"Did she make you happy?"
"Of course not! Who wants to be happy? She made me miserable, but it was exciting to be around her. I never knew what I'd find when I got home—a knockdown drag-out fight over nothing at all or hearts-and-flowers equally over nothing."
Arthurjean yawned. "That part's convincing," she agreed. "I'll play this one straight. You're Frank Jacklin and Winnie Tompkins rolled into one. The point is, where do we go from here? Let's see you sign Jacklin's name."
I pulled out Winnie's gold, life-time fountain pen and wrote "Frank E. Jacklin" over and over again on the back of an envelope. She studied it carefully.
"That's no phony," she agreed, "and it's nothing like Winnie's handwriting. Think I could get a check cashed on it?"
"Let's try," I suggested. "Tomorrow when I get to the office I'll pre-date a check on the Riggs Bank at Washington. You mail it in for collection and we'll see if it clears."
She shook her head. "No dice! If I tried that, first thing we know we'd have the A.B.A. dicks after you for forgery. Can you think of anything else?"
"Not unless you go to Washington and see Dorothy in O.S.S. and ask her to verify my handwriting. Or, wait. You can go and talk to her and notice whether she wriggles her nose to keep her spectacles up. You can find out whether she's still nuts about Prokofiev. You can ask if she still thinks that Ernest Hemingway is a worse writer than Charles Dickens, and whether she still uses Chanel's Gardenia perfume."
"That's enough," she interrupted. "But how'm I going to get to Washington and do all these things?"
"Next week," I said, "you and I can fly down on a business trip—war-contracts, cut-backs, something official—and while I'm being whip-sawed by the desk-heroes you can check on Dorothy. See if I'm not right."