“Go ahead,” Sellers remarked grinning. “I’ve probably heard all of the words you know. Get them off your chest, you’ll feel better.”
Bertha said, “I’ve just come from my lawyer’s. Any names I call her might show malice, and that might hurt my lawsuit. So far as I’m concerned, she’s a very estimable young lady, mistaken perhaps, misguided certainly; but a very charming young bitch of unquestioned virtue.”
Sellers threw back his head and laughed. He pulled a cigar from his pocket and Bertha took a cigarette from her purse. Sellers leaned across the table to hold a match to her cigarette.
“We’re getting polite,” Bertha said.
“Oh, hell,” Sellers observed cheerfully. “We know the conventional obligations of a host. We just don’t pay attention to them most of the time.”
He dropped the match into a large-mouthed polished brass cuspidor which sat on a rubber mat by the side of the big table. All over the table and on the floor around the cuspidor, ribbons of black had been burnt into the wood, places where cigarettes had been allowed to lie neglected, or tossed carelessly in the general direction of the cuspidor, and had burnt themselves out.
Sergeant Sellers followed Bertha’s glance, and grinned. “You always see that around Police Headquarters,” he said. “A man could write a book about the stories back of those cigarette marks. Sometimes you put a cigarette down to answer the telephone. It’s a homicide, and you go busting out and forget all about your cigarette. Sometimes you’re pouring questions at a guy and he begins to crack. He starts wanting cigarettes, just a whiff or two, and then tosses them away. He’s nervous, he couldn’t hit the mouth of the spittoon if it were four feet in diameter. And those short marks— Well, they’re caused by the boys getting careless. Toss ’em in the general direction you want ’em to go, and forget ’em. What do you want me to do with this Dearborne girl?”
“What can you do with her?”
“Plenty.”
“I don’t get you.”