Sellers looked at me and frowned. “It’s not you, Bertha. It’s this guy. You never know what he’s figuring.”
I held out my manacled wrists, and said sarcastically, “Yeah, it looks like I’m smart.”
Bertha said. “We could give you a cut in case we…”
“Don’t be a fool, Bertha,” I interrupted. “Frank isn’t thinking about money.”
Sellers gave me a grateful look.
I said, “You have an opportunity to straighten up that killing out at the KOZY DELL SLUMBER COURT. You have an opportunity to put a whole bevy of feathers in your cap. You have a chance to break up a blackmailing ring, and you have a chance to show how that Hollister girl was actually killed, why she was killed and who killed her.”
“A lot of people would say I had the answer to that last right here, right now,” Sellers said, but his tone lacked the positive conviction he had shown earlier.
“And,” I went on, “you’ve got a widow out there in San Robles who has two kids. Those kids have got to grow up, they’ve got to go to school. They’ve got to go through college, if they really want to make a dent in the world. It takes education these days, and education takes money. There’s a woman out there who doesn’t know where her next dime is coming from. Now, then, if you could play things my way, and she could have eighty thousand bucks…”
“You’ve made a sale,” Sellers said. “Let’s go.”
We all got up, and I said, “What about the handcuffs?”