“Yeah.” I held the coveralls out of the window, slapped the coal-dust out of them, took off my damp suit-coat and laid it on top of the desk, got the electric iron out of the desk-drawer and plugged it in. Our sign said Coleman & Hambright, Private Investigators , and we had to maintain appearances, but I wished we could afford a store-bought pressing. I brushed my pants, but they were damp, too, so I took them off and laid them out on the desktop, over some papers, with the creases pinched tight. I mopped my brow and went into the other room.

Slim Coleman looked up from a workbench covered with wires, tubes, condensers, and all kinds of electrical gadgets. He had a soldering-iron poised above something that looked like a forty-eight-tube radio. He had deep, deep brown eyes that always looked through everybody, but Slim was a hundred-percent. In fact, it was his loyalty that had us behind the eight-ball now. If he had dissolved partnership instead of offering to pay the damages the time I fell from a second-story window and went through a skylight into a whole tableful of expensive orchids⁠—but no, Slim paid it all⁠—twenty-two hundred dollars before he got through, because the cold air ruined a lot more orchids. And I hadn’t even gotten the evidence I was after. (No, it was just happenstance that I fell from the bedroom window of a movie star.)

“What luck?” said Slim in his husky voice.

“I served them, but look, Slim, I hope you get that Brain-Finder going pretty quick. Not that I mind crawling under the length of three pullman cars and cutting my ankles on the cinders to serve divorce papers on Tom Ellingbery, who’s worth a million. Not that I mind doing all that for a measly five bucks, but when I have to come through the sidewalk in the summertime to duck the landlord⁠—”

Coleman’s face lighted up. “The Brain-Finder is ready for a tryout,” he said. “Shall I show you yourself the night of July the Fourth?”