Owls Don't Blink

Chapter Seventeen

At daylight Sunday morning we were skimming over Arizona. Gradually the desert had ceased to be a vague, gray sea beneath us and had acquired form, substance, and color. The higher buttes thrust their rim rocks up at the plane, catching the first vague suggestion of light. Down below, the deeper canyons and gulches were filled with shadows. The stars pinpointed themselves into a bluish green oblivion. As we sped westward the roar of the twin motors echoed from the jagged rim rocks around the buttes below. The east assumed a rosy glow. The tops of the cliffs were bathed in champagne. We sped over the desert as though trying to flee from the sun. Then abruptly the sun shot over the horizon, and the bright rays pounced upon us. The fainter colors of dawn gave place to dazzling bits of brilliance where sun splashed against the eastern edges of the cliffs, accentuating the dark shadows. The sun climbed higher. We could see the shadow of the plane scudding along below us. Then we were over the Colorado River, and into California. The roar of the motors faded to the peculiar whining sound which precedes a landing, and we were down in a little desert stopping place where the airport lunch counter gave us steaming hot coffee and bacon and eggs while the plane was refueling.

Once more we were off. Great snow-capped mountains appeared ahead, guarding the edge of the desert like gray-haired sentinels. The plane jumped and twisted like something alive in the narrow confines of a pass between two big mountains, and then, so abruptly that it seemed there was no appreciable period of transition, the desert fell behind, and we were skimming over a citrus country in which orange and lemon groves, laid out in checkerboard squares, marched by in an endless procession. The red roofs of white stucco houses showed in startling contrast to the vivid green of the citrus trees. Dozens of cities, constantly growing larger and crowding closer together as we neared Los Angeles, spoke of the prosperity of the country below.

Then they shrouded the plane. I looked across at Roberta. “Won’t be long now,” I told her.

She smiled somewhat wistfully. “I think it’s the best honeymoon trip I ever had,” she said.

Then, almost without warning, the plane was swooping down out of the sky, gliding toward a long cement runway. The wheels dipped smoothly to the earth, and we were in Los Angeles.

I said, “Okay. Here we are. We go to a hotel, and I’ll get in touch with my partner.”

“The Bertha Cool you’ve been talking about?”

“Yes.”

“Do you think she’ll like me?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“She doesn’t like good-looking young women — particularly when she thinks I do.”

“Why? Afraid she’s going to lose you?”

“Just on principle,” I said. “She probably doesn’t have any reason.”

“Do we — that is, register under our own names?”

“No.”

“But, Donald, you — I mean I—”

“You register as Roberta Lam,” I said. “I register under my own name. From now on we’re brother and sister. Our mother is very low. We hurried to be at her side.”

“And I’m Roberta Lam?”

“Yes.”

“Donald, aren’t you putting yourself in a dangerous position?”

“Why?”

“Giving me the protection of your name, when you know I’m wanted by the police.”

“I didn’t know you were wanted by the police. Why didn’t you tell me?”

She smiled. “It’s a nice alibi, Donald, but it won’t work. They’ll ask you why it was you spirited me around, using an assumed name and an assumed relationship if you didn’t realize that police were looking for me under my own name.”

“The answer to that is very simple,” I said. “You’re a material witness. I think I can use you to solve a murder. I’m keeping you with me. In place of reporting to Bertha Cool by letter, I’m taking you with me so she can hear your entire story.”

She was silent for several seconds, then said, “I feel quite certain Bertha Cool is going to hate me from the minute she sees me.”

“She probably won’t shower any too much cordiality on you.”

We went to a hotel, registered. The clerk listened to my story about our dying mother, as I told him that I must hurry to a telephone. He pointed out the phone booth to me.

I called Bertha’s unlisted number. She didn’t answer.

I went up to my room, called Bertha once more. This time a colored maid answered.

“Mrs. Cool?” I asked.

“She ain’t here now.”

“When will she be in?”

“I can’t tell.”

“Where did she go?”

“Fishing.”

“When she comes in, tell her to call — no, tell her that Mr. Donald Lam called, and that he’ll call every hour until he gets her.”

“Yes sir. I think the fishin’ was early this morning. I think the tide was goin’ to be just right at seven-thirty. I rather ’spect her back pretty soon.”

