“It might help Sergeant Sellers convict Belder of murder — it might not. I don’t know. I do know that Carlotta’s mother wanted this thing. I snatched it right out from under her hand. S he couldn’t have been Belder’s accomplice, or she wouldn’t have needed to have come to me in the first place.”
“Unless it suited Belder’s purpose to have you get this thing, and you were just walking into a trap,” Elsie said.
“That possibility occurred to me about two o’clock this morning,” Bertha admitted. “That’s why I didn’t get any sleep.”
“Why don’t you go to Sergeant Sellers, put all your cards on the table and—”
“Because that’s the logical thing to do,” Bertha said. “That’s what I should do. That’s what the average detective agency would do, and if I do, I’ll wind up behind the eight ball with the fee that an average detective agency would make.”
“To hell with that stuff. I’m pinch-hitting for Donald. He’s over there in the Navy pushing Japs around, and being pushed around. When he comes back, he’s going to need dough. What’s more, he’s going to need a business that will give him some earning capacity. Damn me, I’m going to have both all ready for him.”
“I can understand just how you feel.”
“If I tell Sergeant Sellers about this, the sergeant will take over. That will be all there is to it. He’ll bawl hell out of me because I didn’t tell him sooner; then I’ll be a witness in a murder trial and the lawyers will start picking me to pieces, asking me why I didn’t do something about this as soon as I got it, intimating that I was first planning blackmail, that I have it in for Belder and am trying to get him convicted of murder on the strength of it— The whole damn line of stuff that lawyers hand out.”
“I know,” Elsie said. “I was a witness once.”
Bertha thought things over for nearly a minute. “Well,” she said, “I’ve started out and I’ve got to paddle my own canoe. Carlotta’s mother knows that I beat her to it, and have the thing she was looking for. I can count on her trying to get it. If Everett Belder knows I’ve got it, he’ll — well, he’ll probably try to kill me. S omewhere along the line I’ve got to play both ends against the middle and come out on top. And from where I’m sitting right now, it looks like a hopeless job.”