“Kosling had it so the bat could get in and out. He always left the door open a few inches and blocked it with a rubber wedge so it wouldn’t blow either open or shut. I kept thinking that perhaps you men had been dumb enough to shut the door and leave the bat inside.”
“I’m quite certain we didn’t, Mrs. Cool. I think the bat came in from the outside.”
“Yes, I suppose so.”
“And gave you quite a start. You screamed and—”
“Well, it would give you a start, too, if something came out of the night and perched on your chest.”
“The bat did that?”
“Yes.”
“Very interesting. Do you know, Mrs. Cool, I think this is the first time I’ve ever had a case which involved a pet bat? I think it’s the first time I’ve ever heard of a person making a pet out of a bat.”
“You’re young yet.”
“Thank you.”
“And how did you happen to be sitting out there waiting for me to come and let the bat loose?” Bertha asked.
He said, “That is indeed a coincidence. More and more I’ve been wondering whether we had the correct theory of what happened last night. I thought that it might — just barely might be possible that your friend, Jerry Bollman, pumped your blind client, received some very interesting information which made him feel there was something the blind man had that he wanted. In place of coming out here with Kosling, he left Kosling somewhere and came out here alone to get the thing he wanted. Obviously, he didn’t get it. If he did get it, he certainly didn’t carry it away with him; but the indications are he walked into that deadly trap gun and was killed as soon as he entered the place. A snare gun that was rigged up by a blind man for a blind victim. Most interesting. We’ve heard of the blind leading the blind, but this is a case where the blind kill the blind.”
“Go right ahead,” Bertha said. “Don’t mind me. I’ve got lots of time.”
“Then,” Sergeant Sellers went on, “it began to dawn on me that perhaps I had been just a bit credulous. When I was in your office this afternoon a collect telephone call came through.”
“Was there anything remarkable about that?” Bertha Cool snapped. “Didn’t you ever have anyone call you collect or long distance?”
Sellers’s triumphant grin showed that she had led with her chin. “The remarkable thing, Mrs. Cool, was that you accepted the call after you found out who was calling — and then a very peculiar circumstance popped into my mind. After you hung up the telephone there was some more talk about Rodney Kosling. You didn’t say that you didn’t know where he was after you had hung up the telephone, but you did use a rather peculiar sentence construction. You said that you had answered all of my questions truthfully, according to the best information you had at the time.”
“I’ll admit, Mrs. Cool, I didn’t think of it until after dinner; then it dawned on me as an interesting possibility. I didn’t want to lose face among my subordinates by staking any of them out here, in case it proved to be a poor hunch, and I didn’t want to trust the examination to anyone else, in case it proved to be a good one. But it was an interesting possibility. Suppose Bollman came out here for something. Suppose you went to meet Rodney Kosling. Suppose you found out what it was Bollman had come out here to get, and suppose you came out and picked up that particular article. That would be very, very interesting.”
Bertha said, “I didn’t take a thing from that house.”
“That, of course, is an assertion which will have to be checked,” Sellers said. “Much as I dislike to do so, Mrs. Cool, I’m going to have to ask you to get in my automobile and go to headquarters where a matron will search you. If it turns out you haven’t taken anything, then — well, then, of course, the situation will be radically different. If it should appear that you have taken something, then, of course, you’d be guilty of a crime, the crime of burglary. And, as a person apprehended in the act of committing a burglary, we’d have to hold you, Mrs. Cool. We’d have to hold you at least until we had a very fair, full, and frank statement of just what you’re trying to do.”
Bertha said, “You can’t do this to me. You can’t—”
“Indeed I can,” Sellers said, quite affably. “I’m doing it. If you haven’t taken anything out of the building, I suppose I can’t make a burglary charge stick, unless, as you so competently point out, I could prove that you entered the building for the purpose of committing a felony in the first place. Looks almost as though you had looked up the law before you made your visit.”
“Well, I didn’t.”
“That, of course is another statement of fact which is open to investigation, although I don’t know just how we’re going to prove it. But in any event, Mrs. Cool, I’m placing you under arrest, and I think as a student of law, you understand that if you now do anything to interfere, you will be resisting arrest, which, in itself, is a crime.”
Bertha Cool thought that over, looked at Sergeant Sellers, recognized the inflexibility of purpose behind his smiling mask, and said, “Okay, you win.”
“We’ll just leave your car parked right where it is,” Sellers said. “I wouldn’t want you to dispose of anything between here and headquarters — and since the tinkling melody of the Bluebells of Scotland shows me that you went to the music box and raised the lid, it is quite evident that the object you took from the music box was relatively small and, therefore, something that could be easily concealed. So, Mrs. Cool, if you wouldn’t mind going into the room again so I can keep my eye on you while I pick up that music box, we’ll take it right along to headquarters with us.”
“All right, you’ve got me,” Bertha Cool said. “Go ahead. Rub it in! Go on and gloat!”
“No gloating at all, Mrs. Cool, just a slight formality. Now, then, if you’ll walk just ahead of me, and if you wouldn’t mind keeping your hands up where I can see them. That spotlight of yours isn’t very efficient. I think you’ll find mine a lot better.”
Sergeant Sellers’s five-cell flashlight blazed into brilliance, lighting the way into the front room of the little bungalow.
Chapter XXVII
The matron escorted Bertha Cool to the door of Sergeant Sellers’s private office and knocked.
The tinkling strains of Bluebells of Scotland sounded faintly through the door.
“Come in,” Sellers called.
The matron opened the door. “In this way, dearie,” she said to Bertha Cool.
Bertha paused on the threshold, turned, looked at the matron — two husky, bulldog-jawed women glaring at each other. “All right, dearie,” Bertha Cool said.
“What did you find?” Sergeant Sellers inquired.
“Nothing,” the matron announced.
Sergeant Sellers raised his eyebrows. “Well, well. Don’t tell me that you went there just for the experience, Mrs. Cool?”
“You forget Freddie,” Bertha said. “Got a cigarette? Your girl friend snitched my package.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I forgot your cigarettes,” the matron said. “I put them up on that—”
“It’s all right, dearie. Keep them with my compliments,” Bertha said.
The matron caught Sergeant Sellers’s eye and seemed embarrassed. “You should have said something about them at the time, Mrs. Cool.”
“I didn’t know I was supposed to,” Bertha announced. “I thought it was a privilege that went with the office, like the cops taking apples from the fruit stands.”
“That’s all, Mrs. Bell,” Sergeant Sellers said.