“I’ll call every hour. Tell her that I said that. Be sure she gets that message — that I’ll call every hour.”

I climbed into the luxury of a hot bath, lay soaking for ten or fifteen minutes, then got up and turned on the cold shower. I rubbed myself into a glow, dressed, shaved, and stretched out for forty winks.

I was awakened by Roberta gently opening and closing the door of the connecting room.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Time for you to call Mrs. Cool again.”

I groaned, picked up the telephone, gave the number to the operator, and waited.

This time Bertha was home — evidently, by the sound of things, just coming into the apartment as the telephone rang. I heard the maid call her, and could hear her hurried steps thudding across the floor, then the sound of her voice rasping at me through the receiver. “For God’s sake, why don’t you stay put? What do you think this agency’s made of? Money? When you want a conference, why don’t you use the telephone? I’ve tried to educate you to that a dozen different times.”

“All through?” I asked.

“Hell, no!” she said belligerently. “I haven’t even started.”

“All right, I’ll call you back when you’re through. One doesn’t argue with a lady.”

I dropped the phone gently back on the hook, abruptly cutting off Bertha’s rage-shrilled voice.

Roberta’s eyes were big. I could see she was frightened.

“Donald, are you going to fight over me?”

“Probably.”

“Please don’t.”

“We have to fight over something.”

“What do you mean?”

“Bertha. You have to massage her with a club in order to keep her from beating your brains out. She doesn’t mean anything by it. It’s just the way she’s made. She can’t help it. When you see she’s getting her fist cocked, you beat her to the punch. That’s all. I’m going to sleep again. Don’t bother to waken me. You go ahead and get some sleep.”

“Aren’t you going to call her again?”

“After a while.”

Roberta smiled somewhat wistfully and said, “You’re a funny boy.”

“Why?” I asked, settling myself back on the bed.

“Nothing,” she said, and walked back to her room.

It took me ten or fifteen minutes to get back to sleep. I must have slept for a couple of hours. When I wakened, I rang Bertha Cool again.

“Hello, Bertha. This is Donald.”

“You damn little whippersnapper! You dirty little upstart! What the hell do you mean by pulling a stunt like that. I’ll teach you to hang up on me! Why, dammit, I’ll—”

“I’ll call you back in a couple of hours,” I said, and hung up.

Roberta came in in about an hour. “I didn’t hear you get up.”

“You were sleeping. Guess you’re pretty tired.”

“I was.”

She sat on the arm of my chair, her hand on my shoulder, looking down at the paper.

“Did you call Mrs. Cool again?”

“Yes.”

“What did she say?”

“Same thing.”

“What did you do. Donald?”

“Same thing.”

“I thought you were anxious to talk with her.”

“I am.”

She laughed. “You’ve taken planes and dashed across the country in order to have this conference, and now you’re sitting around doing nothing.”

“That’s right.”

“I don’t understand it.”

“I’m waiting for Bertha to cool off.”

“Do you think she will? Don’t you think she’ll get more angry than ever?”

“She’s so mad right now she could eat a dish of ten-penny nails without cream or sugar. She’s also curious. Curiosity persists until it’s satisfied. Rage dies down after a while. That’s the secret of dealing with Bertha. Want the funny paper?”

Her laugh was low and nervous. “Not now,” she said. “What’s this?”

She bent forward to read a paragraph in the paper I was holding. I could feel her hair brush against mine.

I held the paper steady until she had finished; then I dropped it to the floor, turned my body sideways. She slid down into my lap.

I kissed her.

For a moment her lips were against mine, a warm oval hungry for a caress; then suddenly her hazel eyes were looking steadily at me. She was holding her head back and smiling a little. “I wondered when that was coming,” she said.

“What?”

“The pass.”

I eased her gently to the floor. “It wasn’t a pass. It was a kiss.”

“Oh.”

She sat there for a moment, looking up at me, and then laughed again. “You are funny.”

“Why?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Just lots of things. Do you like me, Donald.”

“Yes.”

“Do you think I — committed a murder?”

“I don’t know.”

“You think I may have?”

“Yes.”

“Is that what’s holding you back?”

