The clerk moved toward a series of pigeon-holes with the receipted bill, then detoured when only half-way there to drop it into the cash drawer in the safe.
“Almost forgot,” he said.
“Do some more thinking,” Bertha said, “and you might remember something.”
He was definitely supercilious. “I think that will be all, Mrs. Cool.”
Bertha hesitated a moment, then apparently somewhat crushed, crossed the lobby toward the street door.
Bertha walked across the street to the news-stand. “Somebody moved a piano out of that joint across the street,” she said, “within the last day or two. I’d like to get the name on the moving van.”
The man shook his head. “I can’t help you.”
“Didn’t you notice the name?”
“I don’t remember seeing any van there within the last day or two, but, of course, I’m busy over here.”
Bertha covered four more stores with the same result. Then she went to the telephone and called her office. When Elsie Brand answered the telephone, she said, “What can you do on the lah-de-dah, Elsie?”