“Straight down the street,” I said, “until I tell you to stop.” It wasn’t until we’d got half a dozen blocks that I suddenly realized I hadn’t a cent to my name. I figured the meter would register about sixty-five cents getting to Bertha Cool’s address. I gave him the number and settled back against the cushions.

“Wait here,” I said, and got out of the cab, crossed the curb to the apartment house, found Bertha Cool’s name on the directory, and leaned against the door button.

There was going to be an embarrassing moment for me with that taxi driver if Bertha Cool wasn’t in.

To my surprise, the buzzer sounded almost immediately. I pushed against the door, and it opened, letting me into a dark hallway. I groped around, found a light switch, and located the elevator. Bertha Cool was on the fifth floor. I had no difficulty finding her apartment. The light was on. She opened the door as I tapped on the panel. Her hair was messed from sleeping and hung in strings around her face. Her features looked bloated, but her eyes were cold and hard as diamonds glittering out at me from above the puffy folds of flesh. A silk bathrobe was knotted around her waist. Through the opening in the top, I could see the sweep of her massive throat, a V-shaped section of her big chest.

“You look like hell,” she said. “Who beat you up? Come in.”

I entered the apartment, and she closed the door. It was a two-room affair with a kitchenette opening from the back of the living room. The bedroom door was half open. I could see the bed with the covers thrown back, a desk telephone on a stand within a foot of the pillow, a pair of stockings thrown over the back of the chair, a wadded bundle of garments, which looked as though they’d been balled up and tossed onto the seat of another chair. The living room was close, and smelled of stale tobacco. She walked across to the windows, flung them open, looked at me sharply, and said, “What’s the matter? Been run over by a truck?”

“Beaten up by mugs and pushed around by the police,” I said.

“Oh, like that?”

“Yes.”

“All right. Don’t tell me about it until I’ve found the cigarettes. Where in hell did I put those things? I had a full pack when I went to bed—”

“In on the tabaret by the bed,” I said.

She looked at me sharply, said, “You seem to have an observing disposition,” dropped down in a big overstuffed chair, and went on in a calm, matter-of-fact voice, “Run in and get them for me, Donald. Don’t try to talk to me until I’ve had a couple of good deep drags.”