Bertha noiselessly opened the door, inched her way through, and then carefully turned back the knob so that there would be no tell-tale click of the latch.
It was dark now, but there was enough light to enable Bertha to walk across the length of the reception-room without stumbling over anything. She groped for the knob of the outer door, found it, and made certain that the night-latch was on before tiptoeing out into the corridor.
22
The Perils of Housebreaking
Everett Belder’s house was a typical southern Californian Monterey bungalow with a built-in garage. There were grounds which in a less outlying district would have been considered unusually spacious.
Bertha slowed her car to a crawl and sized up the situation. Behind her was a hectic half-hour of wild driving, an attempt to shake any shadows who might have been trying to trail her. Not that she had any reason to believe she was being followed, but she simply proposed to make certain no one could “put the finger” on her.
The day, which had started out fair enough, had clouded up by noon, and with the coming of darkness had developed a steady, cold drizzle. Wet pavements cast shimmering reflections of street lights at the corners, made the cold seem even more damp and penetrating.
Behind the low clouds somewhere was a moon sufficiently progressed toward the full to give a faintly diffused illumination which seeped through the drizzling clouds.
Belder’s house was dark, but Bertha, mindful of the dim-out regulations, couldn’t be certain it was unoccupied at the moment. She drove her car half-way to the corner, switched out the lights, locked both the ignition and the doors, and dropped the keys into her purse. She walked slowly back along the wet sidewalks, climbed the stairs to the cement stoop of the Belder house, and pressed the button. She waited fifteen seconds, pressed again — this time longer.
When she heard no sound of motion from the interior of the house, she tried the front door, found it locked, and walked around toward the back of the house. The built-in garage, set back some twenty feet, was on the west side of the house. The walk which led around to the back door skirted the house to the east.