“Of course I get it. Marco Cutler is in the millionaire class. If he’d hired us and told us what he wanted us to find out, we’d have soaked him good and proper. Moreover, we’d have been able to blackmail him. He got this New York lawyer to come out here, and because the man was from New York, we kept thinking it was a New York client that was involved in the case.”
“Go ahead, you’re doing fine.”
“Then this lawyer, posing as a man by the name of Smith, got hold of Roberta Fenn and tried to pump her. When he didn’t get anywhere, he came to us. He knew exactly what he wanted us to find out, but he wouldn’t tip his hand. He sent us to New Orleans and told us to find Roberta Fenn, knowing that finding her would be a cinch. What he really wanted was to have us start investigating her past, get all the dope he could on her, and then talk with her. He thought that she might talk to someone who was trying to close up an estate where there was some money in it for her.”
I said, “That could have been it all right.”
“And because he handed us that song and dance,” Bertha went on, “I made him a bedrock price. Oh, it was a price that had plenty of velvet, about two or three times what we’d have worked for in town, but — gosh, if I’d only known.”
“You know now.”
Bertha blinked at me and said, “That’s right, I do.”
I said, “Here’s something else that happened.”
“What?”
“I put Emory Hale in your apartment. He hadn’t been there very long when he got to rummaging around in an old desk and found some clippings dealing with this murder of Howard Chandler Craig. It seems that Craig was riding with Roberta Fenn when the so-called love bandit stepped out of the bushes and took Craig’s money and tried to take his girl. Craig wouldn’t stand for it, and got shot. At least, that’s the story the girl told.”