“Who wants me over there?”
“Mr. Ellis.”
I said, “What’s the charge?”
“I don’t know that there is any.”
Bertha Cool said, “He’s intensely nervous. He’s in no condition to questioned or bullied.”
The detective shrugged his shoulders.
Bertha Cool took my arm and said, “I’ll come right along, Donald.”
The detective said, “You can go as far as the D.A.’s office. After that, it’s up to Mr. Ellis.”
We went to the district attorney’s office. A secretary said Mr. Ellis wanted to see me, and Bertha Cool tagged right along. The secretary said, “Only Mr. Lam,” but Bertha couldn’t hear her. Her attitude was filled with the maternal concern of a setting hen. She held open the door of the office marked Mr. Ellis and said, “Go right on in, Donald,” as though she’d been talking to a five-year-old child.
I walked in. Mr. Ellis was one of these good-looking God’s-gift-to-women guys. I looked at him and could tell his story with that one glance — a nice college boy, an athlete by the looks of his shoulders and the bronze of his complexion, a football player for dear old Southern California, a model student with a high scholastic record, friends everywhere, and a habit of ingratiating himself with his professors. They’d manipulated him into the district attorney’s office as a deputy, and he was filled to the collar button with the abstract legal lore of a law school.