Bertha followed this walk, noticing the half-windows which gave light and ventilation to the basement where the body of Sally Brentner had been found. Circling the house, Bertha tried windows and doors, finding that everything was locked. She returned to the front of the house and tried the garage door. It too was locked.
Bertha, far from the end of her resources, climbed the stoop once more and opened the lacquered mail-box, probing inside with eager fingers.
Her fingertips encountered a key.
Bertha removed the key and inserted it in the lock of the front door. It clicked back the night-latch. She dropped the key back into the mail-box, snapped the box shut, and entered the house, closing the door behind her, listening to the spring lock click shut.
Mindful of the rule of the housebreaking profession, that the most essential thing in entering a house is to arrange for a getaway, Bertha took a small fountain-pen flashlight from her purse, and, using it to guide her, padded her way through a living-room, dining-room, serving-pantry, and kitchen. She found a key on the inside of the back door. Unlocking the back door with this key, Bertha started an appraisal of the premises.
A disquieting aura hung over the entire house. Bertha Cool claimed that she could tell something about the people who had lived in a house simply from entering a place and walking through it. Now she couldn’t tell whether she was feeling vibrations which, by some unexplained physical laws, were thrown out from the walls of the house as psychic echoes of the personalities that tenanted the place, or whether a knowledge of the discord which had existed between Belder and his wife, of the hatred which Carlotta and Mrs. Goldring held for Belder, plus the knowledge that Sally Brentner had been murdered somewhere on the premises, had excited her imagination so that she saw her surroundings in the light of what had happened.
She was only conscious of the feeling that here was a house of jangling personalities, a house which had lent itself to murder, which seemed now to be brooding and expectant — waiting only for another murder to be committed.
Big and strong as she was, Bertha had a hard time shaking off the presentiment of impending evil. Snap out of it, you big boob, she muttered angrily to herself. Nothin’s going to happen here. You’re in bad. If you don’t turn up some evidence that will square things with Sergeant Sellers, you’re going to jail.
She completed her tour of inspection of the east rooms of the house, opened a door and found herself in a long corridor from which several doors opened. The one on the right led down another passage, a back bedroom on one side — on the other, a door leading into the rear of the garage, Bertha sniffed the musty odour of the dank interior. The beam of her flashlight was swallowed up in the dark loneliness of the big double garage. A work-bench ran along one wall. There was the usual assortment of discarded junk; also an overflow of objects to which the house could apparently give no adequate room — an old wardrobe trunk, a man’s coat, a pair of grease-stained overalls, a couple of boxes, a litter of old spark plugs, odds and ends of wires, a dilapidated tyre cover.
Bertha backed out, closing the door to the garage, and started exploring other doors in the corridor. The next door opened into a bedroom which Bertha assumed was Carlotta’s. Pictures of three or four young men in uniform adorned the dresser. There was a smell of cosmetics about the room. The adjoining bath held bathroom scales, a glass shelf devoted to bath salts and toilet accessories.