Page:Barbour--Peggy in the rain.djvu/144

 "And—I beg your pardon—does it—do they pay a good salary?"

"I work on space. Sometimes I make twenty dollars a week, sometimes thirty. Once I made nearly fifty. That was when that Italian woman was charged with murdering her husband. Do you remember? He had four or five hundred dollars in an Italian bank and the police found that she had been making inquiries about the money, apparently trying to find how much it amounted to. They almost sent her to the chair on that evidence. McConnell and Jim Crandall and I worked on that for over a month. It was really Jim who found out about the lover, although the police got the credit for it. They got him in Palermo and brought him back and he confessed."

"And you like that sort of thing!" he exclaimed incredulously.

"Yes, I think I do. There are times when—oh, there are always 'times' with every one, aren't there? And it brings me a living, Mr. Ames."

"A living! Fifty dollars a week!"

"Well, let's say thirty to be safe. And then I do a little writing besides; articles and stories for the cheaper magazines, you know."