“How do you know that?”
“Because I checked up at the airport. The man who traveled to New York and back using the name of Emory G. Hale weighed a hundred and forty-six pounds.”
“Perhaps the weight was wrong.”
I smiled at her.
“Oh, don’t be so damned superior! Go ahead, if you feel that way about it. Tell me the rest of it.”
I said, “You put in a call for Hale at New York. You couldn’t get him, but Hale called you and said he was calling from New York, or some intermediate point where the plane was grounded. You don’t know whether he was or not. No one knows. He could have been within a block of the hotel. All he needed was some girl to say into the telephone, ‘New York is calling Mrs. Bertha Cool. Is this she? Hold the line, please.’ ”
Bertha’s eyes were ominous. “Go ahead. Get it all out of your system.”
“When he showed up in New Orleans the next morning and I told him I’d found Roberta Fenn and we started down to her apartment, he knew she wasn’t there.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because he went along with me.”