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got to him.
    “Well. Your personal involvement with Mr. Cliff is out of my line, and anyway I am temporarily his rival for your affections. Did you hear the temporarily?”
    “Yes.”
    “Okay. As for your job, that depends on how good an operative you are. If you’re good, we can probably smooth it over with Miss Bonner after she cools off. We can’t possibly tell her you walked into my car, but I can sound extremely plausible if my heart’s in it, andfor the present my heart is yours. However, the real point is that I was born curious. I can’t explain why I have a feeling that whoever put quinine in Tingley’s Titbits was daring me to find it out and prove it, but I have. I used to pretend I could ignore such things, but I can’t. So I’m not going to.”
    He got his hat from the table. “You’ll hear from me. I don’t know when. I’m in the Westchester phone book. So long.”

Chapter 3

    A t eleven o’clock the following morning, Tuesday, there were three persons in the dingy anteroom of the Tingley offices on the second floor of the old building on 26th Street: a red-faced youth getting his change and a receipted bill at the cashier’s window, a man in a gray suit waiting on a chair, and another man on another chair looking ferociously patient, with a large sample case on the floor between his feet. The seated men watched the youth pocket his change and leave. Soon afterward a door leading within opened and a man emerged—an erect man of sixty in a conservative and expensive topcoat and dark felt hat to match—and left by the exit to the hall. His appearance seemed to remind the man in the gray suit of something, for he got out a notebook and pencil, wrote in a neat hand, “GJ88 at TT Tues.,” and returned the tools to his pocket.
    Five minutes later noises issued from the aperture of the cashier’s window. The man in the gray suit, deducing that they were intended for him, arose and approached. The old man with rheumy eyes peered through and said:
    “Mr. Tingley is very busy. He wants to know what you want to see him about.”
    The man in the gray suit got out the tools again, tore out a sheet from the notebook and wrote on it, “Quinine,” folded it and handed it through the hole.
    “Send that to him, please.”
    In another three minutes he was invited inside and a woman with a snub nose appeared to conduct him to the room whose door still said THOMAS TINGLEY. He entered, said good morning politely, and told the man seated at the roll-top desk that it was Mr. Arthur Tingley he had asked to see.
    “I’m Arthur Tingley.” The plump but sagging face of the man at the desk looked as harried and exasperated as his voice sounded. He exhibited a slip of paper. “What the devil is this? Who are you?”
    “I sent my name in. Fox. A man by the name of Fox.” The visitor pre-empted a chair that was by the corner of the desk, and smiled pleasantly. “I live up in the country, up near Brewster. Last week I bought some jars of Tingley’s Titbits, and when one of them was opened it tasted bitter. A chemist friend of mine analyzed it for me, and he says it has quinine in it. How do you suppose that happened?”
    “I don’t know,” said Tingley shortly. “Where is it?”
    “The jar? My friend still has it.”
    “What kind was it?”
    “Liver Pâté Number Three.”
    Tingley grunted. “Where did you buy it?”
    “At Bruegel’s on Madison Avenue.”
    “Bruegel’s? My God! That’s the first—” Tingley stopped abruptly and regarded his caller with a flinty stare.
    “I rather supposed,” said Fox sympathetically,“that I was bringing you some startling news, but apparently not. You see, I’m a detective. Tecumseh Fox. You may possibly have heard of me.”
    “How the devil would I hear of you?”
    “I thought you might be one of the few who have.” Only the perceptive eyes of a Pokorny would have caught the faint flicker of his vanity’s discomfiture. “No matter. The point is that,