“That’s splendid. Wonderful! Donald, you’re a man in a million! When I said you were an owl, I really—”
Central interrupted to say, “Your three minutes are up.”
“Good-by,” I said, and slammed the receiver back onto its hook.
Chapter Nineteen
The elevator contained the usual Monday-morning crowd returning to the grind of routine office work, men who had gone without hats on the golf course or the beaches and whose foreheads were flaming with sunburn, girls looking a little weary about the eyes trying by intensive make-up to neutralize the telltale marks of not enough sleep — people who found the gloomy confines of an office doubly distasteful after a taste of a day spent in the open.
Elsie Brand was in the office ahead of me.
I could hear the machine-gun clatter of her typewriter as I approached the door marked Cool and Lam, Confidential Investigations.
She looked up as I entered the door. “Hello. Glad you’re back. Have a nice trip?”
She swung around away from the typewriter, flashed a quick look at the clock as though determining how much of the partnership time she could afford to give to one of the partners.
“So-so.”