“Is something holding me back?”

“Donald, I wish you wouldn’t do this for me.”

She was sitting at my feet now, her fingers interlaced across my knee. “I think you’re a very wonderful person.”

“I’m not.”

“And you’ve certainly been wonderful to me. I don’t know whether I can ever tell you what it’s meant to me to have someone act — well, decent. You’ve given me back a lot of faith in human nature. The reason I disappeared that first time was — oh, it was mixed up in something sordid and brutal and frightful. I can’t even tell you about it. I don’t want you to know what it was, but it ruined my faith in human nature. I came to the conclusion that people, particularly men, were—” The doorknob rattled into a quick turn. Someone lunged against the door.

Roberta looked at me in startled surprise. “Police?” she whispered.

I motioned toward the connecting room.

She took two steps toward the door of her room, then glided back. I felt her hand on my cheek, under my chin, lifting my head. Before I realized what she was doing, her lips were clinging to mine.

Knuckles banged angrily on the door.

Roberta whispered, “If this should be it — that’s thanks, and good-by.”

She moved across the room like the shadow of a bird floating across a meadow. The door gently closed.

Knuckles banging again at my door, and then Bertha Cool’s angry voice, “Donald, open that door!”

I crossed the room and opened the door. “What the hell do you think you’re trying to do?”

“Sit down, Bertha. Take this chair. You’ve seen the papers, I take it? You must have done a nice job tracing my call to this hotel. Probably cost you a good tip.”

Bertha said, “You’re a hell of a partner, disappearing like that without letting anyone know where you are! Hale has telephoned from New Orleans. He’s sore. He says he thinks you’ve given him a double-cross, says he isn’t going to pay any bonus or anything else. He’s going to hold us responsible for breach of contract.”

“Have a cigarette. Bertha?”

She took a deep breath, started to say something, then changed her mind; and her lips clamped together in a hard, thin line.

I lit a cigarette.

Bertha said, “That’s the trouble with making you a partner, you little runt. I pick you up off the streets when you are so hungry your belt buckle is carving its initials in your backbone. I stake you to a meal and give you a job, and within a couple of years you’ve muscled your way into the partnership. Now you’re running the business with a high hand. I suppose next thing I know, I’ll be working for you.”

I said, “You may as well sit down. It sounds as though you’re going to be here for a while.”

She made no move to sit down. I walked over, stretched myself out on the bed once more, moved up an ash tray. Apparently Bertha had no slightest idea that Roberta Fenn was in the next room.

“You’re damn right I’m going to be here for a while,” Bertha said. “I’m going to stay right with you from now on — until we get this thing cleaned up. If I have to, I’ll handcuff you to me. Now you put through a call to Mr. Hale in New Orleans and tell him where you are, tell him you came on here for a conference, that you didn’t have time to notify him because it was too important, that you just got in. Try and square yourself and the agency the best way you can.”

I continued to smoke without making any move toward the telephone.

“Did you hear me?”

“Yes.”

“Are you going to do it?”

“No.”

Bertha walked over to the telephone, jerked the receiver up, said to the operator, “Mr. Lam wants to talk with Emory G. Hale in New Orleans. You’ll find him at the Monteleone Hotel. It’s a person-to-person call. He’ll talk with no one else... What’s that?... Yes, I’m — yes, I know. It’s Mr. Lam’s room. He wants to talk... Yes, of course he’s here.”

She held the phone so tight I could see the skin stretched white across her knuckles. She said, “Very well,” and turned to me.

I said, “What is it?”

“They want you to okay the call.”

I made no move toward the telephone.

She shoved the instrument at me. “Okay that call”

I continued to smoke.

“You mean you aren’t going to?”

“That’s right.”

She slammed the receiver back into its cradle so hard that I looked for the instrument to fly to pieces. “Of all the damned exasperating bastards! Of all the ill-mannered, impudent—” Her voice rose almost to a scream, then choked in her throat.

“May as well sit down. Bertha.”

She stood looking down at me for a moment, then said abruptly, “Now listen, lover, don’t be like that. Bertha gets excited, but it’s because she’s been worried about you. Bertha thought something had happened and someone had put a bullet in you.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Sorry! You never even bothered to send me a wire. You — now listen, lover, Bertha doesn’t like to get like this. You’ve got me terribly nervous.”

