“Liz, that must be him!” she exclaimed in a half whisper, pointing. “Mr. Gold! Or Mr. Diamond—depending on who you believe.”

The man who had just crossed Franklin Street paused in front of the diner, took off his hat, and mopped his bald head with a handkerchief. He was of medium height and wore a light gray three-piece suit and gray hat. He put his hat back on, pocketed his handkerchief, and glanced back over his shoulder with an air of caution, as if to make sure he was not being followed.

Lizzy pulled in her breath and peered, trying to get a good look. This was the man Verna suspected of being a member of the Capone gang—or was he a government agent? “It looks like he’s going into the diner,” she said.

Bessie’s grip tightened and she pulled Lizzy forward. “No. He’s heading for the telephone booth. He’s going to make a phone call!”

The booth was a new feature in town, and the only one of its kind. It was said of Mr. Whitey Whitworth, half owner of the Darling Telephone Exchange (Myra May and Violet owned the other half), that he had more money than sense, and that the phone booth was a good example.

The year before, Mr. Whitworth had taken a trip to Atlanta, where he had seen his very first telephone booth on the sidewalk in front of the National Bank of Georgia. All you had to do was plug enough nickels, dimes, and quarters into the three slots at the top of the phone and you could call anybody, anywhere in the country, maybe even the world, if the person you were calling in France or Italy or wherever had a telephone and you knew the number. He had been so fascinated by the way the pay telephone worked and the cheerful clink-clink-clink of the coins dropping into the coin box that he had spent all of three dollars making long-distance calls to his whole family.

And when somebody told him that big-city folks had been using outdoor telephone booths since before Theodore Roosevelt built the Panama Canal, he had decided that it was high time Darling had one, so that people who came to town and discovered that they needed to telephone their homes or businesses wouldn’t have to pester the merchants on the square to use their phones. And if a citizen of Darling didn’t have a phone at home, by golly, he or she could walk the few blocks to the square and use the pay phone. Mr. Whitworth thought it was bound to be a paying proposition.