I dropped in at Bertha Cool’s apartment shortly before midnight. She said, “For God’s sake, where have you been?”
“Out working,” I said. “Where’s Marian? Do you know?”
“No. I called her four or five times, trying to get in touch with you. I thought you were out with her.”
“I went over and saw her,” I said.
Bertha Cool stared at me. “Well, can me for a sardine!”
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“That girl did nothing while you were gone but keep Elsie Brand busy answering the telephone. She’d ring up four or five times a day to ask if we’d heard anything from you, when we expected you back, and if we thought you were all right. I’d have bet my diamonds that the first night you were back she’d make you trot her out to dinner and a movie and hold her hand during the performance.”
I said hotly, “Marian’s a nice girl.”
“Sure, she’s a nice girl,” Bertha Cool said, “but that doesn’t keep her from having her head completely turned as far as you’re concerned.”
“Bunk! She’s fascinated by that deputy district attorney.”
Bertha Cool snorted and said, “Who was telling you?”
“You were.”
“Well, don’t fall for that line of hooey. I was just throwing a scare into you. She’s stuck on you — nuts over you.”
“Well,” I asked, “what’s new? Have you located Flo Mortinson?”
Bertha Cool nodded. “She’s Flo Danzer now,” she said. “She used to be Flo Mortinson. She’s staying at the Mapleleaf Hotel, keeps a room there by the month. She hasn’t been in that room for about a week, but I’m registered in the hotel and all moved in.”
“She have a trunk?” I asked.
“Uh-huh, and I’ve moved in a trunk big enough to cover hers no matter how big it is. I figured that’s what you wanted. Mine’s down in the basement. So’s hers.”
I said, “That’s swell. Let’s go do a little trunk lifting. What name did you register under?”
“Bertha Cool,” she said. “I didn’t see any reason for beating around the bush, and someone might know me anyhow.”
I said, “We’ll have to take a couple of suitcases full of old clothes along with us.”
“Why?”
“To act as padding in case your trunk is much too big. We don’t want hers rattling around inside of it.”
“Why not wait until morning?” Bertha asked. “It’s pretty late to pull a stunt like that.”
“We can get away with it. Send yourself a telegram before we go over. When the telegram is delivered, it’ll give you an excuse to pack your trunk and beat it.”
Bertha Cool took a cigarette from the humidor on the table, carefully fitted it into the ivory holder, and said, “I’m not going any further blind, Donald.”
“The light,” I said, “might hurt your eyes.”
“And if Bertha doesn’t know where the fire is,” she said, “she might get her fingers burned. Bertha wants a showdown, lover.”
I said, “Wait until we get that trunk, and then I’ll know whether I’m right.”
“No. If you’re right, it doesn’t make any difference. If you’re wrong, Bertha wants to know where to find a cyclone cellar. And remember, if you’re wrong, Bertha is going to toss you overboard. You’re taking the responsibility, and it’s your party.”
I nodded absently.
“Come on,” Bertha said. “Sit down and quit frowning. Give me the low-down. Otherwise—”
“Otherwise what?” I asked.
Bertha thought for a minute, then grinned and said, “Damned if I know, Donald — unless I pasted you on your sore nose. We’re in this together, but Bertha wants to know what she’s in and how deep.”
I said, “All right. It’s just a theory so far.”
“Never mind that part of it. I know it’s a theory. It has to be, but I want it.”
I said, “Here it comes. Mrs. Lintig and her husband split up twenty-one years ago. Mrs. Lintig leaves Oakview. Oakview becomes afflicted with economic atrophy. The town dries up until the money in the bank vaults dies of inaction and loneliness.”
“What’s all that got to do with it?” Bertha asked.
I said, “Simply this. The Lintigs associated with the younger set. After the town dried up, the younger set moved away looking for more action, more opportunities. The last place on earth where Mrs. Lintig would find any of her own crowd would be in Oakview.”
“All right,” she said, “I don’t follow you all the way, but go ahead.”
