress of the man who was killed. But then, I suppose all telephone girls are promiscuous, aren’t they?”
“Well, why not?” Bertha Cool asked affably. “The fact that she was laying up with Gell doesn’t let you out. I don’t suppose it’s ever occurred to you that you’ve left fingerprints all over the apartment and over the Gell car—Jesus Christ, if I have to spell it out for you, your fingerprints are all over the perforated silk examination masks that you were dishing out to the various firemen and speed cops who wanted to take the examinations. That’s better, dearie. Put that phone down and take a load off your feet. You and Bertha are going to talk business.”
Mrs. Premmer moved her hand away from the telephone as though her fingers were numb. She stared uncertainly at Bertha Cool for a moment, then sat down across from me, but her eyes didn’t even flicker in my direction. They stared in steady fascination at Bertha.
“What—” she started to asked, and then as she realized how her voice sounded, backed up and tried again, “What do you want?”
Bertha Cool said, “I think, dearie, that if you’d just write it all out in your own handwriting and sign it, we might be able to keep you out of it—that is, publicly.”
“You’re crazy.”
Bertha said, “It’s past midnight, and I’ve got a lot of work to do tonight. You get the hell over to that desk and write out a confession. Don’t go into a lot of unnecessary details, but give me the dope on how the cash was handled, what your cut was, how much Cerfitone got, and all the dope on the payoff.”
“Why, I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”
Bertha looked at her and said, in a tone of genuine boredom, “Christ, I hope I don’t have to get rough with you. You’ve got a cute little figure, but you’d mess easy.”
Mrs. Premmer tried a flash of defiance. “If I understand the situation correctly,” she said, “this is Mr. Donald Lam who is being sought by the police. They have an excellent murder case against him.”
“That’s another thing we’ve got to figure on,” Bertha Cool said. “That murder rap keeps Donald out of circulation, and I need him in my business. Christ, I can’t afford to pay a man five dollars a day wages and a monthly guarantee in order to have him dodging cops. There’s no percentage in that.—You shouldn’t have brought that up, dearie. It makes me sore as hell every time I think about it.”
“Your anger,” Mrs. Premmer said acidly, “your foul talk, and your very evident vulgarity don’t alter the situation in the slightest. Mr. Lam is a fugitive from justice. I have only to call the police to have them take the matter in hand.”
“That’s right, dearie,” Bertha Cool said, taking her cigarette holder and a cigarette from her purse. “Where the hell do you keep your matches? I find I didn’t bring mine.—Never mind. Donald, lover, she’ll get me one.”
Bertha Cool calmly fitted her cigarette into the holder. After a second or two, Mrs. Premmer walked over to a smoking-table, brought a box of matches over, and Bertha held up the end of the cigarette showing that she expected a light.
Mrs. Premmer struck a match and lit the cigarette. Her hand showed only a slight tremor. She seemed pleased with herself as she went back and sat down.
Bertha said, “It will simplify matters if you’ll tell us just how it all started, Mrs. Premmer.”
The blonde said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I will admit that I know a Mr. Gell. Apparently, this was a name taken by a Mr. Cunner for the purpose of leading a double life. I know nothing whatever about that. I only knew him slightly.”
Bertha Cool yawned.
Mrs. Premmer said defiantly, “And I’m sticking by that story.”
Bertha Cool looked across at me. “Do you know, Donald, I think we’re wasting time trying to give this bitch a break. We could do a lot better by going ahead with the thing the way I originally outlined it to you. She’s a natural for the murder of Gell.
“You know as well as I do that girl at the telephone desk will swear that the mysterious party who drove up in the automobile was in reality a woman dressed in a man’s clothes. This woman knew the ropes. She knew that Gell was in apartment six hundred, went up to the apartment, opened the door and shot him without wasting any time in preliminaries or giving him any opportunity to square the deal with her.
“That’s the act of a jealous woman. Now, this girl, Ruth Marr, will testify that there was something familiar about this mysterious caller. She’ll think it over and testify that the voice, the carriage, the gestures were those of Mrs. Premmer. Christ, Donald, it’s a natural. We don’t even need to dress it up. She was jealous because Cunner was two-timing her. The telephone girl had beat her time, and she was furious.—Come on, lover, we’re wasting time here. We’ll go talk with that telephone girl, and then we’ll call in the police.”
