He raced after them, catching up in the corridor that opened into the lobby. Two things brought him to a dead stop. One was the strong feeling that it was beneath a newly appointed resident agent’s dignity to haul prospective customers back into an office which they had just quit so abruptly. After all, this was no cut-rate clothing shop—it was the McGowan Building.
The other was the sudden realization that the tall man was alone. There was no sign of the tiny man. Except—possibly—for the substantial bulge in the right-hand pocket of the tall man’s overcoat…
“A pair of cranks,” he told himself as he swung around and walked back to the office. “Not legitimate clients at all.”
He insisted on Miss Kerstenberg’s listening to the entire story, despite Professor Scoggins’s stern injunctions against overfraternization with the minor clerical help. She cluck-clucked and tsk-tsked and stared earnestly at him through her thick glasses.
“Cranks, wouldn’t you say, Miss Kerstenberg?” he asked her when he’d finished. “Hardly legitimate clients, eh?”
“I wouldn’t know, Mr. Blake,” she replied, inflexibly unpresumptuous. She rolled a sheet of letterhead stationery into her typewriter. “Do you want the Hopkinson mailing to go out this afternoon?”
“What? Oh, I guess so. I mean, of course. By all means this afternoon, Miss Kerstenberg. And I want to see it for a double-check before you mail it.”
He strode into his own office and huddled behind the desk. The whole business had upset him very much. His first big rental possibility. And that little man—Bohu was his name?—and that bulging pocket—
Not until quite late in the afternoon was he able to concentrate on his work. And that was when he got the phone call.
“Blake?” the voice crackled. “This is Gladstone Jimm.”