She ordered my dinner with the solicitous care of a mother guarding the health of her favorite offspring. She insisted that I have some hot soup, lots of coffee, a thick tenderloin steak smothered with onions.
The early editions of the morning papers were out, and Bertha, in between bites of double tenderloin steak with lots of French fried potatoes, cream gravy, and an avocado salad, digested the information contained in the news.
“What is it?” I asked, too utterly weary to care very much one way or another.
“They’ve worked up a fine case against you, Donald,” she said. “It’s a humdinger.”
“What do they say?”
“They’ve found a police officer who identifies you absolutely as being the man to whom Ruth Marr handed a gun.”
I suddenly lost interest in my food.
“Now, don’t be sissy like that, Donald. You know it’s just a part of the frame-up. This officer is one of the men whom you saw calling on Gell. In case the police had got you before the mobsters did, they wanted to spike your guns. So it was only natural that this officer should be a witness against you. Then any accusation you could make against him would seem like an attempt to get even.”
“What does he say?” I asked.
“It seems that a friend had told him to call on Gell. He’s a little bit indefinite about that. His story is that Gell had worked out a system for handicapping horses. Anyway, he drove out to see Gell the night of the murder.”
“What,” I asked, “makes you so certain he’s one of the officers I had spotted?”
She gave me a pitying glance and said, “God, Donald, but you’re green to be a detective.—You can’t think anyone who wasn’t already mixed in it up to his neck would come out in the open and make any statement like that, do you?”
“Exactly what does he say?” I asked.
“Well, let’s see,” she said, propping the paper against a water glass while she sawed off a piece of steak and shoved it into her mouth. “Let’s see m’m’m’m. His name is m’m’m’m’m Louis Skadler. He works daytimes—drives a prowl car—heard that Gell was quite an amateur handicapper and liked to be friendly with the officers, was willing to give the boys a tip from time to time. A couple of friends in the department had told him to look Gell up, said Gell had an apartment at the Mountain Crest Apartments at Yucca City. He drove out there, parked his car, and was on the point of going in when he saw a woman—a very attractive young woman—come out of the alley back of the building and run frantically down the street. He thought perhaps he could pick her up and give her a lift. Then he thought she might be running away from something. He started the motor of his car and was about to put in the clutch when he saw her jump into a car that was parked across the street from the apartment house.—Oh yes, he took down the license number of the automobile, just on general principles.—You guessed it, lover. It was the agency car. He said there was some necking in the automobile. The man tried to get the girl out of the automobile. She made him drag her out. The way the officer describes it, she came out legs first and seemed to be enjoying it. Looking back on it, he feels quite certain that when he first saw her, she was carrying something metallic in her hand. He thought at the time it was a handbag, but he remembers now that when she got out of the car and walked back to the alley, she didn’t have anything in her hand.”
Bertha raised her eyes from the paper and grinned at me. “Pretty good story, isn’t it, Donald? It works out nicely. He was a cop. If he’d been certain she had a gun, it would have been up to him to have investigated, but you see he wasn’t certain—just something metallic. And here’s your friend, Epsworth, coming in with some more stuff. He has reason to believe that Ruth Marr didn’t go near the restroom. He remembers that you were hanging around in the lobby quite a bit of the time, and thinks that you went up in the elevator once.”
Bertha pushed the paper aside to laugh heartily although silently. “What a sweet time they’ll have doing a set of back flip-flops when they get word from Ralph Cerfitone to lay off. I wonder what they’ll do about the killing—guess they’ll pay more attention to that visitor.—Oh yes, Donald, your friend, Epsworth, says that the man wore an overcoat with the collar buttoned up around his chin and a hat pulled low, but that his voice sounded like yours and that he was about your build. Epsworth seems rather anxious to pin this on you, don’t you think so, lover?”
I said, “Wait a minute, Bertha. There’s something about that figure I intended to tell you.”
“What figure do you mean, lover?”
“That person who called.”
“Why call him a figure?”
“Because,” I said, “I think it was a woman.”
She stared steadily at me. “You mean that blonde, Donald?”
“Probably,” I said.
“Why didn’t you tell me before, Donald?”
“I thought you knew, the way you were talking. I should have told you. I just couldn’t get going right. My mind hasn’t been hitting more than two cylinders all night.”
“Tell me more about it, Donald. How do you know?”
“Well,” I said, “it’s partially what I saw, but mostly what Ruth Marr, the girl at the telephone desk, saw. You know how it is with a woman. She’ll notice things about a person’s clothes that—”
“I know,” Bertha Cool said. “Skip it, Donald. Give me the lowdown.”
I said, “There was something funny about the bottoms of the pants legs. They were too long and had been turned up on the insides—the way a salesman will demonstrate a ready-made suit to a customer at the first try-on. Now a man would naturally have pants to fit him. Anyone who went to that apartment hotel in a borrowed pair of pants would be pretty apt to be a woman.”
