“All right,” I said to Bertha, “here’s your car. Better drive back. I have a breakfast date at seven-thirty in the morning. I don’t think I’ll keep it. She’s in my rooming-house, number thirty-two. Take her to breakfast with you. Stall her along. Get her to give up the room. You’d better get her an apartment somewhere. The D.A. will want to know where she’s staying. The way things are now, it had better be away from my joint.”
For a moment the self-sufficiency oozed out of Bertha Cool’s manner. She said, in something that was almost a panic, “Donald, you’ll have to come back with me. You must. I can’t control that girl. She’s fallen for you. She’ll do anything on earth you tell her, and I can’t— God, Donald, I didn’t know I was laying myself wide open that way.”
“You see the point, don’t you?”
“I see it now,” she said.
“I have work to do here.”
“What?”
I shook my head, and said, “There’s no use explaining to you. The more you know, the more you talk. The more you talk, the more you put us in a position of being accessories after the fact. I’d have done a damn sight better if I’d held out on you from the start. I tried to, but you insisted on horning in.”
She said, “He’s wealthy, Donald. I got a cheque for three thousand dollars.”
“I don’t care if you got a cheque for ten thousand,” I said. “You’re in a jam. If there was a dictograph in that office, you’re sunk. Bring your conversation with him up in front of a grand jury, and you can figure how long it’ll be before your licence gets revoked. After that, you’ll be in prison. You won’t take me with you — in case that’s any consolation to you.”
I could see she was frightened. She said, “Donald, come on back with me. There’s nothing you can do here tonight. Leave the agency car. You can drive back with me. It’s a warm, comfortable closed car. You take Marian to breakfast in the morning and get her a nice, quiet apartment somewhere.”