“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 1 was holding. I could feel her hair brush against mine.

  I held the paper steady until she had finished; then 1 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, /’// 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 I 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 neryous.”

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

  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?”

  1 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 dippings?”

  “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.”