I said, “Let’s quit beating around the bush, Claire.”
“You’re the one who’s beating around the bush, making all sorts of wild guesses, trying to find out something that happened, torturing your imagination…”
I said, “Look here, Claire, let’s be frank with each other. You perhaps have a chance to inherit some money from your aunt. I don’t think it’s as big a chance as you’ve been leading us to believe, and I doubt very much if there’s as much money there as you told Bertha Cool there was.”
“So what? That’s my business.”
“It’s your business up to a point,” I said. “But when you came into the office, you started talking about having a man shadowed so you could find out who he was. He was a man who was calling on your aunt. You gave quite a story about why it was you wanted him shadowed. It’s a story that doesn’t hang together. Then Bertha made you a figure of two hundred dollars. For a girl in your position that was a lot of money. You didn’t try to bargain, you didn’t try to haggle. You put it right out on the line.
“Now then, it turns out you haven’t as much money in your bank account as you thought you had. There was a five hundred-dollar cheque which you felt certain was deposited on Saturday. That must have been before you went to see Bertha Cool because Bertha Cool rushed your cheque down to the bank before closing hours. Our bank telephoned your bank, and your bank advised that the cheque was good, that it had sufficient funds to deposit at that time.
“The position your bank now takes is that it had taken a cheque for collection and had temporarily credited your account, but that when it found out the cheque was no good it had debited your account with an amount of five hundred dollars, which made your two-hundred-dollar cheque no good.”
“My Lord,” she said, “you keep going over it and going over it. Suppose all that’s true, then what?”
I said, “The inference is pretty obvious. The cheque which you thought was good as gold, but which you now realise you can’t collect, wasn’t just an ordinary cheque. It wasn’t just an ordinary business transaction. If you had thought a five hundred-dollar cheque which you had deposited in your account was perfectly good, and then I came to you this morning and told you that it wasn’t good, you would, under ordinary circumstances, insist that you were going to take steps to collect the five hundred dollars and that then you’d make our two-hundred-dollar cheque good. The reason you’re not doing that is because you know that for some reason it has suddenly become hopeless to try and collect that five-hundred dollar cheque.”
“All right, what if that is the case? Lots of times people take cheques and find they’re no good, that they’ve been bilked.”