Was Mrs. Coon at home?
Sorry. Mrs. Coon wasn’t. Who was calling, please?
Mr. Percy Hand was calling. When was Mrs. Coon expected?
That wasn’t known. Would Mr. Hand care to leave a message?
Mr. Hand wouldn’t.
I tried again an hour later, after five o’clock. Still no luck. The same maid gave me the same answers. This time, I asked her to have Mrs. Coon call Mr. Hand immediately upon her return home. The maid agreed, but the tone of her voice implied a polite skepticism of Mrs. Coon’s compliance.
I went downstairs to a lunchroom and bought a couple of corned beef sandwiches and a pint of coffee in a cardboard container. I carried the sandwiches and the coffee back to my office and had my dinner, pardon the expression, at my desk. I had what was left of the coffee with a couple of cigarettes. The container was drained and the second butt stubbed when the telephone began to ring, and it was Dulce Coon at last.
“I had word to call you,” she said. “What do you want?”
“I tried twice before to get you, but you weren’t home. I thought you’d want a report.”
“Go ahead and report. Did you see Benedict and the woman?”
“I saw them. They met at the bar in the Normandy Lounge, just as you said they would.”
“Did they leave together?”
“They did, two highballs and a martini later. They walked from the hotel to a garage and drove off in a gray sedan.”
“That’s Benedict’s car. Did you follow them?”
“After a fashion.”
“What do you mean by that? Either you did or you didn’t. Where did they go?”
“Briefly, I lost them. Or, to put it more accurately, they lost me. They ran a yellow and left a long line of traffic, including me, sitting on a red.”
“Why should they do that?”
“A good question. I was about to ask it myself. That tricky business at the light was planned. They did it to shake a tail, and I’d like to know how they knew they had one. Did you give it away?”
“Certainly not.”
“Somehow or other, he must have got onto it. Are you sure you weren’t followed to my office yesterday?”
“There was no reason why I should have been.”
“You said you overheard his conversation with the woman on an extension. Maybe he knew you were listening.”
“That’s absurd. If he had heard me lift the receiver, he’d have quit talking, and I didn’t hang up until after he did.”
“Nevertheless, he knew. Somehow he knew he was being tailed.”
“Obviously. Aren’t you, perhaps, just trying to make an excuse for yourself? You must have bungled the job by making yourself conspicuous or something. I thought following people was a kind of basic thing that detectives learned from their primer. It seems to me that any good one ought to know how to do it.”
“All right. So I’ll have to go back to kindergarten. Don’t worry, though. I’ll see that most of the fee is returned to you.”
“That won’t be necessary. I offered the fee without conditions.”
“It’s a lot of money for practically nothing.”
“I’ve spent more for less. I can afford it. Besides, this may not be the end of it. If there’s something very simple that you can do for me later, I’ll get in touch.”
“In the meanwhile,” I said, “I’ll be studying my primer.”
She hung up, and I hung up, and we left it at that. I tried to think of something simple to do with the evening, and the simplest thing I could think of was to go home and sleep, something which is even pre-primer in its simplicity. So I bought a pint of bourbon and took it to bed with me. Sometime after ten I went to sleep, and slept until almost seven the next morning.
At my office, I read a morning paper. Then I had a client who had a minor job to offer, and the job, which doesn’t matter, took me away for the rest of the morning. After a businessman’s special, I returned to the office and found the reception room full of Detective-Lieutenant Brady Baldwin, who tends to accumulate excessive fat around the belt buckle but none whatever between the ears. My relationship with Brady was good. Indeed, my relationship with all the city’s official guardians was good. The reason, I think, was that we shared roughly the same brackets on the income-tax schedule. No class war where we were concerned.
“Hello, Brady,” I said. “What brings you here?”
“Nothing brings me,” he said. “Someone sent me.”
“That’s what comes from being discreet and efficient. You build a reputation. I’ve got a million references, Brady.”
“Well, that wasn’t quite the way this particular reference was. I’ve been talking with Mrs. Benedict Coon III.”
“You can’t please everybody. She didn’t have to sic the cops on me, though. I offered to return most of the fee.”
“I don’t know anything about fees. Myself, I work on a salary. Someday I may get a pension. Invite me in, Percy. I’ve got a question or two.”
“Sure. Come on in.”
We went into the office, and Brady uncovered his naked skull and put the lid on a corner of my desk. He took a cigar out of the breast pocket of his coat, looked at it a moment and put it