I said, “For twenty-one years no one in Oakview cares anything about Mrs. Lintig. Then all of a sudden a man shows up and starts asking questions. Two or three weeks later, Evaline Harris shows up and starts collecting photographs. Now, why did she want those photographs? Apparently she snooped out every single photograph in existence that had Mrs. Lintig in it, and bought those photographs.”
Bertha Cool’s eyes showed interest.
“Then,” I. said, “she comes back to the city and gets murdered.”
“For the photographs?” Bertha asked. “Surely net for those, lover. They aren’t that important.”
I said, “I go to Oakview to look the situation over. Twenty-four hours after I hit town, a cop in Santa Carlotta knows all about it. He shows up, gives me a spanking, takes me out of town, and drops me. Why?”
“So you’d get out of town,” Bertha said.
“But why did he want me out of town?”
“So you wouldn’t get the information.”
I shook my head and said, “No, because he knew Mrs. Lintig was going to come to town, and he didn’t want me there while Mrs. Lintig was there.”
Bertha Cool puffed thoughtfully on the cigarette for a few seconds, and then said with interest, “Donald, you may have something there.”
“I’m pretty certain I have something there,” I said. “This big cop is a bully, and he’s yellow. If someone had beat him up and kicked him out of town, he’d have been afraid to go back. I’ve always noticed that people consider the most deadly weapon is one that they fear the most, without regard to what the other man may fear the most. That’s psychology and human nature. If a man’s afraid of a knife, he figures the other guy is afraid of a knife. If he’s afraid of a gun, he thinks a gun is his best bet in a jam.”
“Go ahead, lover,” Bertha said, her eyes glistening with interest.
“All right. Mrs. Lintig shows up. That was a programmed appearance. There was nothing accidental about it. She breaks her glasses or fixes it so the bellboy breaks them for her. She says she’s ordered another pair. The other pair never came. Why?”
Bertha said, “I told you about that tonight, lover. It’s because the man from whom she had ordered the glasses knew she wasn’t going to stay there long enough to receive them.”
I said, “No. There’s one other explanation.”
“What?” she asked.
“That she never ordered them.”
Bertha Cool frowned. “But I don’t see—”
I said, “She wanted to dismiss that divorce action. She knew her close friends had moved away. But there would be some people left in town who would know her, people she’d be expected to know. They’d be ones who remembered her vaguely, not former intimates, but people who had seen her simply as part of the social background of twenty-one years ago. Twenty-one years is a long time.”
Bertha Cool said, “Phooey! There’s no sense to it.”
“There were no photographs of her available,” I went on. “No one could check back on her appearance. What’s more, they didn’t get a chance. She went to the hotel. From all I can find out, that’s about the only place she went. She registered and put in an appearance so the hotel people would know her. She didn’t recognize any of her old friends. Why? Because she’d broken her glasses and couldn’t see a thing. She put off looking up any of her former friends on that account. She called on a lawyer — a perfectly strange lawyer, by the way — and arranged to have the old divorce case dismissed. She gave me an interview which she hoped would be published in the local press, and she heat it.
“Now get this. This is the significant high light of the whole business. When Dr. Lintig and his wife had their slip-up, the fly in the ointment was a young chap named Steve Dunton who was running the Blade. Steve Dunton was a dashing young gallant, somewhere in the middle thirties. He’s in the middle fifties now. He wears a green eyeshade, has put on weight, and chews tobacco.
“Now then, I told Mrs. Lintig that I was a reporter from the Blade. She didn’t even know the paper, and she never once asked me anything about Steve Dunton.”
“And what was Dunton doing all this time?” Bertha asked.
“He’d quit being a gay blade. He beat it and went fishing. He didn’t come back until she’d left.”
Bertha Cool said, “Pickle me for a herring, Donald. You may be right. If you are, it’s blackmail.”
“Bigger stake than that,” I said. “Dr. Lintig starts running for office on a reform ticket in a rich little city that’s honeycombed with graft. He’s too innocent and unsophisticated to know what the opposition would be certain to do — dig back in his past trying to find something sour.
