“Yes.” She reached for the telephone.
I said, “Never mind. I’ll wait.”
“Won’t you give me your name?”
“It isn’t necessary.”
I walked over to the corner, sat down, and picked up a newspaper. I turned to the sporting section and lit a cigarette as I settled down to reading.
The girl finished her erasure and started at the keyboard again. From time to time she’d look at me. I didn’t look up to meet her eyes, but didn’t need to. She had a habit of stopping the typing whenever she looked across at me.
I could hear voices in Bertha Cool’s office, just a few stray bits of conversation without being able to distinguish words.
After a while the door opened, and a man came out. I had the paper up in front of my face at the time, but I could look under the edges of the paper and see his legs from the knees down, and his feet.
There’s an old exploded theory that detectives wear big square-toed shoes. At one time they may have done it, but the good detectives quit it long before the public ever knew anything about it.
This man had lightweight tan shoes and well-creased trousers, but there was something about the way he handled his feet that made me keep the paper up. He started to walk out, then suddenly paused, turning around, and said something to Bertha Cool. The toes of his shoes were pointing directly at me. I held the paper up, and he kept on standing there.