“Yes, but I make better use of it.” The gleam in her eyes was certainly amusement. “Tecumseh Fox? You ought to be ashamed of yourself. Who do you think I am, the downstairs maid that answered the phone call?”
“Nope. But you’re going to tell me. This isn’t your murder case, so why not stay out of it? It will be an awful nuisance if you get in — I mean for you. You may regard it as proper and ethical to let A hire you to investigate B, and then let B hire you to investigate C, but you know how the police are. They’ll get suspicious and when they’re suspicious they’re obnoxious. Their smallest suspicion will be that you were double-crossing A, and maybe you were until he got murdered. I’m not interested in that, but I want what I asked for. Otherwise, and immediately because I can’t afford to wait, it’s Inspector Damon on the telephone, and orders to bring you in dead or alive, and all the questioning and please sign this statement and be here again in the morning and don’t leave the jurisdiction—”
“Damn you,” Miss Bonner said. The amusement was gone. “You can’t do it. How could you account for having it?”
“Easy. Use your head. I’ve already told you that I have it from Cliff and I’m only checking. Don’t my A, B and C prove it?”
“I wasn’t double-crossing Tingley.”
“Good. Had you ever met or seen Cliff before Saturday?”
“No.” Miss Bonner swallowed. “Damn you. He phoned the office and we arranged to meet at Rusterman’s. I thought I might get a break on the job I was doing for Tingley, but when I found out what he wanted I saw no reason why I couldn’t take his job too. It couldn’t harm Tingley any, and neither could it harm Cliff if he was on the level—”
“What did he want?”
“He suspected that Consolidated Cereals was responsible for the trouble at Tingley’s, and he wanted me to investigate and get proof if possible. The reasons he wanted it were, first, he expected to buy Tingley’s and didn’t want the property depreciated, and second, he wanted to expose Consolidated Cereals.”
“Did he mention anyone specially?”
“Yes. Guthrie Judd of the Metropolitan Trust. They recently took over Consolidated Cereals.”
“Was there anything else he wanted you to do?”
“No.”
“Did you tell him you were working for Tingley, investigating him?”
“No.”
“Did he phone you here about half an hour ago?”
“What?” Miss Bonner frowned. “Did who phone me?”
“Cliff. To tell you what to tell me?”
“He did not. You... you insufferable—”
“Save it. I’m sensitive. I don’t want to hear it. Thank you very much, Miss Bonner.”
Fox wheeled and tramped out. Apparently Miss Bonner was disinclined for any further association with him, for though he had to wait more than a minute for an elevator, since it was after six o’clock, she did not put in an appearance.
On the street again, he still did not return to where he had parked his car, but set out at a brisk pace, headed downtown. At 38th Street he turned west. When he reached Sixth Avenue he entered a drugstore and consulted a phone book, emerged and looked around, and crossed the avenue to the entrance of a building which had seen better days and would certainly soon suffer demolition now that the El was gone. After a look at the directory he took a creaky old elevator to the third floor, where a narrow hall led him to a door with a dirty glass panel which said “Womon” in the center, and in a corner said “Enter.”
He entered.
Chapter 9
Piles of literature were stacked high in all available spaces of the medium-sized room which housed the administrative, editorial, business and distribution departments of Womon. The furniture — two desks, five chairs, a typewriter, a mimeograph, cabinets and shelves — was unassuming but adequate. Standing beside one of the desks was a worried-looking man, dipping bicarbonate of soda from a package and stirring it into a glass of water. Seated at the other, sticking stamps on envelopes, was a young woman whose plain tan woolen dress conformed to her curves, with a face that might have been thought attractive for customary purposes but for the formidable intellectual power suggested by the capacity of her brow. They looked at Fox and he said how do you do.
“Good evening,” said the man. “Pardon me.” He swallowed the mixture in the glass and made a face. “I eat too fast.”
“Lots of people do.” Fox smiled at him. “Nice place you have here. Compact.”
“Nice? It’s a dump. I used to have an office—” The man waved that away. “What can I do for you?”
Fox opened his mouth to start the approach to the query he had come to make, but the young woman got a word in first. She had finished stamping the envelopes and arisen to put on her coat and hat, and spoke to the man:
“What shall I do if the stuff from Wynkoop comes before you get here in the morning?”
“Take it and pay for it. I’ll sign a blank check.”
“Oh.” She was getting her coat on. “I keep forgetting that Phil — I mean I can’t get used to being rich. He’s later than usual, but I suppose under the circumstances...”
Fox, instantly abandoning the modest minnow he had come for at this splash hinting at a bigger and better fish, transferred his smile to the young woman and barred her way to the door.
“I beg your pardon,” he said, “but may I make a suggestion?” He pulled from his pocket the Womon Statement of the Basic Requirements of a World Economy. “A friend gave this to me, and I think it’s fascinating, but I don’t understand it very well. I want to ask some questions about it, but I’m hungry. You’re just leaving and I suppose you eat, so why don’t you eat with me and I can ask you the questions? My name is William Sherman.”
“Good idea,” the man declared. “She can answer more questions than the rest of us put together.”
“I always read while I eat,” said the young woman without enthusiasm, and in fact she had a heavy volume under her arm. She shrugged. “All right, come along.”
“Here,” said the man. “Application for membership in the Womon League. Take it with you.”
Fox took it, and his dinner companion, to the Red Herring on 44th Street, having decided that there was less oxygen there than any other place he could think of. In the bar she accepted a cocktail as a matter of fact, and a second one with no special reluctance. After they had been conducted to a booth for two in the back room, it occurred to him that he didn’t know her name, and he asked for it and got it: Grace Adams.
By the time they had finished with the mixed grill and were being served with salad, Fox was confronted with the fact that though his calculations had been sound, nevertheless his expectation had not been realized. The two cocktails, joined with the insufficiency of oxygen in the crowded and noisy room, and reinforced by a bottle of Burgundy of which she had tossed off her share without looking at it, had indeed loosened her tongue; but the looser it got the deeper she dived into the profound abstrusities of economic theory. She derided Keynes, pilloried Marx, excoriated Veblen, and consigned the gold standard to the crucible of hell. Unquestionably, Fox admitted, she got brilliant and even eloquent, but he was not buying a dinner at the Red Herring, which was expensive, for the sake of eloquence.
Patiently and obdurately and deviously, time and again he spoke of his eagerness to contribute substantially to the cause of Womon, but she ignored it and went on with her fireworks. He tried other subtle and crafty approaches to the subject of the Womon exchequer and its present condition permitting nonchalant drawing of checks to meet obligations on the dot, but either she didn’t hear them or she evaded them with a devilish cunning, he couldn’t tell which. By the time the coffee was served he was beginning to get a sinking feeling that he was doomed to utter defeat at the hands, or rather the tongue, of this female pyrotechnic geyser.