Free One Minute Past Eight by George Harmon Coxe

times when a woman was useful. If I would go to secretarial school he’d give me one year as a private detective without interference; he was willing to gamble that one year would cure me of the idea.”
    She looked up without moving her head. “I guess it sounds childish now,” she said softly. “I guess it is childish. But when you grow up with an idea that seems so important it’s not always easy to put it aside. With me I suppose it was a minor obsession.” She sighed and said:
    “So I did some studying and maybe Dad pulled some strings. Anyway I got the license and went to work and it couldn’t have been more dull. Sometimes I would follow people. I was never told why. I simply followed them—or tried to—until my feet were sore and my legs ached. When the day was over I wrote a report and that was that. I worked behind department-store counters, all kinds of counters, spying on the help to make sure they were honest. I felt like a spy. I hated it. I never had an exciting moment in nine months or even a very interesting one. Then they told me about coming here.”
    “How did they know I was coming?” Jeff asked. “How did they know about my stepbrother?”
    “They said there was a leak in your office.”
    “When did they tell you?”
    “Saturday.”
    “That was a quick leak,” Jeff said dryly. “This was the Tyler-Texas outfit that found this out?”
    “Yes. Actually I don’t know the details. All I know is that my boss said he had a job I’d like. He knew what plane you were taking and we tried to get a reservation on an earlier flight but by the time I managed to get tourist cards from the consul there wasn’t any earlier flight. It wasn’t until I got to the airport and you were pointed out to me that I even knew who you were.”
    “They told you to pick me up.”
    “Yes. They said the only chance I’d have to get the assignment from your stepbrother would be to get to Caracas first. All I had to do was get to know you and make you invite me to have a drink in the terminal restaurant. I asked why and they said the less I knew the better. They said they had been in touch with their Miami correspondents and that someone would meet me and take over. That’s why I had to wear the red hat and the gardenias; so the men would know me.”
    “What exactly were you supposed to do?”
    She straightened her leg and leaned forward, elbows on knees, her voice hardly more than a whisper.
    “They told me that when I got into the building I was to excuse myself and say I was going to the rest-room. Two men were to meet me and tell me what to do,” She wet her lips and said: “It scared me a little. I wanted to know what the men were going to do to you and they said not to worry, that there’d be no trouble. They had a way to make you miss the plane and I’d go on alone… Well, I didn’t know what to say. They made it sound so exciting and—” She groped for a word and Jeff supplied it,
    “Romantic?”
    “I suppose so,” she said and blushed. “And there was another reason. I was the one who wanted to be the private detective. I wanted to do something that was exciting—I’d been pestering them for a long time—and I couldn’t go to Dad and say I was afraid. I just couldn’t. My—my pride wouldn’t let me.”
    Jeff understood that much and it moved him strangely to know that while pride made her take the assignment, pride did not prevent her from letting him know how she felt.
    “So these two men met you,” he said.
    “Yes. And one of them gave me this little folded paper. He said to send you to the cigarette machine and put the powder in your drink. He said you’d never taste it. It wouldn’t hurt you, and when you started to get drowsy I was to bring you outside and they would handle the rest of it.”
    Again the color touched her cheeks and again her voice grew small “I told them I couldn’t. I knew then that they must have planned the whole thing before I left Boston. And now