The heat almost smothered me after the coolness of the lobby. Damn that guy Swanberg, anyway. He was always so perfect, so completely unaffected by the weather, so supercilious and so cold, so mechanical. You knew he'd never had any trouble and never would have, because he would never be swayed by anything but cold logic. It's only we humans with sentiments who get in trouble.
It was his untouchableness that griped me. He was so inhumanly perfect he always made me feel rough and uncouth. You know how it is. If I could just get something on him to throw off that complex, I'd be happy even if we did have to vacate. I guess I spent my time day-dreaming about Swanberg—Swanberg wearing an old-fashioned night-cap, Swanberg slurping his coffee, Swanberg sleeping with his socks on—anything human.
What wouldn't I have given to have a picture of him in the roller coaster the way I had been the night of July the Fourth, with a perfectly strange, perfectly gorgeous, slim blonde throwing her arms around his neck the way that one had around mine. I was willing to bet he had a big, hefty wife at home who made him step.
I shivered whenever I thought about that blonde. She was the kind I would have liked to marry, only one like that was way out of my reach. I didn't have much education and I didn't always know what to do around a real high-class female. That's why I had been riding the roller coaster alone.
Well, there was nothing for it now but the coal-chute. A truck was backed up to the sidewalk and two very black-faced men were pushing coal down a steel chute through a manhole in the sidewalk. I ducked into the alley, unrolled the bundle under my arm, and threw out a pair of khaki coveralls. I hated this, but I did it anyway; I had to. We couldn't afford to have my suit cleaned every time I went in through the sidewalk, so I got into the coveralls and zipped them up. I watched around the corner. When the truckers raised the steel bed, I walked up to the open hole in the sidewalk and dropped in casually.
I'm a short man anyway, a little on the chunky side, and that coal-hole was like a furnace. The sweat poured down my back and chest and the coal-dust poured into my nostrils. I got out of there as fast as I could and took the freight elevator to the twenty-second floor. I went through the hall, unlocked the door, got inside, and locked it again.
"That you, Doc?" came Slim Coleman's deep voice.
"Yeah." I held the coveralls out of the window, slapped the coal-dust out of them, took off my damp suit-coat and laid it on top of the desk, got the electric iron out of the desk-drawer and plugged it in. Our sign said Coleman & Hambright, Private Investigators, and we had to maintain appearances, but I wished we could afford a store-bought pressing. I brushed my pants, but they were damp, too, so I took them off and laid them out on the desk-top, over some papers, with the creases pinched tight. I mopped my brow and went into the other room.
Slim Coleman looked up from a work-bench covered with wires, tubes, condensers, and all kinds of electrical gadgets. He had a soldering-iron poised above something that looked like a forty-eight-tube radio. He had deep, deep brown eyes that always looked through everybody, but Slim was a hundred-per-cent. In fact, it was his loyalty that had us behind the eight-ball now. If he had dissolved partnership instead of offering to pay the damages the time I fell from a second-story window and went through a skylight into a whole tableful of expensive orchids—but no, Slim paid it all—twenty-two hundred dollars before he got through, because the cold air ruined a lot more orchids. And I hadn't even gotten the evidence I was after. (No, it was just happenstance that I fell from the bedroom window of a movie star.)