“I can understand exactly how you feel, Mrs. Cool,” and there was a half-smile in Elsie Brand’s eyes. “I thought at the time that Sergeant Sellers was starting something.”
“I was sore,” Bertha admitted. “Good and sore. I made up my mind I’d see him in hell before I even gave him so much as a pleasant thought in the future. Then something happened, and I put two and two together and got this clue. I suppose I could blame Donald for that if I really tried good and hard.”
“Why blame him because you got a clue?”
“Not that,” Bertha said, “but the way I got it. The way I went about the whole thing. I used to run just a simple detective agency. I never thought of holding out on the police. Hell, I never had any reason to hold out on them. I never had anything to hold. I tagged along with a little detective agency, doing odd jobs here and there, picking up a little money, pinching every penny until the Indian head yelled for mercy. Then, along comes Donald.”
Bertha stopped long enough for a deep draw at the cigarette. “A brainy little devil if ever there was one,” she went on. “Money just didn’t mean a damn thing to him. He spent it like water and damned if he didn’t have the knack of making it run like water coming through a leaky roof. I never saw so much money in my life. And he never played anything the way he was supposed to, or the way it looked as though he was playing it. He was always two or three jumps ahead of everybody, playing the cards close to his chest, getting all ready for that final big blow-off when Donald would bob up with the right answer that he’d had all along, and a fistful of money that came to us because he had known the right answer long before anyone else had even guessed it.”
“Well, I hated to admit that Donald was better at it than I was. So when I had a chance to play them close to my chest in this case, I just kept quiet. I should have talked. Now, it’s too late to talk. I’ve got a bear by the tail. I can’t let go, and I don’t know what to do.”
“If it’s going to make you feel any better, tell me about it,” Elsie said.
Bertha said, “Her husband killed her, there’s no mystery about that. The point is, he did it in such a clever way they can never convict him of murder. Even if they get the goods on him, they probably can’t convict him of anything — but he had a woman accomplice. Now then, who was this woman accomplice?”
Elsie Brand smiled. “I’m not guessing. You want to talk, go ahead and talk.”
“Talking makes me feel better,” Bertha admitted, “and gets the thing more clear in my mind. He had a female accomplice. Who? I thought for a while it was Carlotta’s mother, but it couldn’t have been, because they must be working at cross purposes.”