I said, “I go to Oakview to look the situation over. Twenty-four hours after I hit town, a cop in Santa Carlotta knows all about it. He shows up, gives me a spanking, takes me out of town, and drops me. Why?”
“So you’d get out of town,” Bertha said.
“But why did he want me out of town?”
“So you wouldn’t get the information.”
I shook my head and said, “No, because he knew Mrs. Lintig was going to come to town, and he didn’t want me there while Mrs. Lintig was there.”
Bertha Cool puffed thoughtfully on the cigarette for a few seconds, and then said with interest, “Donald, you may have something there.”
“I’m pretty certain I have something there,” I said. “This big cop is a bully, and he’s yellow. If someone had beat him up and kicked him out of town, he’d have been afraid to go back. I’ve always noticed that people consider the most deadly weapon is one that they fear the most, without regard to what the other man may fear the most. That’s psychology and human nature. If a man’s afraid of a knife, he figures the other guy is afraid of a knife. If he’s afraid of a gun, he thinks a gun is his best bet in a jam.”
“Go ahead, lover,” Bertha said, her eyes glistening with interest.
“All right. Mrs. Lintig shows up. That was a programmed appearance. There was nothing accidental about it. She breaks her glasses or fixes it so the bellboy breaks them for her. She says she’s ordered another pair. The other pair never came. Why?”
Bertha said, “I told you about that tonight, lover. It’s because the man from whom she had ordered the glasses knew she wasn’t going to stay there long enough to receive them.”