It was a job for Bertha to get in and out of the car. She had to twist around and squirm her way out. I didn’t wait for her, and I didn’t try to help her. I opened the door and walked down the street fast.
Bertha hadn’t gone more than twenty yards from the car, when Alta came out of the parking lot. She turned toward me.
I ducked in a doorway and waited.
She was considering the possibility of being followed all right. She kept looking behind her as she walked, but after she’d turned the corner, she evidently figured the road was clear. I picked up her trail. There was a cheap hotel midway in the block. She went in there. I didn’t dare follow until after she’d got out of the lobby, then I walked in and over to the cigar counter. There was an automatic indicator over the elevator. I watched the hand. It had stopped at the fourth floor.
The girl behind the cigar counter was blond with stiff, wavy hair. I remembered one time when I’d seen a strand cut from the rope used by a hangman in San Quentin. A travelling salesman had it, and he had combed the strands all out. That girl’s hair was about the same color, had about the same wave, and looked to be just about as stiff. She had light eyebrows, and big green eyes. She’d managed to get the expression on her face that one associated with virginal innocence back in nineteen hundred and six; mouth puckered up, eyebrows raised, lashes long and curly. It was the expression of a kitten just venturing out of the back closet into the living-room.
I said, “Listen, sister, I’m a travelling salesman. I’ve got a bill of goods I can sell the Atlee Amusement Corporation, but I have to have an inside track. There’s a gambler here in the hotel who can give it to me. I don’t know his name.”
Her voice was as hoarse and harsh as that of a politician the morning after election. She said, “What the hell do you take me for?”
I took ten bucks of Bertha Cool’s expense money out of my pocket, and said, “A girl who knows all the answers.”
She lowered her eyes demurely. Crimson-tinted fingernails slid across the counter toward the ten bucks. I clamped down on it, and said, “But the answer has to be right.”
She leaned toward me. “Tom Highland,” she said. “He’s your man.”