“That’s what you say,” Sellers said.
“And that,” I told him, “is why I want you to get this thing cleared up. It’s my only chance for my white alley. Let’s go down and talk with Claire Bushnell’s aunt before she has a chance to think up a good story. She was being blackmailed. I think the blackmailer would keep in touch with her, probably by telephone. I don’t think Tom Durham is doing much travelling around today, because I think he’s got a .32 bullet in him somewhere. All you need to do is to stop by Amelia Jasper’s house on the road to headquarters and give her a grilling.”
“Yeah, and lose my badge for it,” Sellers said. “What do you think I am? A sucker that’s going to break in on somebody’s rich aunt and say, ‘Look here, Madam, you’re being blackmailed’?”
I said, “You’re going to let me do that. I wouldn’t ask you to do it. All you need to do is to sit and listen.”
Sellers thought it over, then shook his head and said, “It’s a gag. You’re going to headquarters.”
“By that time the trail will be cold and you’ll never find out anything.”
“I’ve caught me a murderer,” Sellers said, grinning with self-satisfaction. “That’s all right for one day’s work. Come on.”
Bertha said, “For the love of Mike, Frank, give me a break. You’re busting up my partnership and smearing the thing with a lot of publicity that’s going to cost me all kinds of dough. I’m on the trail of an eighty-thousand-dollar insurance job. If what Donald says is right, I stand a chance of throwing the hooks into the insurance company and cleaning up a little gravy.”
Frank Sellers hesitated. At length he said to me, “If you doublecross me on this thing I…”
“Since when did anybody doublecross you?” Bertha demanded.