"A Miss Sukey Jones live here?" I said.
His eyebrows elevated half an inch. "There is a young woman employed here," he said. "I regret to say that this is her night off, and she is not here."
"Employed," I said to Harry. "She must have hired as a private secretary or something."
I doubt if the stiff in livery had smiled in years. He shouldn't have tried it. It almost cost him his teeth. "Hardly anything so grand as that," he said. "The girl is Mrs. Campbell's personal maid."
Harry was silent for a moment. I waited for him to speak. We looked at each other.
"Maybe we ought to talk to this Althea Campbell," I suggested.
The woman was nearer to forty than thirty, and she could have been handsome once. Even now her shape wouldn't have been bad if she'd taken off forty pounds. The poundage was unnatural and flabby, and her skin was blotched and unpleasant. She was a faded, natural blonde, I would say, but her hair was red now.
Harry was always polite. He went forward and introduced us. She was wearing a silk wrapper a couple of sizes too small, and she didn't get up to greet us.
Still, she didn't seem to be displeased by an unexpected visit by two males at 10:00 p.m. The look she gave Harry was as if she might eat him. Harry never seemed to notice how it was with women when he came into a room, but I could see it, raw and naked, on her face.
She was a widow, and Sukey had been working for her a week. Harry said he knew of a job in the Company office that he could get for Sukey, and he asked Mrs. Campbell to let her go, without telling her we'd been there.