“Naturally, the first thing they looked up was his professional standing. When they started digging into that, they found he’d changed his name from Lintig to Alftmont, so naturally they started looking up Dr. Lintig. They found that Lintig had been registered in Oakview. They went to Oakview and made an investigation. That was when the first man showed up on the job. That was about two months ago, a chap who gave the name of Cross. He was the one who made the original investigation.”
Bertha Cool nodded.
“That gave them everything they wanted right there,” I went on, “but they couldn’t be certain that Mrs. Lintig hadn’t died or secured a divorce. They could throw the old scandal in Dr. Alftmont’s teeth, but it had all the earmarks of mud-slinging for political purposes. What they wanted to do was to have Mrs. Lintig enter the picture. Then they could play it in either one of two ways. First, they could have her write to the doctor and tell him to withdraw from the campaign. Secondly, they could have her show up and make a statement to the newspapers — not in Santa Carlotta, but in Oakview.
“You can see what would happen then. By showing up in Oakview, it certainly wouldn’t look as though it was a case of political mud-slinging. The Oakview papers would publish the statement that she had located Dr. Lintig living under the name of Dr. Alftmont in Santa Carlotta and residing with the co-respondent in the divorce action as man and wife. The Oakview newspaper would telephone Santa Carlotta asking them to verify the tip before they ran it as news. Then Santa Carlotta would let the Oakview paper run it first, and then they’d publish it as an exchange item.”
“Then why didn’t she tell you that story when you contacted her there in the hotel, Donald?”
“Because she wasn’t ready,” I said. “She didn’t intend to tell the story at that time. That appearance was just for the purpose of laying the foundation. She wanted the people around the hotel to see her and get accustomed to regarding her as Mrs. Lintig.”
“Then you think she wasn’t Mrs. Lintig?”
I shook my head and said, “The Santa Carlotta police couldn’t find her. They found Flo Danzer who used to be Flo Mortinson who roomed with Amelia Sellar in San Francisco. Then they hit a brick wall. Flo knows what it is. They wouldn’t have taken the risk of planting another woman as a ringer unless they’d first decided there was no possibility of getting the real Mrs. Lintig.”
“But look here, lover,” Bertha said, “how did they know Steve Dunton would go fishing. He’d have exposed her.”
I said, “That’s one thing they didn’t know. They didn’t know it either because Mrs. Lintig never confessed it to Flo, or, what’s more likely, because Flo didn’t remember such details as names. She knew Mrs. Lintig had been playing around, and that’s all.”
Bertha Cool smoked for a while in thoughtful silence.
“Now then,” I said, “Dr. Alftmont got a letter recently which purported to come from his wife. He says it’s her handwriting. I examined that last letter, and it looks like a forgery to me.”
Bertha Cool’s face lit. “Well, shucks,” she said, “there’s nothing to it, lover. All we need to do is to prove that Mrs. Lintig is an impostor.”
“What good will that do?”
“It’ll put Alftmont in the clear, and that’s all we want.”
I said, “It would have a short time ago. It won’t now. They’re after Alftmont on a murder charge now. Unless we can find some way of beating it, the case is going to break by tomorrow morning at ten o’clock.”
Bertha Cool said, “Look, lover. You can do anything with Marian. You can make her look Alftmont square in the face and say that he wasn’t the man who came out of that room.”
“Wouldn’t that be nice,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
I said, “The other people know all about Alftmont. By this time, they’ve traced him to Los Angeles. They know damn well he was the man who was in that room. They’re just waiting to spring the identificaion on him. They’ve told the D.A. here they think the case has a Santa Carlotta angle. He’s asked them to lay off until he can get Marian Dunton’s mind firmly convinced that the man she saw was coming out of apartment 309 and not out of either of the adjoining apartments. They’re ready to shoot now.
“They flash a photograph of Dr. Alftmont on Marian Dunton, and she refuses to identify it. What happens? They give her a regular, old-time third-degree gruelling. She can’t stand up to that. No girl her age could unless she’d had a lot more experience and a lot more hard knocks than Marian has.