“Sit down and you’ll get over being so nervous.”

She walked over to the chair and sat down.

“Help yourself to a cigarette,” I said. “It will steady your nerves.”

“Why did you leave New Orleans?” she asked after a minute or two.

“I thought we should have a conference.”

“What about?”

“I’ll tell you when you’ve quieted down.”

“Tell me now, Donald.”

“No, not now.”

“Why?”

“You’re too excited.”

“I’m not excited.”

“Wait until I can see that you’re really enjoying your cigarette, and then we’ll talk.”

She settled back in the chair and went through the motions of relaxing. But her eyes were still hard and angry.

I waited until she had puffed her way to the end of the cigarette.

“Going to tell me now?”

“Have another cigarette.”

She sat there, glowering at me. “I suppose it all gets back to the fact that money doesn’t man a damn thing to you. You’ve never had the responsibilities of running a business. Just because we’ve been lucky with the first few partnership cases doesn’t mean that—”

“Haven’t we been all over that before?” I interrupted.

She started to get up out of the chair, then, halfway up, dropped back again.

She didn’t say anything, and neither did I. We sat there in silence for nearly fifteen minutes. Finally Bertha took another cigarette. She started it off with a deep drag.

“All right, lover,” she said, “let’s talk.”

“What did you find out about that old murder case?” I asked.

“Donald, why did you want to know about that?”

I said, “I think it has something to do with what happened in New Orleans.”

“Well, I haven’t been able to get anything on it yet. I’ve got some people working on it. I should know by tomorrow afternoon.”

“How about newspaper clippings?”

“I told Elsie Brand to go down to the library and copy stuff from the files of the newspapers. Donald, you’ve simply got to get busy and find that girl.”

“Which one?”

“Roberta Fenn.”

“I found her once.”

“Well, find her twice,” Bertha said with a flash of temper.

“I’m worried about Hale.”

“What about him?”

“He’s carrying water on both shoulders.”

“Now you listen to me, Donald Lam. We aren’t conducting a society to purify the motives of our clients. We’re running a detective agency. We’re trying to make money out of it. If a client comes to me and says he wants to find someone, and puts up the money, it’s the money that really does the talking.”

“So I gathered.”

“And that’s business.”

“Perhaps.”

“Oh, I know it isn’t your way. You go around charging windmills. You think that just because we’re running a detective agency, we’re supposed to be knights of the Round Table. You find damsels in distress and fall for them, and they fall for you, and—”

“But I’m still worried about Hale.”

“So am I. I’m afraid he’s not going to pay us our bonus.”

“Didn’t you put the agreement in writing?”

“Well — well, there’s a chance he might squirm out of it on a technicality — just a technicality, you understand. What worries you about him?”

I said, “Let’s look at it this way. Hale came from New York. He hired us in Los Angeles to find a girl in New Orleans. It was absurdly easy to find her.”

“But Hale didn’t know that,” she said.

“The hell he didn’t. Hale knew exactly where she was living. He could have put his finger on her at any moment. He’d been out with her just before he came to see us.”

“That may not mean anything.”

I said, “All right, we’ll pass that and go on to something else.”

She said, “Nix on that stuff, Donald. That’s what Hale said he wouldn’t stand for.”

“Why did he say that?”

“I don’t know. Probably because he didn’t want to be bothered by having us waste our time and his money on a lot of foolishness.”

I said, “We found Roberta. You were to go and see her the next morning. Hale was supposed to be in New York. He wasn’t in New York. He was in New Orleans.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because I checked up at the airport. The man who traveled to New York and back using the name of Emory G. Hale weighed a hundred and forty-six pounds.”

“Perhaps the weight was wrong.”

I smiled at her.

“Oh, don’t be so damned superior! Go ahead, if you feel that way about it. Tell me the rest of it.”

I said, “You put in a call for Hale at New York. You couldn’t get him, but Hale called you and said he was calling from New York, or some intermediate point where the plane was grounded. You don’t know whether he was or not. No one knows. He could have been within a block of the hotel. All he needed was some girl to say into the telephone, ‘New York is calling Mrs. Bertha Cool. Is this she? Hold the line, please.’ ”

Bertha’s eyes were ominous. “Go ahead. Get it all out of your system.”

