“Very interesting. Do you know, Mrs. Cool, I think this is the first time I’ve ever had a case which involved a pet bat? I think it’s the first time I’ve ever heard of a person making a pet out of a bat.”
“You’re young yet.”
“Thank you.”
“And how did you happen to be sitting out there waiting for me to come and let the bat loose?” Bertha asked.
He said, “That is indeed a coincidence. More and more I’ve been wondering whether we had the correct theory of what happened last night. I thought that it might — just barely might be possible that your friend, Jerry Bollman, pumped your blind client, received some very interesting information which made him feel there was something the blind man had that he wanted. In place of coming out here with Kosling, he left Kosling somewhere and came out here alone to get the thing he wanted. Obviously, he didn’t get it. If he did get it, he certainly didn’t carry it away with him; but the indications are he walked into that deadly trap gun and was killed as soon as he entered the place. A snare gun that was rigged up by a blind man for a blind victim. Most interesting. We’ve heard of the blind leading the blind, but this is a case where the blind kill the blind.”
“Go right ahead,” Bertha said. “Don’t mind me. I’ve got lots of time.”
“Then,” Sergeant Sellers went on, “it began to dawn on me that perhaps I had been just a bit credulous. When I was in your office this afternoon a collect telephone call came through.”
“Was there anything remarkable about that?” Bertha Cool snapped. “Didn’t you ever have anyone call you collect or long distance?”
Sellers’s triumphant grin showed that she had led with her chin. “The remarkable thing, Mrs. Cool, was that you accepted the call after you found out who was calling — and then a very peculiar circumstance popped into my mind. After you hung up the telephone there was some more talk about Rodney Kosling. You didn’t say that you didn’t know where he was after you had hung up the telephone, but you did use a rather peculiar sentence construction. You said that you had answered all of my questions truthfully, according to the best information you had at the time.”
“I’ll admit, Mrs. Cool, I didn’t think of it until after dinner; then it dawned on me as an interesting possibility. I didn’t want to lose face among my subordinates by staking any of them out here, in case it proved to be a poor hunch, and I didn’t want to trust the examination to anyone else, in case it proved to be a good one. But it was an interesting possibility. Suppose Bollman came out here for something. Suppose you went to meet Rodney Kosling. Suppose you found out what it was Bollman had come out here to get, and suppose you came out and picked up that particular article. That would be very, very interesting.”