Rex Stout Read Online Free PDF

goodbye.”
    “I won’t! I won’t look at it! I …” Sylvia went to the desk and stood there looking down into her former partner’s caramel-colored eyes. After a moment she demanded: “Dol, am I a louse?” After another moment: “Oh, damn!”she exploded, and turned and ran out of the room. Foltz followed her.
    Dol surveyed the ex-newspaper man and said, “Go on, Len. Go away.”
    Chisholm stood looking surly. “I won’t if you don’t. Come to lunch.”
    “Len Chisholm.” Dol’s voice had bite in it. “You need that job. Realpolitik. Run.”
    Len strode to the door, turned there, extended his long arms as a suppliant, and whined, “Sister, can you spare a dime?” Then he flung the door open and was gone.
    As the door banged behind him Dol Bonner winced, just perceptibly. She sat straight listening to the sound of his four steps crossing the ante-room, and the opening and closing of the door to the corridor, then she crossed her arms on the blue-lacquered desk-top and let her head go down to them. Apparently she was not crying, for her trim shoulders in a lightweight tan woolen dress, and her soft light brown hair, all that showed of her head, were motionless.
    She was still like that ten minutes later, when there was a light tapping at the door and it began to open cautiously.
    Dol jerked herself up. “Come in.”
    It was the Mediterranean girl. Dol asked, “Yes?” The girl said: “A man wants to know if you will be here at one o’clock. It’s twenty minutes to one.”
    “What man?”
    “He won’t give his name. He sounds … important.”
    “Maybe he is. It doesn’t matter. I’ll be here.”
    The girl went. When the door had closed again, Dol got up and walked to a window and stood there looking down at roofs and chasms. After a while her arms went up and out and she stretched herself thoroughly, then patted and pulled at the woolen dress, down and around. She wandered about the room, looking at this and touching that, finally stopped in front of a picture on the wall between the windows, a fine engraving of a stodgy pile of a building with an inscription beneath: NEW SCOTLAND YARD. She wasn’t really looking at it; she had not liked it, thinking it pretentious or ridiculous, or both, to have it there; Sylvia had insisted on it as the display of an ideal. Dol Bonner wasthinking of something else; her practical, impatient and lonely mind had no time to waste on ideals, either as goals or as decorations. Suddenly she turned and went to the door, entered the ante-room, and crossed to the desk in the corner.
    She said to the girl: “Martha, I ought to tell you. I have to give you a week’s notice. Should it be two weeks?”
    “Why—” The girl gasped. “You mean—Miss Bonner—” Her face flamed. “I thought—”
    “We’re shutting the office. Quitting. Dissolving the firm. If it should be two weeks you’ll get the pay. You’re okay, and you’d earn more than you’d get, anywhere. I know lots of people, and I won’t mind doing one of them a favor by telling him to hire you.”
    “Oh … I can get a job any time.” So the tears that had appeared in Martha’s eyes were not for that. “But it’s so wonderful here with you and Miss Raffray … you don’t really … really have to dissolve.…”
    “Don’t you dissolve in tears.—Or maybe you ought to. I’ve never been able to manage it—it—must be convenient for you people, keeping your emotional pipes clean and open with all that flushing—good heavens, you really are—”
    Dol turned and fled back to her room and went to her desk. She was definitely uncomfortable and irritated, but not, she thought, depressed. The contretemps had its consolations. She hated to lose Sylvia because she loved and admired her, but it would bring satisfaction to be on her own. A cheaper and dingier office would be less pleasant, since she had all her life been accustomed to desirable things, even elegant ones, but after all a