“When he showed up in New Orleans the next morning and I told him I’d found Roberta Fenn and we started down to her apartment, he knew she wasn’t there.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because he went along with me.”

“What does that have to do with it?”

“Don’t you understand? She knew him as Archibald C. Smith. The minute she saw him, she would have said, ‘Why, how do you do, Mr. Smith? What brings you here?’ Then the cat would have been out of the bag. He knew that. Therefore, if he had thought she was there, he’d have sent me down alone to call on her.”

Bertha was interested now. “Anything else?”

“Lots of it.”

“What?”

“The only real witness to that exact time of the shooting is a girl by the name of Marilyn Winton. She’s a nightclub hostess. She was just entering the apartment house when she heard the sound of the shot. She looked at her wrist watch a few minutes later. She places the shot as being at exactly two-thirty-two.”

“What about her?”

I said, “Emory Hale was seen entering that apartment house at about twenty minutes past two.”

“You mean that’s where he was when he was supposed to have been in New York?”

“Yes.”

“Who saw him?”

“I can’t tell you.”

Her face darkened. “What the hell do you mean you can’t tell me?”

“Exactly that. It’s confidential as yet.”

She glared at me as though she wanted to bite my head off. “Some girl,” she said. “Some little trollop who’s trying to take you for a ride tells you that she saw Hale entering the apartment house, and you mustn’t say anything, just keep it confidential. So you turn your own partner down because some little petticoat with a sweet smile looks languishingly up into your eyes, and gives you the works. Bosh!”

I said, “One other person told me that was true.”

“Who?”

“Hale.”

“Donald — do you mean to say that you talked with him about it? Why, the one thing that he impressed upon us was that, under no circumstances, were we to start speculating about him. He wanted—”

“Take it easy,” I interrupted. “He didn’t tell me about it in words. He told me about it by his actions.”

“What do you mean?”

I said, “He became anxious to meet this Marilyn Winton. I arranged to take him to the nightclub. We poured four or five drinks down each other. He was trying to find out how much I knew. I was trying to find out what he wanted.”

“Did you make him pay for the drinks?”

“Certainly. I may be dumb on financial matters, but I’m not that dumb.”

“What did you find out?”

“He got to talking with Marilyn Winton about the time she’d heard the shot, whether she was absolutely certain it was two-thirty-two and not three o’clock.”

“Well?”

“She told him that it was two-thirty-two by her wrist watch. So Hale admired the watch and asked her to let him look at it.”

“Well, what’s with that?”

“At the time,” I said, “he was drinking Coca-Cola and gin.”

“And what does that have to do with what we’re talking about?” she demanded impatiently.

I said, “He put the drink down below the table, holding it in between his knees while he turned the wrist watch around, looking at.it. A floor show was on, and the lights were dim. His right hand, holding the wrist watch, dropped below the table for a few seconds. After that he blew his nose a couple of times and whipped his handkerchief around rather promiscuously. Then he put the glass back on the table, and while he was doing that, put the wrist watch in the handkerchief. Then he handed the wrist watch back. Marilyn held a napkin to it. Then she moistened the napkin in a glass of water and moved it along her wrist just underneath the wrist watch.”

“Don’t bother me with all that stuff,” Bertha said. “What’s all that got to do with it? What do I care how many times he blew his nose? Just so he pays the money, he can blow his damn head off, for all I care. He—”

“You don’t get it,” I said. “The thing the girl did-putting water on her napkin and rubbing it along her wrist — that’s the significant thing.”

“Why?”

I said, “The wrist watch was sticky.”

“I don’t get you.”

I said, “You dip a wrist watch in a glass of gin and Coca-Cola, leave it in there for a minute or so, and then bring it out, wipe it off hastily with a handkerchief, and the watch is apt to be sticky — enough sugar in the Coca-Cola, you know.”

“And why the devil should anyone dip a wrist watch in a drink of gin and Coca-Cola?” Bertha asked.

“So that when the person who was wearing it was cross-examined about the exact time she heard the shot, she’d have to confess that a few days afterward she noticed her wrist watch was out of order, and she had to take it to a jeweler.”

