The clerk raised a folding gate and approached Bertha Cool with businesslike authority. “I’m sorry, but we don’t permit strangers to enter the elevators, unannounced.”
Bertha Cool smiled sweetly at him. “Mrs. Stevens, in apartment 12B, asked me to come right up,” she said. “I was just talking with her over the telephone.”
As the clerk tried to keep expression from his face, Bertha nodded to the elevator boy. “Let’s go,” she said.
Someone was talking on the telephone in apartment 12B when Bertha knocked on the door. A few moments later the conversation terminated, and Bertha knocked more loudly.
There was no sound from within the room. Bertha raised her voice. “Going to let me in, Dolly, or do I wait for you to come out?”
The door opened. An angry woman somewhere in the thirties stood glaring belligerently at Bertha Cool. “I have just been advised,” she said, “that you—”
“I know,” Bertha told her. “The clerk doesn’t like me. I don’t like him. Move over, dearie, and let me in.”
Bertha’s powerful frame pushed the lighter woman to one side with an easy lack of effort. She moved on into the apartment, nodded approvingly at the piano, selected the most comfortable chair, dropped down in it, and lit a cigarette.
The woman in the doorway said, “There are rules against this sort of thing, you know.”
“I know.”