“I sincerely hope not. Let Mr. Cramer’s assurance include me.”
Her eyes went around. “What about these men?”
“They are trained confidential assistants. They hold their tongues or they lose their jobs.”
The tip of her tongue came out and went in. “I’m not satisfied, but what can I do? If my only choice is between this and the whole New York detective force pawing at me, the Lord knows I take this. I phoned Leo Heller ten days ago, and he came to my office and spent two hours there. It was a business matter, not a personal one. I’m going to tell you exactly what it was, because I’m no good at ad libbing a phony. I was a damn fool to say that about the stolen ring.”
She was hating it, but she went on. “You said I have sense enough to get and hold a well-paid job in a highly competitive field, but if you only knew. It’s not a field, it’s a corral of wild beasts. There are six female tigers trying to get their claws on my job right now, and if they all died tonight there would be six others tomorrow. If it came out what I went to Leo Heller for, that would be the finish of me.”
The tip of her tongue flashed out and in. “So that’s what this means to me. A magazine like Mode has two main functions, reporting and predicting. American women want to know what is being made and worn in Paris and New York, but even more they want to know what is going to be made and worn next season. Mode’s reporting has been good enough — I’ve been all right on that — but for the past year our predictions have been utterly rotten. We’ve got the contacts, but something has gone haywire, and our biggest rival has made monkeys of us. Another year like that, even another season, and good-by.”
Wolfe grunted. “To the magazine?”
“No, to me. So I decided to try Leo Heller. We had carried a piece about him, and I had met him. The idea was to give him everything we had — and we had plenty — about styles and colors and trends for the past ten years, and have him figure the probabilities six months ahead. He thought it was feasible, and I don’t think he was a faker. He had to come to the office to go through our stuff, and of course I had to camouflage it, what he was there for, but that wasn’t hard. Do you want to know what I told them he was doing?”
“I think not,” Wolfe muttered.
“So he came. I phoned him the next day, and he said it would take him at least a week to determine whether he had enough information to make up a probability formula. Yesterday I phoned again, and he said he had something to discuss and asked me to call at his place this morning. I went. You know the rest of it.”