Chapter XI.

  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.”