Bertha Cool thought that over while she broke off a piece of bread, sopped up the meat juice in her plate, then nodded thoughtfully. After a while, she said, “This Ruth Marr may be important to us, Donald. We don’t want her running around loose.—Where is she?”
I shook my head. “That’s more than I can tell you.”
Bertha Cool watched me shrewdly. “Finish your steak, lover.”
“I can’t. I’ve lost my appetite.”
“You shouldn’t let little things interfere with your eating. Well, I’ll go powder my nose. When that waiter comes along, tell him I want some mince pie a la mode, a big pot of coffee, and some cream, and tell him I don’t want that watery table cream. I want real whipping cream.”
Bertha Cool scraped back her chair and piloted her big bulk calmly and serenely toward the ladies’ restroom.
I buttonholed the waiter and gave him her order, then I made a dive for the telephone booth and called the apartment hotel. “Let me speak with Mademoiselle Yvonne Delmaire,” I told the night operator.
He cleared his throat. “It’s rather late. She—”
“She’s up,” I said, “waiting for the call. This is Carl Benn of 207 talking.”
“Oh,” he said. “Just a moment, Mr. Benn, and I’ll connect you.”
Ruth Marr’s voice was tearful as she said, “Hello,” without accent. I figured the night clerk would be listening in. I said quickly, “Mademoiselle, I dislike to bother you at this hour, but I knew you were sitting up waiting for the call. I have covered all of the various agencies which might have anything in which you’d be interested, and I am able to report satisfactory progress.”
She took a tumble and said, “Oh, I am, what you call, overjoy. It is excellentment! Perhaps I see you soon, no, yes?”
“I’ll be in in about half an hour,” I said, “but I’ll go right to bed. I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Oh no, no, M’sieur. But please. You do not understand Mademoiselle Yvonne. She wait so anxiously to know the details.”
“The details can wait until morning.”
“Oh, but no! I am not that type, M’sieur. I cannot sleep until I know. It is not late for Mademoiselle Yvonne. Many times she reads all the night and goes to bed only with what you call the chickens.” She giggled at that, and then as I kept silent, said, “Please. Promise me, M’sieur, for a moment, for five minutes, perhaps, when you come, you will look in on me just to tell me the details.”
I figured the more she talked, the more her idea of a foreign accent was going to get full of hayseeds. The night clerk was probably a dumb egg, but even so he might have ideas. Hell, he might even have taken one of those correspondence courses and been able to talk to the waiter in French.
“Okay, Mademoiselle,” I said, “but it may be late,” and hung up the telephone before she had a chance to do anything else with her Midwestern ideas of the accent on an Albanian refugee who had been educated in a Paris convent.
Bertha Cool was back at the table by the time I left the telephone booth. If she’d been powdering her nose, she certainly hadn’t done any loafing. I circled around so that I approached the table from the general direction of the men’s room. Apparently she didn’t see the detour, nor did she look up at me until I drew back my chair. She was smoking, and her eyes, blending into the pale color of the cigarette smoke, studied me thoughtfully through the haze. “Hurt much, lover?” she asked.
“Rather sore,” I said, “but getting better.”
“How does the food make you feel?”
“Okay.”
“Think you’re good for any more shocks tonight?”
“No,” I said. “Whatever it is, it can wait until after I’ve had some sleep.”
She said, “I guess it can at that,” and then, after a moment, “I wish I’d known about that damn blonde when I was talking to her. I’m afraid I let her off too easy.”
“She isn’t off yet,” I said.
Bertha Cool smiled, a slow, ominous smile. “You’re damn right, she isn’t, lover.—I don’t think you’d better go back to your room.”
“I won’t,” I said.
“Your clothes are up in my apartment. You’d better stay there tonight, Donald.”
“No, I don’t think that would be wise.”
She thought things over for several puffs at the cigarette. The waiter appeared with her mince pie a la mode, the coffee, and a pitcher of thick, yellow cream. Bertha creamed the coffee, watched the globules of butterfat rise to the surface and melt, and nodded approvingly as she dumped in three heaping spoonfuls of sugar. “Well, Donald,” she said, stirring the coffee slowly, “I guess perhaps you’re right. I have an old suitcase up there. You can put your clothes in that and wear the evening clothes until you get settled.—It’s a good to remember about cops, Donald. They never say anything to a man in evening clothes if he’s sober.—A tuxedo, yes, but full dress, no. Of course, if you get drunk, it doesn’t work, but all you need to do is put on tails, and you can walk right out of a jewelry store at three o’clock in the morning with a satchel under your arm, say to the officer on the beat, ‘Good morning, my man. Will you please check this door to make certain it’s locked,’ and he’ll touch his cap to you and call a cab for you.”
