I walked into the office, the morning newspaper under my arm, trying to appear nonchalant.
Elsie Brand, my secretary, looked up from her typing with a smile.
“Have a nice week-end?” she asked.
“Fine,” I told her.
“You’re looking mighty pert this morning.”
“Feeling like a million dollars,” I assured her. “You’re looking like a movie star. Bertha in?”
She nodded. “She wants to see you.”
I said, “I’ll be there in case anyone wants me.”
I went on into Bertha’s private office.
Bertha shot me a look from her glittering little eyes, then whirled around in the swivel chair. The chair squeaked in protest as she motioned me to the client’s chair in the corner of the room.
“Kick the door shut, lover.”
I closed the door.
“How are we coming? What have you done about getting a cut of that eighty thousand bucks, Donald?”
I said, “How about the suitcase?”
“Bless your soul,” she said, “the suitcase was easy. You just tell Bertha what you want her to do, and she’ll do it.”
“Where is the suitcase?” I asked.
She pushed the swivel chair back, brought a little suitcase out from under the desk.
“How did you get it?”
“I went to Stanwick Carlton and told him that I was trying to get some sort of a report on the case; that I didn’t think the police theory was the right one; that I thought perhaps the whole thing was a frame-up to cover something else that was bigger.”
“What, for instance?”
“My God, I didn’t tell him,” Bertha said. “I flung glittering generalities around. The poor guy was heart-broken. I let him cry on my shoulder and then poured hooch into him. He already had a start. I told him I wanted the suitcase. He gave it to me and kissed me. My God, lover, the son-of-a-bitch kissed me!”
“But you got the suitcase,” I said, reassuringly.
Bertha wiped the back of her hand across her lips and said, “You’re damn right. I got the suitcase.”
I went over and took a look at it. “Has this been changed at all since…”
“How the hell do I know?” she said. “You know what the police do. I asked Stanwick Carlton if he’d looked in it, and he said no, he couldn’t bear to.”
I opened the suitcase and said, “They’ll have taken the bullet out, of course. See what you make of this, Bertha.”
“What I make of it? It’s just a damn suitcase.”
I said. “We may not have much time to work on this thing. We’ve got to find out something more than the fact that it’s just a suitcase. Why was the bullet fired into it?”
“Because the man who was shooting at the woman missed her and the bullet hit the suitcase.”
I started taking out the folded garments, putting them carefully on Bertha’s desk, stacking them together so that the hole made by the bullet would coincide. I finally used the handle of the pen out of Bertha’s desk set to mark the location of the holes.
A blouse was neatly folded. The bullet hole zig-zagged in through it without matching any of the folds.
I said, “Someone re-folded the blouse.”
“Probably the cops,” Bertha said.
“It’s a neat job of packing,” I pointed out.
“Uh huh, I guess so.”
I said, “Let’s try refolding this blouse so the bullet holes all match up.”
I tried half a dozen different folds. It didn’t match at all.
Bertha became interested.
I said, “How else could we fold this? How would a woman pack it?”
“Hell, I don’t know,” Bertha said. “I usually throw them in and tramp a hundred and sixty-five pounds of pressure on top of them and then close the lid of the suitcase. You know me, lover. I have got past the coy age. I don’t give a damn what I look like, just so I’m clothed.”
I said, “We haven’t got too much time on this thing, Bertha.”
“That’s twice you’ve said that. What the hell has time to do with it?”
I said, “I may have to be gone for a little while.”
“Working on this case?”
I nodded.
“Well, you bring home the bacon,” Bertha said. “You know me, lover, and the way I feel about things. With eighty grand kicking around loose we certainly should be able to chisel in on enough of it to…”
“To pay eighty per cent of it over to the government,” I said.
I knew that was good for a reaction.
Bertha quivered with white fury, sputtered for words.
I put the garments back inside the suitcase, closed it and took it back to my own office.
Elsie Brand looked in as I came in, ceased pounding the typewriter long enough to regard the suitcase curiously. “Going some place?” she asked.
“Perhaps.”
“Isn’t that a woman’s suitcase?”
I nodded and said, “Come on into the private office for a minute, Elsie.”
She pushed hack from the typewriter, followed me into my private office. I closed the door and said, “Elsie, we have only a few minutes. We’re going to have to work fast. You’re a woman who has gone to an auto camp with her lover. The door has been closed. You’re in the privacy of the auto camp. What would you do?”
She blushed.
I said, “No, no, now get down to earth. You’d start taking off your clothes. What would you do with them?”
“Hang them up, of course.”
I said, “Take a look at this suitcase. You can’t tell much about the way it’s been packed, because things have been changed around, but let’s take a look at the order of the garments. There’s a bullet hole through some of these. Here’re some underthings and some stockings, with a bullet hole through them. Here’re some handkerchiefs. Now, we come to this blouse. It’s a problem. Can you fold it so that the bullet hole matches up after the blouse has been folded? You can see the bullet went through the blouse four or five times.”
“On account of the way it was folded,” she said.
“Fold it back the way it was, then.”
Elsie spread the blouse out on my desk, started folding it, trying to get the bullet hole to line up when the blouse was folded. She couldn’t do it.
Elsie studied the blouse closely, raised the place where the arms joined the blouse to her nostrils, put the blouse down, started folding it again, then shook her head and said, “It wasn’t packed. It had to be folded like this.”
She took it and folded it into a crumpled, disorganized package, then, using the pen-holder from my office pen set, just as I had done in Bertha’s office, worked around until she had the holes all lined up.
“Would a woman have packed it that way?”
She shook her head, and said, “This was a soiled blouse. It had been worn. But still she wouldn’t have packed it so carelessly that…”
“Wait a minute. What do you mean it had been worn?”
“I mean it was soiled. She’d been wearing it.”
I said, “If you were going to keep a rendezvous in a motor court with a man you loved, if you were stepping out on your husband, would you carry soiled clothes along?”
“Certainly not. You mean this bag was all she had?”
“That’s right.”
“What did the man have?”
“Nothing.”
Elsie started looking through the bag, making an inventory.
“Turn your back a minute,” she said. “This is going to be intimate.”
I turned my back, but said over my shoulder, “You don’t need to be so delicate about it. The police have pawed through everything in there.”
“Not with me looking on, they haven’t.”
I walked over to the window and smoked a cigarette.
Elsie said, “Come on back. I think this was the blouse she was wearing at the time — well, you know, at the time she went to the motor court.”