“How the hell do I know?” she said. “You know what the police do. I asked Stanwick Carlton if he’d looked in it, and he said no, he couldn’t bear to.”
I opened the suitcase and said, “They’ll have taken the bullet out, of course. See what you make of this, Bertha.”
“What I make of it? It’s just a damn suitcase.”
I said. “We may not have much time to work on this thing. We’ve got to find out something more than the fact that it’s just a suitcase. Why was the bullet fired into it?”
“Because the man who was shooting at the woman missed her and the bullet hit the suitcase.”
I started taking out the folded garments, putting them carefully on Bertha’s desk, stacking them together so that the hole made by the bullet would coincide. I finally used the handle of the pen out of Bertha’s desk set to mark the location of the holes.
A blouse was neatly folded. The bullet hole zig-zagged in through it without matching any of the folds.
I said, “Someone re-folded the blouse.”
“Probably the cops,” Bertha said.
“It’s a neat job of packing,” I pointed out.