“Your mouth could have shrunk, maybe,” I said, “but how could your nose have got that much longer?”
“If you don’t like my nose,” she said, “how’d you like to go to hell?” Her face had turned red.
“That’s not the point. It’s a swell nose, but it’s not Sue’s.” I held the photograph out to her. “See for yourself.”
She glared at the photograph and then at the man.
“What a smart guy you are,” she told him.
He was watching me with dark eyes that had a brittle shine to them between narrow-drawn eyelids. He kept on watching me while he spoke to her out the side of his mouth, crisply:
“Pipe down.”
She piped down. He sat and watched me. I sat and watched him. A clock ticked seconds away behind me. His eyes began shifting their focus from one of my eyes to the other. The girl sighed.
He said in a low voice: “Well?”
I said: “You’re in a hole.”
“What can you make out of it?” he asked casually.
“Conspiracy to defraud.”
The girl jumped up and hit one of his shoulders angrily with the back of a hand, crying:
“What a smart guy you are, to get me in a jam like this. It was going to be duck soup—yeh! Eggs in the coffee—yeh! Now look at you. You haven’t