Mrs. Premmer half screamed, “You’re a liar! The idea of that little chippy beating my time! She’s a poor country amateur, too awkward and too easy to compete with anyone—and don’t try to bluff me with that murder talk. I have a perfectly good alibi for the time the murder was committed.”
Bertha Cool smiled sweetly at her. “An alibi about which you’d like to tell your husband, dearie?”
Mrs. Premmer caught her breath.
Bertha Cool took a deep drag at her cigarette, and said, “I thought so. What time’s your husband due home, dearie?”
I could see that the question hit Mrs. Premmer squarely amidships.
Bertha Cool went on, “It might be advisable to have our little conversation concluded before he comes in.—Don’t you think so?”
“He’s out at lodge. He may come in at any time,” Mrs. Premmer said breathlessly.
“I see,” Bertha Cool observed calmly. “When he comes in, do you want to explain me to him, or would you prefer that I make the explanation?”
“What do you want?” Mrs. Premmer asked.
“I want to know what happened. I want to know all that happened,” Bertha Cool said. “After you’ve told me, I’ll tell you how much to write down.”
Mrs. Premmer hesitated. Bertha Cool went on casually, “Your husband knows me and knows what I’m working on. I made the mistake of accusing him of peddling the examination questions.—You see, Donald had found out that the people who called said they came from Premmer. We naturally supposed that it was Mr. Premmer. It didn’t occur to us that it would be Mrs. Premmer until we found out you were Gell’s mistress.”
Mrs. Premmer glanced hastily at her wristwatch and reached a sudden determination. “I’ll tell you everything,” she said, “if you promise to protect me.”
“Nuts,” Bertha Cool said. “You’re not in a position to ask for any promises, and I don’t intend to make any.”
“Then I won’t talk.”
“Suit yourself, dearie,” Bertha Cool said. “We’ll wait for Mr. Premmer to come in, won’t we, Donald?—It shouldn’t be long now.”
Mrs. Premmer said desperately, “My God, have you no mercy, no respect for my husband’s political position, for his career? Don’t you care anything for our domestic happiness?”
Bertha Cool smiled affably. “Not a damn bit, dearie,” she said.
“What do you intend to do with—with what I might tell you?”
Bertha Cool’s smile was positively benevolent. “Cut myself a piece of cake,” she said.
Mrs. Premmer averted her eyes, stared hard at the floor. After a moment, she said, “Have you any objection to my putting through a telephone call?”
“Not in the least,” Bertha said casually. “It takes up time, that’s all. If you want to have it over with before your husband comes, you’d better get started. You’re not going to spar for time now and then hurry me later. I’m very slow and deliberate when it comes to getting facts, particularly facts I want in writing and—”
“Oh, all right,” Mrs. Premmer said desperately. “My God, you know it all already, and I suppose that little tart at the telephone desk wouldn’t want anything better than to get me involved in a scandal or even mixed up in a murder.”
“You’re probably right at that,” Bertha Cool said conversationally. “You shouldn’t let yourself come in competition with her type.”
“I wasn’t competing with her in the least,” Mrs. Premmer declared.
“Horsefeathers,” Bertha Cool observed, exhaling a cloud of cigarette smoke as she spoke.
Mrs. Premmer glanced helplessly about her. Tears welled into her eyes.
“If you’re going to take time out to cry, dearie,” Bertha Cool advised, “there’s no use in hurrying at all. Your husband will be home, and we’ll make a family party of it.”
Mrs. Premmer snapped back the tears with indignant eyelashes. “All right, you hellion,” she said, “I’ll give it to you fast. I got to playing the races. Then I got in debt. It was made easy for me to borrow money. I didn’t realized how easy at the time or why it was being made easy. Then Ralph Cerfitone started tightening the screws. He wanted me to get information on the Civil Service examinations. He wanted to know what forms of questions were to be used each day when examinations were given. He wanted to know the answers. He wanted information he could sell.
