"What blonde?" Toffee asked suspiciously, peering from the depths of her chair.
"The blonde that screamed. She was a decoy. She double crossed me."
"They'll do it every time," Toffee said firmly. "Now you take a redhead...."
"Never mind that," Marc said pensively. "She started screaming long before she could possibly have seen the car from where she was standing. She drew my attention away deliberately, so I'd be sure to get hit. I'm sure of it. She probably took the brief case, too. Maybe she was hired for the job. Good grief! If that's true, I'm really in a spot!"
"They'll do it every time, those blondes," Toffee repeated doggedly.
"I'm sure my brief case was stolen," Marc said, almost to himself. "I've got to find that blonde. And in the meantime, just to be sure, I'd better have the boys knock out another campaign tonight." He turned to the telephone and started to dial feverishly.
After fifteen minutes of assorted telephone conversations, Marc turned to Toffee dispiritedly. "It's no use," he announced. "Every last one of them has been called out of town for the weekend. I've never talked to so many simple minded wives and landladies in all my life. They haven't any idea where any of the men are. They would pick a time of crisis to start their weak-minded cavorting."
"Who would want to keep you from having the Reece account?" Toffee asked.
"The Mayes Agency," Marc answered promptly, and then shook his head. "But Mayes wouldn't do a thing like this. He's hard as nails when it comes to business, but he wouldn't do anything criminal, and I might have been killed by that car this morning. What am I going to do now?"