“A woman partner?” she asked.
“That’s right.”
“Oh,” she said, elevating her eyebrows, “it’s like that, eh?”
“Not like that,” I explained. “Bertha Cool is middle-aged, weighs a hundred and sixty-five pounds, has a broad beam, a bulldog jaw, little glittering, greedy eyes, and is just as hard and tough and difficult to handle as a roll of barbed wire.
“She was running the business several years ago, when I was up against it for almost any kind of a job. I’ve had legal training, and Bertha hired me and worked the hell out of me. Later on I graduated into a full partnership.”
“What kind of work do you do?”
I said, “Bertha Cool used to do divorce work, automobile accident stuff, and in addition to that a lot of little things that most of the agencies wouldn’t bother with. Now I haven’t any way of describing exactly what we do. I’m an opportunist and we’ve been lucky.”
“You mean you’ve made money?” she asked.
“Yes. That’s only part of it. We sharp-shoot.”
“What kind of cases?”