Cats Prowl at Night

24 A Letter to Donald

Bertha Cool plumped herself triumphantly in the chair across from Elsie Brand’s desk. “Well,” she announced cheerfully, “here it is Monday morning. The start of a brand-new week.”

Elsie Brand nodded.

Bertha said, “Get your note-book, Elsie. Take a letter to Donald... Dear Donald: Bertha has just been mixed up in the damnedest case! I certainly did wish you were here to help me. It almost got Bertha down, but she managed to kick through with the winning ticket just when it looked as though the cards were all stacked against her.”

“Sergeant Sellers took over after I gave him the key clue to the situation. Well, I guess I may as well begin at the beginning and tell you all about it.”

“How am I dictating, Elsie, too fast?”

“No, it’s all right,” Elsie said. “Go right ahead. Are you going to give him all the details?”

“Yes. I think he’d like them, don’t you?”

“I’m certain he would.”

“All right. Let’s see, where was I? Oh, yes, I was telling, him about the case. Well, take this down, Elsie. A man by the name of Everett Belder put all of his property in his wife’s name. His mother-in-law had an adopted daughter, Carlotta. And Mrs. Belder and the mother-in-law were trying to keep the daughter from finding out who her mother was. Then the mother-in-law, Mrs. Goldring, went broke. She rang up Mabel to get Mabel to help her, and Mabel turned her down cold. Carlotta was a shrewd, scheming little bitch who was absolutely dependent on her adopted mother for all of her money, and she hated Mabel’s guts. Carlotta’s real mother — Mrs. Croftus — knew all about where she was, but didn’t dare to disclose her identity because she’d served a term in the pen and didn’t want her daughter to find out, and Mrs. Goldring knew all about it.”

Bertha broke off dictation. “Think that sounds too mixed up, Elsie?”

“No. He’ll get it straightened out all right.”

“I guess so,” Bertha Cool said. “Well, let’s go on with it. Mrs. Croftus had hired a private detective by the name of Sally Brentner to work as a maid in the Belder household so that she could keep in touch with what was happening. Carlotta, as I said above, hated Mabel Belder’s guts. She saw a chance to get rid of Mabel, to pick up a neat little fortune, find out who her mother was and kill just a whole flock of birds with one stone. All she needed to do was to have Mabel Belder’s ticker go on the blink while she was asleep. So sweet little Carlotta bored a hole in Mabel Belder’s bedroom. It was one of those Monterey houses with knotty pine and wood walls, and it was a cinch to do it. She rigged a hose up to the exhaust of Mabel Belder’s automobile and then went out to give herself an alibi, playing an early morning game of tennis, Mabel being a late sleeper, and her husband being trained not to waken her when he left the house. That would give Carlotta her chance to come home and find her dear little sister dead in bed — from heart failure — it taking no time at all to disconnect the hose from the automobile. She knew Belder had been told to take the machine out, have it filled with gas and brought back to the house by eleven — so Mabel could go to the train to meet her mother, although Belder didn’t know where she was going.”

“It was a slick scheme, but it went wrong. Mabel must have called Sally into her bedroom early that morning and kept her there for something. Mabel may have been getting a massage, or had Sally mending some dress she wanted to wear that day, or perhaps they were just planning meals. We may never be sure, but we do know Sally was in that room long enough for the monoxide fumes to get her as well as Mabel.”

“So dear Carlotta came home with the tennis alibi all tucked in her pocket — it had been too foggy to play, but she’d put in an appearance at the courts so she’d have her alibi — and what did Carlotta find — two corpses instead of one. She could have claimed Mabel’s bad pump went haywire, but it would have been too much to have tried to claim Sally’s ticker quit at the same time from natural causes. So there she was with two corpses on her hands and Belder due to come back within a couple of hours.”

“Then Carlotta realized something else that she hadn’t known before — that the bodies of the victims of monoxide poisoning don’t look like bodies that have died of heart-failure.”

“She dashed around in a panic. Mrs. Goldring was due to arrive at somewhere around eleven o’clock that morning, but the bodies might be discovered before then and Carlotta wasn’t certain Mrs. Goldring would back her up in beating a murder rap; but Carlotta must have been in touch with her real mother prior to that time, and she knew that her mother had served a term in the pen. Her mother wouldn’t be too squeamish. She might not have given her approval to a murder scheme, but once her darling daughter had gone overboard, Mother would throw what scruples she had to the wind and welcome the opportunity to tie herself into Carlotta’s affections so completely that Mrs. Goldring could never pry her loose.”

