She hesitated for a few seconds before she met his eye, but then her gaze was steady and direct.
“I believe he was quite a swine,” she said.
“Who with?”
“I wouldn’t know that. I didn’t have anything to do with his private life.”
“He didn’t ever take a shot at you?”
Her face chilled for barely an instant, and then she laughed a little without smiling.
“I’m a good secretary,” she said, “and that’s harder to find.”
Simon conceded that. But on second thought he added to himself that she might also not have been Mr Ufferlitz’s type. His guess was that Byron Ufferlitz’s quarry would have been either ingenuous and trusting or tough and cynical. The dumb innocents could be swept off their feet by Mr Ufferlitz’s self-created grandeur and overwhelmed with the old line of what he could do for them in pictures, and the hard-boiled mercenaries could be talked to in their own language and handled as they expected to be, thereby reducing the shooting schedule. But to a man of that type Peggy Warden’s natural honesty and clear-eyed composure would be highly disconcerting. She could so obviously deflate baloney or bullying with equally devastating simplicity.
Simon liked her for those same qualities. It occurred to him with a sort of rueful inward humor that he really met quite a remarkable number of girls he liked. He must have possessed an inexhaustible human sympathy, or else he was very lucky. In twenty-four hours, to have drawn two out of the bag like Peggy Warden and April Quest...
He frowned. April Quest — there was someone that Byron Ufferlitz might easily have seen as a good prospect. And the Saint remembered that she had made no secret of what she expected Mr Ufferlitz’s intentions to be and what she thought of him.