“Wouldn’t that be nice,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
I said, “The other people know all about Alftmont. By this time, they’ve traced him to Los Angeles. They know damn well he was the man who was in that room. They’re just waiting to spring the identificaion on him. They’ve told the D.A. here they think the case has a Santa Carlotta angle. He’s asked them to lay off until he can get Marian Dunton’s mind firmly convinced that the man she saw was coming out of apartment 309 and not out of either of the adjoining apartments. They’re ready to shoot now.
“They flash a photograph of Dr. Alftmont on Marian Dunton, and she refuses to identify it. What happens? They give her a regular, old-time third-degree gruelling. She can’t stand up to that. No girl her age could unless she’d had a lot more experience and a lot more hard knocks than Marian has.
“Marian gets hysterical. She blurts out the whole story or enough of it so they can fill in all the gaps. They find out that we’ve been acting as official host and hostess while she’s been in the city. They don’t bother about asking for an explanation or trying to take your licence away. They simply arrest both of us as accessories after the fact, accuse us of trying to bribe and browbeat a prosecution witness, charge us with subornation of perjury, with trying to square a murder rap for Alftmont — and we’re all in jail together.”
Bertha Cool’s eyes showed that she appreciated the logic of my remark, but didn’t like the word picture I’d painted. After a minute, she said, “Cripes, lover, let’s get out of it. We’ve done everything we could. We can allege that Mrs. Lintig is an impostor and challenge them to prove it. That will clear our skirts.”
I said, “It may clear our skirts, but it won’t be getting results for our client.”
“I’d rather not get results for our client than spend the next twenty years in the women’s penitentiary at Tehachapi.”
I said, “What we want to do is to keep out of jail, give our client a break, and let him get elected mayor of Santa Carlotta. What you want is business. With the mayor of Santa Carlotta plugging for you, you’ve got an asset that’s worth a lot of money.”
Bertha thought for a minute, and then said, “You went to San Francisco on the bus, didn’t you?”