Tingley looked at it, grunted something, hesitated, and reached for his phone. After getting a number he asked for Captain Darst, and in a moment started asking questions. He covered the ground thoroughly, even to the point of reciting a detailed description of Fox’s appearance, and finally hung up and swiveled to face the caller again.
He looked a little relieved, but not satisfied. “Who sent you?” he demanded.
“No one,” said Fox patiently. “Don’t start that again. You must be pretty busy. Just give me a passport to the premises and forget about me.”
“You must be some kind of a damn fool.”
“Certainly I am. Right now I ought to be up home helping with a dormant sulfur spray on my peach trees, and look what I’m doing. Look at you. You ought to be out on the road trotting five miles under wraps, but here you are.”
“Are you from Consolidated Cereals?”
“I am not from anybody.”
“Exactly what do you want to do?”
“What I said. Look your factory over and ask questions of people. You can hitch a trusted subordinate to my elbow.”
“You’re damned right I can. You’re either a liar or you’re crazy. In either case—” Tingley reached for a row of old-fashioned massive bell pushes and pressed his finger on the second from the left. Then he leaned back and glowered at the other in silence during the moments that lapsed before a door in the side wall opened. A woman appeared — a woman over fifty but probably not sixty, with a figure of generous proportions, a muscular face and efficient-looking dark eyes — and approached them with energetic steps.
“We’re just starting some mixes on the middle run—”
“I know,” Tingley cut her off. “Just a minute, Miss Yates. This man’s name is Fox. He’s a detective. He’s going to look around the factory, and he can ask questions of you or Sol or Carrie or Edna or Thorpe. No one else. I don’t trust him. I’ll explain later why he’s here. One of you stay with him.”
“Does he go in the sauce room?”
“Yes, but hold up while he’s there.”
Miss Yates, obviously too busy to waste time on questions, nodded at Fox and said crisply, “Come on.”
When he was alone again, Arthur Tingley put his elbows on his grandfather’s roll-top desk and pressed his palms against his forehead, squeezing his eyes tight shut. He sat that way, motionless, for a full ten minutes, then stirred, blinked around, and regarded with grim distaste the basket of morning mail. In it, unquestionably, would be indignant letters about inedible titbits, and a batch of cancellations.
Any ordinary business day of any business man is apt to have headaches, but before that Tuesday was past Tingley’s amanuensis — an angular and tenacious girl of forty-three whose name was Berdine Pilt and whom he always called “my clerk” and never “my stenographer” or “my secretary” — became aware that he was setting an all-time record for growling, barking and snapping. She blamed it chiefly on the quinine, but surmised that the morning’s callers had mysteriously made it worse; his ejaculations and comments, and the letters he dictated, offered no clue.
The room she occupied being divided from his by two partitions, she missed a good deal. She heard not a word, for instance, of the conference he had at half past two in the afternoon with Miss Yates and the sales manager, Sol Fry; nor had she cognizance of a peculiar expedition which he made precisely at four o’clock. It was brief and appeared to be surreptitious. He slipped out by the door through which Miss Yates had in the morning conducted Tecumseh Fox, walked fifteen paces down a partitioned corridor, stopped at an open door, glanced up and down the corridor, and dived within. He was in a long narrow room with female wearing apparel ranged along both walls and a partition down the middle, mostly coats disposed on hangers. Going straight to a worn coat with a muskrat collar, he glanced around again, warily, plunged his hand into the pocket of the coat and withdrew it again clutching a small covered glass jar, went back to the corridor and returned to his office. At that moment Berdine Pilt knocked on the other door with mail to sign, and he dropped the jar into a drawer of his desk and hastily shut it.
Berdine did know that there was something to be said to Phil Tingley when he came in at five o’clock, for she had been told to convey the message to the front; but since she went home at that time, along with everyone else on the premises except Miss Yates, who usually stayed in the factory until around six, she was divided from that interview by more than two partitions. She saw Phil’s arrival a minute or so after five, but not his departure some forty minutes later; and eight subway miles separated her from what was perhaps the most surprising phenomenon of the day, a telephone conversation which occurred at a quarter to six, five minutes after Phil’s departure.
Arthur Tingley scowled at a row of pigeonholes as he spoke:
“Buchanan four three oh one one? Is this you, Amy? This is your Uncle Arthur. I want — uh — I have — uh — a problem, and I want you to help me out. Can you come here to the office at six — no, wait a minute, damn it, that won’t do — can you come at seven o’clock? No no, not that. Not on the telephone. No, I can’t. Well, damn it, I’m asking you. All right, I’m asking it as a favor — a family favor — my sister was your mother, wasn’t she? We can discuss that when you come...”
Amy Duncan, in the living room of her apartment on Grove Street, returned the phone to its cradle and sat down on the sofa with an expression on her face of disgusted bewilderment.
“That’s a hot one,” she told nobody aloud. “And I said I’d go. I certainly have a head full of mush. I should have told him to take his darned problem to Miss Bonner the detective.”
She sat there some time and then went to the bathroom and took an aspirin. It had been a highly unsatisfactory day. She had got up late and done nothing. There had been nothing to do. She had plenty of leisure now for rearranging the neck and letting out the hem of the green dress, as she had intended to do for her dining date, but now there was no date. At a moment during the endless afternoon she had got the dress out anyway and started ripping the hem, but hadn’t finished it. Nothing literally nothing, had happened, with the single exception that around four o’clock Tecumseh Fox had phoned to say that he might have something to report in a day or two.
The friend who shared the apartment had flitted in shortly after five, changed clothes like a cyclone, and flitted out again. After taking the aspirin Amy drifted into the bedroom, glanced into the mirror and saw nothing encouraging there, and lay down on the bed and closed her eyes. She stayed there over an hour. When she finally moved she jerked up with a quick start, looked at her watch, and scrambled to her feet.
“You poor simple-minded female,” she said, again aloud in a tone of disgust, “if you think you don’t know what you don’t want to think about, don’t think.” Then abruptly, she burst into laughter. “Hey! That’s good! I must tell — wah!”
Then in some haste she started to clean up and dress, choosing from the closet an old blue thing which she had never liked. There would be no time to eat, but she could do that later, and she wasn’t hungry anyway. As near as she could tell through the windows, in the early November darkness, it was drizzling outdoors, but when she got to the street, finding that it was a cold windy rain, she decided on a taxi and was lucky enough to get one before reaching the corner. In front of the Tingley building on 26th Street she dismissed it and made a dive through the wet gusts for the entrance, pushed the door open, and entered.