“So you changed your mind and swung your car to the left?”
“That’s right.”
“But the street on the left was also vacant, wasn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“And, by the same reasoning, if she didn’t have time to turn to the right and go a block, she didn’t have time to go to the left.”
“That’s why I came back out here.”
Sellers regarded her with an amiable grin. “That’s swell, Bertha. Sometimes when you’re making sarcastic comments about how long it takes the police to get an idea through their heads, you might remember that even the best of private detectives require two or three days for simple matters like that to percolate through their skulls. Now, how did you happen’ to look in this particular garage?”
“Well, I came out to look the situation over to see where she might have gone — to see what might have happened. I discovered the streets were double blocks on the right and on the left; then I knew she couldn’t have turned the corner and doubled back on me. She must have disappeared before she got to the corner.”
“You didn’t notice that about the double blocks before?”
“To tell you the truth, I didn’t,” Bertha admitted somewhat shamefacedly. “I thought it was just a routine shadowing job, one of those things that’s particularly unimportant to everyone except the guy who’s paying for it. When a man gets to the point that he’s hiring a stranger to shadow his wife, he might just as well write his marriage off the books, and it doesn’t make much difference whether she’s philandering with Tom, Dick or Harry.”