“Thank you,” Cutler said. “I was hoping you’d suggest that.”
Bertha Cool hesitated a moment, then stood to one side of the door. The two men came in, glanced quickly at the bedroom, walked across to the room which looked out on the balcony over the street.
Goldring said, “That’s Jack O’Leary’s Bar over there.”
Cutler laughed. “I recognized it, but I was trying to reconstruct in my mind the roundabout method by which we arrived. The street seems to be running about ninety degrees off.”
Goldring said, “You’ll get used to it,” appropriated the comfortable chair in which Bertha had been sitting, raised his feet to the ottoman, and said, “Don’t mind if we smoke, do you, lady?”
He scratched a match on the sole of his shoe before Bertha had a chance to reply. She said, rather shortly, “No.”
Cutler said, “Won’t you be seated. Miss — or is it Mrs.?”
I interrupted hurriedly before Bertha could give her name, “It’s Mrs. Won’t you gentlemen be seated?”
Goldring shifted his eyes and looked at me through cigarette smoke as though I’d been a fly crawling along the top of a piece of pie he had intended to eat.
Cutler said, “I’m going to be frank with you — very frank. My wife left me some three years ago. Our domestic life hadn’t been entirely happy. She came here to New Orleans. It was only after some difficulty that I found her.”