“Nice philosophy,” Sellers said. “I’m sorry I haven’t time to discuss marital philosophy with you right now, Bertha. Why did you consider the shadowing job unimportant?”
“I thought it was just a routine job.”
“Then why didn’t you notice they were double blocks?”
“I was just too damned mad. I was mad at myself and mad at the woman. She’d stalled along, driving so steadily and leaving herself so wide open for a trailing job that she had me half day-dreaming. I was following along more or less mechanically, and had my thoughts a thousand miles away. Then all of a sudden she pulled this fast one. Well, I was mad, and it just never occurred to me that she might have ducked into a garage somewhere.”
“Until later?”
“Until later,” Bertha said.
“You didn’t double back and look the garages over on Wednesday?”
“No, I didn’t. I looked the driveway over. I thought she might have swung the car into a driveway and gone into one of these houses.”
“And if in the driveway, why not in a garage?”
“I don’t know. It just didn’t occur to me at the time.”