Bertha sat blinking at me as though I’d flashed a very bright light full in her eyes.

“I’ll be damned!”

I didn’t say anything, but just sat there, letting her think it over.

After a while she said, “Are you sure about the watch, Donald, that he dunked it in the drink?”

“No. I’m simply giving you the evidence. It’s circumstantial.”

“Why on earth would he have gone up to Roberta Fenn’s apartment?”

“Two reasons.”

“Roberta Fenn is one?”

“Yes. And the other’s the dead lawyer, Nostrander.”

“Why would Nostrander figure in it?”

I said, “Roberta Fenn was feeling pretty low. She went to New Orleans. Edna Cutler was in New Orleans. She’s the wife of Marco Cutler. Marco was about to give her a terrific smear in a divorce action. Edna couldn’t face the music. She went to New Orleans, got Roberta to pose as her double. When the papers arrived to be served on Edna, the process server served them on Roberta.

“Marco Cutler got his divorce. He didn’t wait for the final decree. He married a wealthy woman who has ideas about such things. She may be going to have a baby. Edna Cutler chose that time to appear on the scene and calmly observe that she’d never heard of any divorce. It was a slick stunt. She’s got him over a barrel unless he can prove fraud or collusion.”

“Can he do that?”

“He might be trying.”

“How?”

“By hiring detectives.”

“What detectives?”

“Us.”

Bertha’s eyes kept blinking rapidly. “Fry me for an oyster,” she said at length, almost under her breath.

“Get it?” I asked.

“Of course I get it. Marco Cutler is in the millionaire class. If he’d hired us and told us what he wanted us to find out, we’d have soaked him good and proper. Moreover, we’d have been able to blackmail him. He got this New York lawyer to come out here, and because the man was from New York, we kept thinking it was a New York client that was involved in the case.”

“Go ahead, you’re doing fine.”

“Then this lawyer, posing as a man by the name of Smith, got hold of Roberta Fenn and tried to pump her. When he didn’t get anywhere, he came to us. He knew exactly what he wanted us to find out, but he wouldn’t tip his hand. He sent us to New Orleans and told us to find Roberta Fenn, knowing that finding her would be a cinch. What he really wanted was to have us start investigating her past, get all the dope he could on her, and then talk with her. He thought that she might talk to someone who was trying to close up an estate where there was some money in it for her.”

I said, “That could have been it all right.”

“And because he handed us that song and dance,” Bertha went on, “I made him a bedrock price. Oh, it was a price that had plenty of velvet, about two or three times what we’d have worked for in town, but — gosh, if I’d only known.”

“You know now.”

Bertha blinked at me and said, “That’s right, I do.”

I said, “Here’s something else that happened.”

“What?”

“I put Emory Hale in your apartment. He hadn’t been there very long when he got to rummaging around in an old desk and found some clippings dealing with this murder of Howard Chandler Craig. It seems that Craig was riding with Roberta Fenn when the so-called love bandit stepped out of the bushes and took Craig’s money and tried to take his girl. Craig wouldn’t stand for it, and got shot. At least, that’s the story the girl told.”

“Go ahead,” Bertha said. “Give me the rest of it.”

I said, “In the bottom part of the desk was a thirty-eight caliber revolver. Craig was shot with a thirty-eight caliber bullet.”

“Then Roberta Fenn was guilty of that murder. The story she told about the stick-up was all a lie.”

“Not necessarily.”

“Well, if it turns out that was the gun that committed the murder, it’s a cinch that’s right.”

I shook my head.

“Why not?”

I said, “Hale got in touch with Roberta Fenn at a time when he was posing as Archibald C. Smith who was in the insurance business in Chicago. He tried to get Roberta to talk. Either she wouldn’t talk or else she didn’t talk the words Hale wanted to hear.” “What sort of words?” Bertha asked. “That there was some collusion between her and Edna Cutler, that Edna knew of the filing of the divorce action, or anticipated a divorce action would be filed, and that papers would be served, and deliberately put Roberta Fenn in her apartment for the purpose of avoiding service.”

“So then what?” Bertha asked.

