Chapter One
I was in the outer office, standing by the files, doing some research on a blackmailer, when he came in, all six feet of him.
He wore a plaid coat, carefully tailored, pleated slacks, and two-tone sport shoes. He was built like a secondhand soda straw, and I heard him say he wanted to see the senior partner. He said it with the air of a man who always demands the best, and then settles for what he can get.
The receptionist glanced at me hopefully, but I was deadpan. Bertha Cool was the “senior” partner.
“Thesenior partner?” she asked, still keeping an eye on me.
“That’s right. I believe it is B. Cool,” he announced, glancing toward the names painted on the frosted glass of the doorway to the reception room.
She nodded and plugged in to B. Cool’s phone. “The name?” she asked.
He drew himself up importantly, whipped an alligatorskin card case from his pocket, took out a card, and presented it to her with a flourish.
She puzzled over it for a moment as though having difficulty getting it interpreted. “Mr. Billings?”
“Mr. John Carver Billings the—”
Bertha Cool answered the phone just then, and the girl said, “A Mr. Billings. A Mr. John Carver Billings to see you.”
“The Second,” he interposed, tapping the card. “Can’t you read? The Second!”
“Oh, yes,” she said, “the Second.”
That evidently threw Bertha Cool for a loss. Apparently she wanted an explanation.
“The Second,” the girl repeated into the phone. “It’s on his card that way, and that’s the way he says it. His name is John Carver Billings, and then there are two straight lines after the Billings.”
The man frowned impatiently. “Send my card in,” he ordered.
The receptionist automatically ran her thumbnail over the engraving on the card and said, “Yes, Mrs. Cool,” into the telephone.
Then she hung up and said to Billings, “Mrs. Cool will see you now. You may go right in.”
“Mrs. Cool?” the man said.
“Yes.”
“That’s B. Cool?”
“Yes. B. for Bertha.”
He hesitated perceptibly, then straightened his plaid sport coat and walked in.
The receptionist waited until the door had closed, then looked up at me and said, “He wants a man.”
“No,” I told her, “he wants thesenior partner.”
“When he asks for you what shall I tell him?”
I said, “You underestimate