“Marian gets hysterical. She blurts out the whole story or enough of it so they can fill in all the gaps. They find out that we’ve been acting as official host and hostess while she’s been in the city. They don’t bother about asking for an explanation or trying to take your licence away. They simply arrest both of us as accessories after the fact, accuse us of trying to bribe and browbeat a prosecution witness, charge us with subornation of perjury, with trying to square a murder rap for Alftmont — and we’re all in jail together.”
Bertha Cool’s eyes showed that she appreciated the logic of my remark, but didn’t like the word picture I’d painted. After a minute, she said, “Cripes, lover, let’s get out of it. We’ve done everything we could. We can allege that Mrs. Lintig is an impostor and challenge them to prove it. That will clear our skirts.”
I said, “It may clear our skirts, but it won’t be getting results for our client.”
“I’d rather not get results for our client than spend the next twenty years in the women’s penitentiary at Tehachapi.”
I said, “What we want to do is to keep out of jail, give our client a break, and let him get elected mayor of Santa Carlotta. What you want is business. With the mayor of Santa Carlotta plugging for you, you’ve got an asset that’s worth a lot of money.”
Bertha thought for a minute, and then said, “You went to San Francisco on the bus, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“And left your car in Santa Carlotta?”
“Yes.”
“And picked it up late this morning?”
“Yes.”
“Then it was someone in Santa Carlotta who pushed your nose back?”
“It was.”
“A cop?” she asked.
I nodded.
“The same one who tried to throw a scare into you at Oakview?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t like it, lover,” she said. “A crooked cop can frame you with something you can’t get out of.”
I grinned and said, “I know it.”
“Well, what are you grinning about?”
“I’m grinning,” I said, “because that’s a game two can play. A clever man can frame a cop so the cop won’t have time to frame anyone else. Right now, in case you want to know it, Sergeant John Harbet is a very busy individual, and I wouldn’t doubt at all if he was making a lot of explanations.”
“Why?” she asked suspiciously. “What’s happened?”
“For one thing,” I said, “he had been hanging around the Blue Cave with Evaline Harris. When they wanted someone to go up to Oakview and get the lay of the land and pick up all the outstanding pictures of Mrs. Lintig, they sent Evaline. When Evaline got murdered and the police started asking questions about who her boy friends were, Harbet brought a lot of pull to hear on the management. I don’t know how much pull, but it was a hell of a lot, and the word was passed around to the girls not to talk about Harbet. Trying to cover it up that way makes it that much worse when the lid is blown off.”
“And is the lid blown off?” she asked.
I nodded.
Bertha Cool looked at me speculatively and said, “Donald, I’d hate to be one to push you in the nose. I have an idea you might find a way to make things awfully uncomfortable for me afterwards.”
“I would,” I promised.
She said, “Come on. Let’s go steal a trunk.”
“You send yourself a telegram first,” I said.
We went around to the Mapleleaf Hotel. The clerk said, “Good evening, Mrs. Cool,” and looked at me suspiciously.
Bertha beamed at him and said, “My son — from military academy.”
The clerk said, “Oh.”
We went up to Bertha Cool’s room and sat around for about fifteen minutes, then the telegram which Bertha Cool had sent herself was delivered. We went down to talk with the night clerk. “Very bad news,” Bertha Cool said. “I have to take an early-morning plane east. I’ll have to get my trunk sent up to my room and pack.”
The clerk said, “The porter isn’t on duty now, but I think we can get it up for you.”
I said, “I can get it into the elevator if you can find a hand truck.”
“There’s one down in the basement,” he said.
Bertha Cool said, “I’ll have to do some packing and unpacking. I’ll have to shift baggage around. I want to take just one trunk and one suitcase. Donald, do you suppose you could get that trunk up for me?”
“Sure,” I said.
The clerk obligingly gave us a key to the basement. We went down and snooped around. Within two minutes we found a trunk with the initials F.D. on it, and a tar: Property of Florence Danzer, Room 602.