I said, “Marco Cutler got a decree of divorce. He got an interlocutory decree, he didn’t get his final. It’s due. If Edna Cutler came into court, and had that interlocutory judgment set aside on the ground that she had known nothing about the action, and that summons had not been served upon her-now there’s one other angle. If the thing was the other way around, we’re being played for suckers.”

“What do you mean?” Bertha asked.

“Suppose the whole thing is a beautiful frame-up. Suppose we’re to appear in the role of giving it authenticity and a touch of first-class respectability.”

“What do you mean?”

“Suppose Marco Cutler wanted to get a divorce. Suppose he knew that Edna Cutler would contest it. He didn’t want to get in the middle of a contested divorce action because he himself was living in a glass house, and, therefore, wasn’t able to throw stones. All right, he gets Roberta Fenn to go to New Orleans. She gets in touch with Edna Cutler. Edna is feeling pretty gloomy. Roberta skillfully plants in her mind the idea that it might be a swell stunt to disappear. Edna agrees. After the disappearance has been staged, Roberta passes the word on to Marco, and Marco gets his lawyers to file suit and send the papers to New Orleans for service. They serve Roberta as Edna Cutler. Edna actually never knows a single thing about the divorce action. They’ve wiped her off the slate without even giving her a chance.”

“Then what?” Bertha asked.

I said, “Everything lies dormant until Edna finds out about it. Then just as she’s getting ready to do something drastic, Hale comes to us on the theory that he wants us to find Roberta Fenn. We find her. Roberta is very coy. She arranges to be found at just the right time. In fact, if I hadn’t found her by a process of detective work, she’d probably have stumbled into me on the street or dropped in at Jack O’Leary’s Bar when I happened to be there.”

“Go ahead,” Bertha said. “All that stuff is so elemental there’s no use wasting time on it. Give me the real lowdown.”

I said, “The game was that we’d find Roberta. She’d get very, very friendly. She might even encourage me to make a pass at her. Then she’d ‘tell me all,’ only the ‘all’ would be that Edna Cutler certainly acted strangely about having her take her name. It would be just enough to indicate that there was a big frame-up on Edna’s part to nick her husband. Edna would get thrown out of court.”

“Pickle me for a peach!” Bertha said. “What are we going to do now, lover?”

“Absolutely nothing-not until we find out whether we’re being played for suckers, or whether the whole thing is on the up and up.”

“We’ve got to find Roberta Fenn.”

“I have.”

“Have what?”

“Found her.”

“Where is she?”

I grinned at Bertha and said, “I’ve taken care of that little thing. You can search New Orleans from now until next year at this time and you’d never find her.”

“Why?”

“I mean that I’ve hidden her, and this time I’ve made a good job of it.”

“What’s the idea of hiding her? Why not tell Hale that we’ve got her, and smoke the whole thing out into the open?”

“Then what?”

“Well, we’d — then we’d finish our contract.”

“And where would that leave Roberta Fenn?”

“To hell with Roberta Fenn. I’m thinking about us.”

“Think some more about us then.”

“What do you mean?”

I said, “We’re given a deck of marked cards. We’re supposed to put them into the game-very innocently. All right, we put them into the game, collect our stipend, and that’s all. But suppose we take the marked deck of cards, slip them into our pocket, forget to put them into the game, and a big jackpot is coming up? Then what?”

She gloated over me rapturously. “And I thought you were dumb about money matters!” For a moment I thought she was going to kiss me.

I got up and moved over toward the door.

“What do you want?” she asked.

I said, “I want you to sit in your office and not know where I am. If Hale telephones, I’ve disappeared, too.”

Bertha frowned. “I’d have to lie to him, wouldn’t I?”

“You would now,” I said. “If you hadn’t been so smart about tracing telephone calls and hunting me up, you could have told him the truth — that you didn’t know where I was.”

“What are we going to do about that?” Bertha Cool asked.

I said, “When he rings up tonight, tell him you don’t know where I am.”

“You mean you want me to lie to him?”

I smiled at her and said, “No.”

Bertha said, “What are you getting at?”

I said, “I want you to tell him the truth.”

“I don’t get you.”

I held the door open for her. “By tonight,” I told her, “you won’t know where I am.”