"Yeah," he agreed at last. "Could be, though we'll have to check her and her secretary and her clients, right up to but _not_ including Democratic Senators and Cabinet officers." "How about barbershops?" I asked him. "Or drugstores? I've always thought they'd make the best intelligence centers in America. You can't keep track of everybody who buys a dime's worth of aspirin or a package of Kleenex. What's to prevent the cigar counter at any hotel or drug store being the place where two Nazi agents meet. The clerks wouldn't know them and in a town like this nobody would even notice them." The Special Agent finished his drink and banged the glass down on the table. "That's just the trouble with this town," he announced. "There's so many services here that everybody uses you can't possibly check them. Well, you run on down to your office and see if you can't find out something else. Thanks for the lift on Miss Clump. Now I've got to call headquarters and get a special detail to go to work on her." "You don't seriously think that she knows anything about Von Bieberstein, do you?" I asked. He smiled ruefully. "No, I don't, but the way you describe her, she's a sort of nice, old-fashioned woman, and yet she drags down a thousand bucks for fifteen minutes of astral horse-feathers in this tough burg. There's something screwy about a set-up like that. Now I've seen the files on most of the big-time astrologers that operated here--Evangeline Adams and Myra Kingsley were tops in their time--and there's not one of them can touch this Clump woman for money. I don't forget that the first woman I ever arrested--it was before I joined the Bureau and I was on the homicide detail in Raleigh--was just as sweet and gentle as your Aunt Minnie. All she'd done was poison her husband and her two children so's to be free to sleep with her brother-in-law. So it's going to be plenty work for the Bureau to check this one, before we're sure she's okay." I told him that I didn't enjoy being put in the position of an F.B.I. Typhoid Mary, who automatically exposed his acquaintances to immediate visitations of G-men. "Shucks! Mr. Tompkins," he assured me, "they'll never know we're around. We got a pretty smooth outfit now and we have ways of checking you never dreamed of. When we go to work, we do a neat job and if we don't learn anything, well, that's that--but we don't bother folks while were doing it." "All right," I agreed. "I'll be down at the office until the morning." CHAPTER 28 The highly respectable receptionist at the office of Tompkins, Wasson & Cone almost smiled at me. "There are several gentlemen waiting for you, Mr. Tompkins," she announced. "Some of them have been here since before lunch. Do you plan to receive them or shall I ask them to return tomorrow?" "No, I'll see them in a few minutes," I replied. "Miss Briggs will let you know."