Owls Don't Blink

Chapter Two

I felt certain the man with Bertha Cool would be the New York lawyer. He was a tall, rangy man in the late fifties with long arms. A dentist had evidently tried to lengthen his face when he made the dental plates.

Bertha Cool was still down to her conservative 165. She’d put on a coat of sunburn from her deep-sea fishing, and the tanned skin contrasted with her gray hair. She came striding toward me with a push of muscular legs that made the New York lawyer lengthen his stride to keep up with her.

I moved forward to shake hands.

Bertha gave me a quick glance from those hard gray eyes of hers, said, “My God, Donald, you look as though you’d been drunk for a week.”

“It was the alarm clock.”

She snorted. “You didn’t have to get up any earlier than I did. This is Emory Hale, Emory Garland Hale, our client.”

I said, “How are you, Mr. Hale?”

He looked down at me, and there was a quizzical expression on his face as he shook hands. Bertha interpreted the expression. She’d seen it before on other clients.

“Don’t make any mistake about Donald. He weighs a hundred and forty with his clothes on, and his jack-knife and keys in his pocket, but he’s got an oversize brain, and enough guts for an army.”

Hale grinned then, and it was just the sort of grin I’d expected. He carefully placed the edges of his teeth together and pulled his lips back — probably just a mannerism, but you kept thinking he was afraid his dental plates would fall out if he gave them a chance.

Bertha said, “Where do we talk?”

“At the hotel. I’ve got rooms. The town’s still pretty crowded — tourist season still on.”

“Suits me,” Bertha said. “You found out anything yet, Donald?”

I said, “I gathered from the air-mail letter you sent to me in Florida that Mr. Hale was to give me the details so I could start work.”

“He is,” Bertha said. “I told you generally what he wanted in that letter. You must have been here three days already.”

“One day and two nights.”

Hale smiled.

Bertha didn’t. She said, “You look it.”

A taxi took us to a modern hotel in the business part of the city. It might have been any one of half a dozen large cities. There was nothing to indicate the romantic French Quarter which was within half a dozen blocks.

“Did Miss Fenn stay here?” Hale asked.

I said, “No. She stayed at the Monteleone.”

“How long?”

“About a week.”

“And then?”

“She walked out and never came back, just disappeared into thin air.”

“Didn’t take her baggage?” Hale asked.

“No.”

“Just a week,” he said. “I can’t believe it.”

Bertha said, “I’ve got a date with a bathtub. You haven’t had breakfast, have you, lover?”

I said, “No.”

“You look like the wrath of God.”

“Sorry.”

“You aren’t sick, are you?”

“No.”

Hale said, “I’ll retire to my room and get some of the dust and grime removed. And I think I can do a little better job of shaving than I did at this early hour on the train. I’ll see you in — how soon?”

“Half an hour,” Bertha said.

Hale nodded and went down the corridor to his own room.

Bertha turned to me. “Are you holding out?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I want to find out more things from Hale before I tell him everything.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know — just a hunch.”

“What are you holding out?”

I said, “Roberta Fenn stayed at the Monteleone Hotel. She ordered a package sent C.O.D., a dress she’d had fitted and on which she’d paid a twenty-dollar deposit. There was another ten dollars due. The dress came after she left. It stayed there for about a week, and then the hotel sent it back to the store. They had a record of it on the hotel books.”

“Well,” Bertha said impatiently, “that doesn’t tell us anything.”

I said, “Three or four days after the dress was returned, Miss Fenn rang up the store, said if they’d send the package down to Edna Cutler on St. Peter Street, Miss Fenn would leave the money with Miss Cutler to pay the C.O.D.”

“Who was Edna Cutler?” Bertha asked,

“Roberta Fenn.”

“You’re certain?”

“Yes.”

“How did you find out?”

“The woman who rented the apartment to her identified the photograph.”

“Why on earth would Roberta Fenn have done anything like that?” Bertha asked.

I said, “I don’t know either. Here’s something else.” I opened my wallet, took out a personal I had clipped from a morning paper, and handed it to Bertha.

“What is it?” she asked.

“A personal that’s been running every day for two years. The newspaper won’t give out any information about it.”

“Read it to me,” Bertha said. “My glasses are in my purse.”

I read her the ad: “Rob F. Please communicate with me. I haven’t ceased loving you for one minute since you left. Come back, darling. P.N.”

“Been running for two years!” Bertha exclaimed.

“Yes.”

“You think Rob F. is Roberta Fenn?”

“It could be.”

“Shall we tell Hale all this?”

“Not now. Let him tell us all he knows first.”

“And you aren’t even going to tell him about this ad in the agony column?”

“Not yet. Have you got a check out of him?”

Bertha’s eyes grew indignant. “What the hell do you take me for? Of course I’ve got a check out of him.”

I said, “All right, let’s find out what he knows first, and tell him what we know a little later on.”

“How about that apartment? Can we get in and look around?”

“Yes.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

“Without arousing suspicion?”

“Yes. I slept there last night.”

“You did!”

“Yes.”

“How did you arrange that?”

“I rented it for a week.”

Bertha’s face darkened. “My God, you must think the agency’s made of money! The minute I turn my back on you, you go around squandering dough. We could have got in there just the same by telling the landlady we wanted to rent it, and—”

“I know,” I interrupted, “but I wanted to go over the place with a fine-tooth comb and see if there was anything that she might have left there, any clue to what had happened.”

“Did you find anything?”

“No.”

Bertha snorted. “You’d have done a lot better to have stayed here and got a night’s sleep. All right, get the hell out and let Bertha get cleaned up. Where do we eat?”

“I’ll show you a place. Ever had a pecan waffle?”

“A what?”

“A waffle with pecans in it.”

“Good God, no! I’ll eat my nuts as nuts, and my waffles as waffles. And I’m going to check out of this hotel and go live in that apartment. We won’t have it a dead expense if I do that. When it comes to money matters, you—”

I slipped out into the corridor. The closing door bit off the rest of her sentence.