The Case of the Missing Secretary

“Betsy was no threat to your job,” he told her. “I don’t combine my personal relationships with my business ones. I thought you knew that.”

She knew that he was going to marry Betsy, and she couldn’t bear it. Not only was she losing the only man she’d ever loved, but she was losing him to a woman who’d cut his heart out and roast it over a pile of blazing hundred-dollar bills. Betsy would take him for every cent he had. She glanced over at him curiously. How, she wondered, could a man with a brain such as his be so terminally stupid when it came to women?

“You aren’t going to be happy working in a detective agency,” he persisted.

“But I am,” she corrected. She smiled smugly. “I’m treated like a person there. When I do something right, I get praised for it. When I do something wrong,” she added with a meaningful look, “nobody rages at me in disgusting language and threatens to feed me my handbag.”

“How boring.”

She smothered a laugh and looked away.

“You miss me, damn you,” he murmured, smiling at her averted face. “Our daily battles kept you going when nothing else did. You loved trying to get one up on me. Remember the day the Brazilian businessmen came to the office and you spent thirty minutes trying to speak Spanish to them?”

“You told me they spoke it.”

“You should have known that the national language of Brazil is Portuguese. Anyway, you got even.”

“Indeed I did,” she recalled with a grin. “I borrowed one of the girls from the secretarial pool who spoke no English and sent her in to take dictation from you while I took a two-hour lunch break.”

“I almost broke your neck,” he said shortly. “She sat there and nodded and smiled at me for thirty minutes before I realized that she didn’t understand a word I said.”

“The girls in the next office did.” She chuckled. “They said you were very eloquent. In fact, one of them wanted to have you arrested.”

“The good old days,” he said wistfully. He glared at her. “Now I have two helpers who get down on their knees and thank God when I leave the office, and a third who spends her life trying to bend me back over my own desk.”

“Oh, my,” she said.

“You might pretend to be sympathetic. It’s uncomfortable to work in that kind of environment.”

“Now you know how women feel,” she replied.

He glared at her. “I don’t recall ever chasing you around the office or trying to bend you over a desk!”

More’s the pity, she wanted to say. But she only replied, “No, sir, you never did.”

“Do you know, I’ve actually thought about reporting her for harassment?”

“If she makes you that uncomfortable, why not just fire her?”

“Because she can spell, Morris.” He exploded. “She can spell! That’s something neither of the others can do!”

“You could ask the agency to send you someone with good spelling skills.”

“I did,” he replied tersely. “They sent me Margo of the peekaboo bosom.”

She put her face in her hands, but she couldn’t stem the laughter.

“Come back,” he invited roughly. “I’ll give you a raise. You can have a new desk. I’ll fix the damned window that sticks.”

“I’m very tempted,” she said, and meant it. But she’d never be able to stomach Betsy at close range. “But I like my new job too much to quit now.”

“I hope Dane isn’t assigning you anything dangerous.”

“Now, see here,” she began defensively.

“Here we are!” He stopped the car, helped her out and escorted her into the building and up the elevator to his office.

“Now,” he said, opening the door for her. “Find that file!”

She blinked twice before she walked into the luxurious carpeted office. The spot where Betsy had thrown coffee at her three weeks before was still there. No one had come to clean it up. The coffeemaker was standing empty and very dirty. Three desks were piled high with file folders and stacks of correspondence. Diskettes for the computer were lying around, out of their jackets. One of the women had gray hair and was very tall. She was smoking and her ashes were everywhere. Another was talking on the telephone, apparently to someone male. She smiled at Logan and deliberately leaned forward to show her cleavage.

“Hello, Margo,” Kit said sweetly.

“Hi! How did you know my name?” the girl replied, and suddenly went back to the voice on the other end of the line.

“Cute,” Logan muttered.

Kit walked toward the third desk, the only neat one, where a third woman, plain and harassed-looking, was flipping through files.

“Not yet, I’m afraid,” she told Logan in an apprehensive tone. She looked about twenty, a country-looking girl with a patent vulnerability in her face, and Kit felt a surge of sympathy for her.

“Here, let me help,” Kit said kindly. Laying aside her purse, she bent over the stack and in seconds, extricated the one Logan had demanded. “Here.”

He took it and glared at the young woman.

“How could I know that it would be filed under Portfolios?” she asked plaintively. “I’m new…!”

“I’m Kit Morris.” Kit introduced herself.

“I’m Melody Cartman,” came the reply. She glanced toward Logan, who was making a telephone call. “You used to work here, didn’t you? No wonder you left! See Harriet over there? She’d stopped smoking for ten years when she came to work here. Now she’s gone back. She’s smoking three packs a day, and she’s got a bottle of Scotch in her desk!”

“I can understand why,” Kit mused. Logan, buried in his file, hadn’t noticed them discussing him.

“Margo isn’t afraid of him. She likes men. Especially rich ones. He has a girlfriend and she’s terrible. She expects us to stop everything and wait on her. Not to his face, of course,” she muttered. “She’s sweetness and light the minute he walks in the door.”

“Now you know why I don’t work here anymore.”

“He’s my third cousin,” Melody groaned, glancing at him. “He’s just like one other terrible member of the family. If I’d had any idea he was like this, I’d never have let Tansy talk me into this job. But the company I worked for went bust and I just couldn’t bear to go back to San Antonio.” She hesitated. “I’m stuck here!”

“Listen,” Kit said, raising her voice, “we’re short one detective at the agency where I work….”

“Shut up, Morris,” Logan said menacingly as he slammed the telephone receiver back onto the cradle. “You aren’t stealing any of my people.”

He moved away and Melody groaned. “See? We’re slaves. He owns us! I’ll never see my apartment again…!”

“There, there, it will be all right. I’ll take a few minutes and explain my filing system to you. Then you won’t have this problem again.”