Tobin, back in his cabin, calculated the time and decided to hell with it. He had to find out why somebody took the newspaper clippings relating to Everett Sanderson's presence on the cruise ship and left everything else.
He took one of Sanderson's brochures, looked at the phone number and town name and zip code rubber-stamped on the back of it, and then picked up the phone.
He first tried the number of the agency itself and got a ghostly answering machine, one of those recordings that sound as if they'd been made by a poltergeist. It said the agency was closed and would be open at 8:00 a.m. tomorrow, if tomorrow was a weekday. Then, fortunately, it left another number to call in case of emergency.
Tobin certainly considered this an emergency. On the fourteenth ring a woman with a cigarette cough answered the phone. Tobin said, "Hello?"
The woman kept coughing and finally said, "Who the hell is this anyway?"
The detective agency wasn't nearly as friendly as it had promised to be in the brochure.