We opened Bertha Cool’s trunk and between us managed to lift FIo’s trunk into place. There was quite a bit of room on the sides, and we wadded that with old clothes and newspapers. Then I closed and strapped Bertha’s trunk, got it on a hand truck, and got it to the elevator. Thirty minutes later, a taxicab had the trunk strapped on to a trunk rack, and we were headed for the Union Depot. We switched at the Union Depot just so we wouldn’t leave a back trail, and went to Bertha’s apartment.
The elevator boy dug up a hand truck, and we took the trunk up to Bertha Cool’s apartment. I couldn’t get the lock picked, but it only took a few minutes to cut off the heads of the rivets which held the trunk lock into position.
We found what we wanted before the trunk was more than half unpacked: a packet of papers and documents tied with a stout cord.
I untied the cord, and Bertha and I went over the papers together.
There was the Lintig marriage licence, some letters which Dr. Lintig had written during the courtship while he was still a student in college. There were newspaper clippings, and a photograph of Dr. Lintig and the bride in a wedding dress.
Dr. Lintig had changed somewhat in the twenty-odd years since that photograph had been taken. He was, of course, older, but the change hadn’t been as great as might be expected. He’d evidently been an earnest, studious youth who had looked ten years older than his real age.
I studied the face of the woman in the wedding dress. Bertha put my question into words. “Is that,” she asked, “the woman you saw at the hotel?”
I said, “No.”
“That settles it,” Bertha said. “Donald, we’ve got them licked.”
I said, “You keep forgetting the little matter of a murder.”
We dug deeper into the pile of documents. I came on some papers written in Spanish. Bertha said, “What are these?”
I said, “Let’s see if there isn’t a translation appended to them,” and turned over the pages. “It looks like a Mexican divorce.”
It was.
“Is it any good?” Bertha asked.
“Not much,” I said. “For a while some of the states in Mexico established a one-day residential qualification for getting a divorce and provided that the residence could be by proxy. A whole flock of attorneys did a land-office business getting Mexican divorces. The state supreme court punched holes in those divorces whenever the question came up for consideration, but a lot of California marriages had taken place after a Mexican divorce had been granted. Those marriages were so numerous that the authorities simply closed their eyes to their bigamous aspect and let it go at that. The general concensus of opinions is that they constitute a moral whitewash if not a legal justification.”
Bertha said, “Now why do you suppose she did that, lover?”
I said, “She wanted to re-marry, but she didn’t want Dr. Lintig to know of that marriage. She wanted to hold a club over his head. That was why she got the Mexican divorce. That’s a bet I’ve overlooked.”
“How did you overlook it?” she asked. “And what was the bet?”
I said, “I’ll show you.” I went to the telephone and called Western Union. I dictated a night message to the State Bureau of Vital Statistics at Sacramento, California, asking for information concerning the marriage of Amelia Sellar, and a search of death records for a burial under the married name if they were found.
I hung up the telephone to find Bertha Cool grinning at me. “It looks as though we’re getting somewhere, lover,” she said.
I said, “You must have a list of operatives who can be called at short notice.”
“I do,” Bertha said.
“All right. Get a couple of them. Describe John Harbet. Have them cover police headquarters. I want to know where Harbet goes when he leaves there.”
“Won’t he go back to Santa Carlotta?” she asked.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Not now.”
Bertha Cool crossed over to a writing-desk and took out a leather-backed notebook. “It may take an hour or so to get them on the job,” she said.
“An hour’s too long,” I told her. “Get, people who can go to work immediately. Hire the operatives of another detective agency. Have them on the job within twenty minutes.” Bertha Cool started telephoning. I went back to the trunk.
I’d found the rest of it by the time Bertha returned from the telephone, some old stage costumes and some vaudeville publicity photographs of a woman in tights with autographs written on them, Lovingly, Flo.
I studied the pictures. “Add twenty years and forty pounds,” I said, “and that’s the woman I saw in Oakview, the one who was registered as Mrs. James C. Lintig.”
Bertha Cool didn’t say anything. She walked over to the kitchenette and brought out a bottle of brandy.
I looked at the date on the seal of the bottle. It said 1875.