“They get the worst of it. But I’m not talking about Bertha. I’m talking about you.”
“So it would seem.”
“In other words,” I said, “you had some motive that you haven’t told us.”
She bounced up out of her chair and said angrily, “Will you get busy and do what you’re paid to do, instead of hanging around here and insulting me?”
“I’m trying to get information so I can help you.”
She said sarcastically, ‘Believe me, Mr. Lam, if I had known the answers, I certainly wouldn’t have paid your estimable, grasping, avaricious Bertha Cool two hundred dollars in order to get those answers for me. When I turned that money over to your partner, I was foolish enough to think that I could get someone who would go out and start collecting information for me, not hang around my apartment on a Sunday morning making passes…”
“I haven’t made any passes,” I told her.
“I know,” she said, “but you will.”
“Want to bet?” I asked.
She looked at me scornfully, then said, “Yes.”