“She has a secretary,” I said.
“I mean as a detective.”
“Don’t be silly, Marian. You couldn’t be a detective.”
“Why not?”
“You don’t know enough about the world. You have ideals. You — it’s silly to even think of it. Bertha Cool takes all sorts of cases, divorce cases particularly.”
“I know the facts of life,” Marian Dunton said indignantly.
I said, “No, you don’t. You just think you do. What’s more, you’d feel like a heel. You’d have shadowing jobs. You’d be snooping around, peeking through keyholes, digging down into the muddy dregs of life — things you shouldn’t know anything about.”
“You talk like a poet, Donald,” she said, and tilted her head slightly on one side as she looked at me. “There’s something poetic about you, too,” she went on. “You have that sensitive mouth, big, dark eyes.”
I said, “Oh, nuts.”
The waiter brought our salads.