“Cerfitone was working through Cunner. I knew Cunner under the name of Gell. He was the one who loaned me the money. He held up my notes, and—well, by the time I found out where I stood, I was mixed in so deeply I couldn’t stand—publicity.”
“Meaning you’d been chasing around with Gell,” Bertha Cool said.
Mrs. Premmer started to deny it, then changed her mind. “Oh, all right,” she said. “What difference does it make?”
“What introduced discord into the family?” Bertha Cool asked.
Mrs. Premmer said, “Cerfitone found out that Gell was two-timing him. Gell had another apartment and was selling information on the side without splitting with Cerfitone. I don’t know how big a graft it was. Cerfitone himself didn’t find it out until yesterday.”
“And then he killed Gell?” Bertha Cool asked.
“No, he didn’t kill him. He was with me at the time.”
Bertha Cool waved a jeweled hand casually toward the writing desk. “Write it out,” she said, “and sign it.”
“I’m not going to write it out. That puts me entirely in your power. It’s asking too much.”
“All right,” Bertha said, “have it your way.”
She made no move to go, but sat placidly smoking.
“You’d hold that over my head as a club as long as I lived,” Mrs. Premmer went on desperately.
Bertha Cool said, “Of course I will, dearie. What the hell did you think I wanted it for?”
Mrs. Premmer came to her feet, rigid with indignation. “Damn you,” she said bitterly. “I hate you. I could—I could stick a knife into your heart. I could put a bullet into that foul mouth of yours.”
“I suppose you could, dearie,” Bertha Cool observed calmly, “but in the meantime hadn’t you better write that little note? You can make it brief if you want to, but be accurate and concise. Make it very clear. Your husband may come any minute.”
Mrs. Premmer brushed back tears. She walked over to the writing desk, grabbed up a pen, and started writing savagely. Her face was a white mask of hatred.
Bertha Cool sat calmly comfortable, inhaling deep drags of cigarette smoke, exhaling slowly through nostrils which distended with appreciation of the tobacco.
I lost interest in the situation enough to doze off, feeling a warm haze surrounding me. Through the haze, I was dimly conscious of the room, of Bertha Cool’s huge figure sitting in the massive chair, of the sound of Mrs. Premmer’s pen moving rapidly over the paper.
I wakened slightly to attention as Mrs. Premmer crossed over to Bertha Cool and handed her the sheet of paper.
Bertha Cool read it through, then said, “Be a little more specific about your intimacy with Arthur Gell, dearie, and then sign it and date it.”
“I won’t put that on paper,” Mrs. Premmer said. “I’ll die first.”
“Suit yourself, dearie.”
Mrs. Premmer glared at her for several seconds, then strode back to the table and wrote some more on the sheet of paper. She signed it and handed it to Bertha Cool. Bertha Cool read it, blew on it gently to dry the ink, and said, “That’s very nice. I think we can do business with that.”
“Please go,” Mrs. Premmer said. “Harry will be here at any moment.”
Bertha Cool slowly ground out the stub of her cigarette in the ashtray. “How do you feel, Donald?” she asked. “Like going places?”
I shook off the lethargy which had gripped me and got up from the chair. “I’m feeling better,” I said.
Bertha Cool said to Mrs. Premmer, “When we’ve gone, you can ring up Cerfitone if you want to.”
“I don’t want to. He’d kill me.”
“Have it your own way, dearie, and remember you can trust Bertha’s discretion as long as Bertha can trust you. Good night.”
Bertha Cool beamed at me, tucked her hand in the crook of my arm, and let me lead her out through the door into the corridor. The minute we had left, the door banged shut with a slam that threatened to jar the plaster loose. Bertha Cool didn’t even look back. We went down in the elevator. As we left the lobby, a short, broad-shouldered individual with a gray mustache, a florid face, and a military bearing was strutting into the place with great dignity.
Bertha Cool indicated him with a casual jerk of the head. “That’s Premmer,” she said.
“Now what?” I asked.
Bertha Cool beamed at me. “Well,” she said, “here we are, all dressed up and no place to go. I think, Donald, it might be a swell notion for us to have some eats. I think food would do you some good.”
“I could use about three cups of coffee,” I said.
Bertha Cool summoned a taxicab, and gave the address of the most expensive nightclub in the city.