“A private detective?”
“Yes.”
“Just a moment.”
The secretary was back within a matter of seconds. “Mr. Nunnely will see you.”
Bertha sailed through the door which the secretary held open. The man at the desk didn’t even look up. He signed a letter, blotted it, opened a drawer in the desk, dropped the letter into the drawer, took out a day-book, opened it, picked up a desk-pen, made a notation. Every motion was calm and unhurried, yet there was no hesitation between separate acts. Each thing that he did flowed into a part of a perfect pattern of continuous work.
Bertha Cool watched him curiously.
It was nearly a minute before he methodically blotted the entry he had made in the day-book, closed it, carefully returned it to the drawer in the desk, closed the drawer with the same tempo which had characterized everything he had done since Bertha had entered the office, then raised his eyes and confronted Mrs. Cool with a perfectly calm expression of poker-faced politeness. “Good morning, Mrs. Cool. The message you gave my secretary was rather unusual. May I ask for an explanation?”
Under the cool, almost impersonal inspection of pale green eyes, Bertha Cool found it, for a moment, a little difficult to carry out her plan of campaign. Then she twitched angrily as though shaking off the man’s influence, and said, “I understand you need money.”
“Don’t we all?”
“You in particular.”