She sighed, crossed over to the cash drawer, took out twenty dollars, and handed it to me. I stood with the twenty dollars in my extended hand waiting, and, after a while, she handed me another twenty. I kept waiting, and she sighed, handed me ten more, slammed the drawer shut, and locked it. “You’re getting exalted ideas about your value,” she said.
I pushed the money down in my pocket, said, “Come on,” and tried to rush Bertha down to the agency car.
Trying to hurry Bertha Cool was just that much wasted effort. By the time we got to the agency car, I’d used up enough nervous energy to have gone to Evaline Harris’s place and back, and I hadn’t made a fraction of a second’s difference in Bertha Cool’s schedule. She did everything at a certain rate of speed, like a truck that has a governor on the motor.
I slid in behind the wheel, feeling used up. Bertha pulled the body way over on its springs as she hoisted her bulk into the car and settled back against the dilapidated cushions.
I rattled the motor into noise, eased out the clutch, and slid out of the parking lot. Bertha Cool said, “It’s still a pretty good car, isn’t it, lover?”
I didn’t say anything.
It was the slack hour in the business district, and I made time to Evaline Harris’s apartment house. A whole flock of machines were parked out in front of the place. The machines had the red spotlights of police cars. I pretended not to notice them. Bertha Cool did. She looked at me a couple of times, but didn’t say anything.
I led the way to the apartment house and said, “I think it’ll be a good plan to ring the manager. In that way we can work a stall and go up to the apartment unannounced.”
I rang the manager’s bell. Nothing happened. I rang it a couple more times.
A press car came rolling up and double-parked. A photographer with a Speed Graphic and synchronized flash bulb jumped out and ran up the steps. A slender man with the hard-boiled look of a metropolitan reporter came behind him. They tried the door. It was locked. The reporter looked at me and said, “You live here?”