"Okay," I told her. "I'll be in about four this afternoon and will handle any calls or visitors then."
I turned to Harcourt. "It doesn't sound like much but Phil Cone thinks I once consulted Ernestina Clump. Want me to make an appointment?"
He nodded, so I looked up her number and dialed the office in the Chrysler Building where Miss Clump kept track of the stars in their courses and the millionaires in their jitters.
Arranging for an immediate appointment through the very, very well-bred secretarial voice that stiff-armed me was not easy until I said that I would pay double-fees. Then she believed it might be arranged. "That will be two thousand dollars," she imparted, "and you must be here at one o'clock precisely."
As we taxied downtown together, Harcourt was uncommunicative, except for the remark that it was right handy to Grand Central and would be no trick to stop off before catching trains.
Miss Clump, as it turned out, was a motherly woman whose wrinkled cheeks and plump hands suggested greater familiarity with the cook-stove than with the planets. Her office showed the most refined kind of charlatanry--everything quite solid and in good taste, with no taint of the Zodiac. At a guess, about ten thousand dollar's worth of furnishings was involved and I imagined that the annual rental might run as high as six thousand.
"Well, Mr. Tompkins," Miss Clump remarked in a pleasant, homey voice with a trace of Mid-Western flatness, "I wondered when you would be in to see me again. The stars being mean to you? Or is it another woman?"
"Let's see," I stalled, "when was the last time I consulted you?"
She cackled. "Young man, you've been comin' to see me, off and on, the last ten years. Last time was in March. That was about the red-head. Virgo in the House of Scorpio you called it."
I nodded. "That would be it, I guess. She's more scorpion than virgin."
She patted my hand comfortingly across the table. "They all are," she said, "unless they're really in love. Then even the stars can't stop 'em. What's the matter now?"
"Police," I said. "Loss of memory. Women and money are all right but I'm being followed and I've drawn sort of blank for the whole month of March. Can you take a look at my horoscope and tell me what the stars were doing to me then?"