I wasn’t particularly interested in her dissertation on police psychology. I looked down at the demitasse and wondered if I wanted any more coffee. I was beginning to feel wide awake.
“When you get this thing cleaned up,” Bertha Cool went on, “you’ll have to get out of the country.”
“Out of the country? I asked, startled.
She nodded.
“Why,” I asked, “if we have it cleaned up?”
She said, “You went to Judge Longan, lover.”
“Well, what about it?”
“He’ll expect to hear from you.”
“Well, is there any reason why I can’t tell him about Cerfitone?”
Her look was pitying. “Is there any reason,” she said. “Listen, lover, Bertha tried to cut herself a piece of cake. The knife slipped. Bertha almost cut her fingers. So then Bertha had to go get flour, eggs, butter, cream, and mix up her own cake. Now she’s getting ready to put it in the oven. And you want to come along and tell Carter Longan the whole recipe so he can publish it in the newspaper.”
I said, “I can’t leave the country. He’d figure I was covering up.”
“He wouldn’t figure anything of the sort,” she said. “As a matter of fact, you won’t even know you’re leaving the country. Bertha will simply give you a job shadowing someone. It will be someone who’s taking a boat for Honolulu, Australia, and Singapore. You’ll tail along as a part of your regular job. It’ll be a nice vacation for you, Donald. You’ll have the ocean trip and all your expenses paid. You’ll draw wages while you’re gone.— You know, Bertha, lover. She wouldn’t cut herself a piece of cake without getting some for you.”
I said, “I virtually promised Longan I’d let him know if I found out anything about Cerfitone.”
“A virtual promise is nothing,” she said. “Don’t be a sap, Donald. You can’t get anywhere tying up with a reformer—because a reformer can’t get anywhere. People are suckers, Donald. God made them suckers. Politicians lead them around by a ring through the nose. Occasionally, some reformer comes along and beats the cymbals and blows the trumpet—and that’s all the good it does.”
“No, it isn’t,” I said. “The people sweep the corrupt officials out of office.”
Bertha beamed at me. “Sure they do, lover, and then what happens?—They elect a reformer.”
“Well, what of it?”
“And then what happens to the reformer, lover? He either has to build up a political machine or else he’s defeated at the next election. If he builds up a political machine, he has to do it by distributing gravy to the boys who are on the inside.—Hell, Donald, politicians always have cake. The people pass it to them on silver platters, and when the politicians cut it, they have to cut a piece for each of their friends. Otherwise, the friend becomes an enemy.—My God, Donald, don’t make the mistake of trying to protect the dear people. You can’t protect a man from himself. You don’t suppose you could talk to a sheep and turn him into a bull, do you?”
I said hotly, “That’s not the same thing. Essentially, people are honest. They—”
“Sure, they’re honest,” Bertha Cool interrupted, “but they’re lazy, and they’re mentally inefficient. They like to be hypnotized. They love to be fooled, and they’re suckers for sales psychology. Look what happens, lover. We have graft today. A hundred years ago we had graft. We probably have more today than we had a hundred years ago. For three generations now people have been following reformers, fighting all sort of graft.—And what has it brought them, sweetheart? Not a damn thing, except more graft than when they started. No, Donald, precious, people are sheep. They were made to be sheared. They love to worship public officials who play politics. Every eight years, the people swallow some politician hook, line, and sinker and make him president. They hold him on the political stomach for about six years. Then they commence to get indigestion because the politicians quit pouring the soda bicarbonate of publicity into their stomachs. At the end of eight years, they vomit him up in order to swallow someone else, and the process is repeated.
“Why, listen, lover—of course, you aren’t very old, but did you ever hear of a politician who wasn’t elected on a platform of economy in office?”
“That isn’t it,” I said.
“Oh yes it is, lover. I can remember way back. Even then all politicians were promising economy, and still it wasn’t new. They’d always hold up the extravagances of the past administration before the horrified eyes of the voters. They’d pledge greater economy and get elected.—And there’s never a case on record, lover, where a politician hasn’t spent more than his predecessor in office.”
“Oh nuts,” I told her. “What’s the use?”
She smiled at me. “That’s the spirit, Donald. You’ll just have a job tailing someone to Australia. That’s all you’ll need to know about it, lover. When you get that job, you’ll know that Bertha Cool has cut herself a piece of cake, and has wrapped a nice little piece up in waxed paper for Donald.—But you’re tired, lover. You mustn’t sit here and argue. Meet me tomorrow at ten-thirty for breakfast in the tea room of that department store where we had lunch last week. They’d never think of looking for you there. Let me have another cup of coffee, and we’ll go home. You need some sleep. You’re too puny to take two beatings in one night.”
“You be careful,” I warned. “They’ll know about Mrs. Premmer’s confession by now. They’ll kill you to get that.”
Bertha Cool’s diaphragm rippled in a chuckle. “I’ll take a hell of a lot of killing, lover.”