“Well, Mrs. Croftus went right to the bat for her dear daughter. She dashed out to the house, hid the bodies, wrote a letter which Mr. Belder could find, and which would be almost certain to send him to a private detective. Belder fell for it hook, line and sinker. He came to me. I was supposed to follow his wife. It was a cinch. I’d never seen his wife and he didn’t wait around to point her out to me. I simply acted on the assumption, as anyone would, that the woman coming out of Mrs. Belder’s house, wearing Mrs. Belder’s clothes, carrying her pet cat, and getting into Mrs. Belder’s automobile would be Mrs. Belder. So they decoyed me out to a certain neighbourhood near where they intended to have the body found later on. (Friends of Mrs. Croftus had gone away for two weeks and she knew their garage would be vacant.) Then they ditched me. Then they tried to frame things to make it look as though Mr. Belder had done the job. And to clinch it, they put Mrs. Belder’s removable bridge in a spectacle case and planted it in Belder’s overcoat pocket. Mrs. Croftus used a lot of skill in writing poison-pen letters on Mrs. Belder’s portable typewriter. The one they left for Mr. Belder to find had apparently been sent through the mail. Actually, it had been ripped out of the typewriter and dropped on the floor of the dining-room. They persuaded Mrs. Goldring it wouldn’t be wise ever to tell the real subject of conversation on her long-distance call, and got her to say Mabel had told her about receiving a poison-pen letter. Mrs. Croftus made it seem Mabel’s eleven-o’clock trip was because she had wanted to go and meet the author of these letters. And then Belder made the mistake of leaving his coat in the barber shop and forgot where he’d left it. They had to find that coat because it had the clue that was really to have clinched the case against Belder.”

“Of course Mrs. Croftus had lots of inside information. Sally, her detective, had been keeping her supplied, and Carlotta kicked through with everything she knew. Among other things, Sally had been spying on Everett Belder because she thought he was playing around with his secretary — which he was, and she’d made an appointment to have her teeth cleaned at a dentist’s office right across from Belder’s office. In that way she’d learned of a Mrs. Cornish who was an old flame.”

“So Mrs. Croftus called up Dolly Cornish, pretended to be Mrs. Belder, and intimated she’d murdered her maid and that Dolly was next on the list. That was long after Mrs. Belder had gone to the Happy Hunting Grounds, but it would have eased a lot of tension if Dolly Cornish had only reported to the police. But a slicker clerk at the apartment-house used his two-cylinder brain to stop that because he thought, in his little moron way, that Dolly should protect her reputation at all costs, and shouldn’t let the newspapers give her a lot of publicity — which made Bertha a lot of trouble.”

“Well, lover, I’m not going to tell you all the details. I kept floundering around in the case. Bertha’s heavy-handed when it comes to things like that. She certainly missed your deft touch, but she huffed and she puffed and she heaved, and damned if she didn’t finally put one and one together and make two. Then, Sergeant Sellers took over, and he put two and two together and made four. The two older women sat tight, but dear little Carlotta had to cave in and tell everything. Believe it or not, after what those two women did for her, she tried to make a deal to turn State’s evidence against her mother and the woman who had adopted her. That’s the sort of little bitch she is.”

“But after that, the damnedest thing happened. You’ll never guess what it is in a million years. Frank Sellers wants me to marry him. You could have knocked me over with a feather. At first I felt like laughing, but now I just don’t know. In some ways he’s awfully nice and he just worships the ground you walk on, Donald. He thinks you’re all brains, which you are. He fixed up a slander suit Imogene Dearborne brought against me. He dug into her record and found where she’d really made a racket of lawsuits. The damned quote estimable unquote mealy mouthed little twirp. Anyway, Frank really smeared her back in her place, and, of course, she’d been playing games with her boss. Sally had found that out and duly reported to Mrs. Croftus, who had that for her third ‘poison-pen’ letter. That two-faced little hypocrite of a secretary! She sued me and I had to see a lawyer about drawing an answer. He wanted to stick me twenty-five dollars, and after we broke the case wide open and I told him not to draw up anything, he still wanted the twenty-five. Bertha is getting terribly soft, lover, because she finally weakened and gave him two and a half. Damn him, he wasn’t entitled to a cent.”

“But to get back to Sergeant Frank Sellers. He says I bring him luck, and he likes my courage and guts and the way I tear into things. Well, I’m not reaching any decision yet. How am I going, Elsie? Am I going too fast?”

Elsie Brand looked up with awed respect in her eyes. “I’ll say one thing for you, you’re certainly covering lots of territory. You are a fast worker!”

“I meant too fast in my dictation,” Bertha snapped.

“Sorry,” Elsie said, and held her pencil poised over the book. “I’m up with you on the dictation, Mrs. Cool. Go ahead.”

Bertha started to say something, then suddenly checked herself. “And that’s enough,” she snapped. “We’ll leave him something to wonder about so he’ll want to come home before his vacation dough runs out. You might put a P.S. on there, that we’re sharing in the Belder estate on a percentage basis... No, the hell with it. Just tell him that we’re doing all right if the income tax doesn’t break us.”

And Bertha heaved herself to her feet and started for her private office.

“If any clients come in,” she called over her shoulder, “be sure that I see them.”