What annoyed him even more was the fact that the ingénue was behaving like a road-company Theda Bara. She pouted, she hooded her eyes, she undulated her shoulders and heaved her poitrine like the High Priestess of the Python.
"Now where have I seen that corn-ball playing that routine before?" Lennox asked himself. Suddenly he remembered. An ingénue in a velvet gown trimmed with miniver, batting her eyes at Oliver Stacy over a champagne glass. He began to laugh. The girl looked up, caught his eye, and gave him a slinky undulation. Lennox arose and bowed. Then he reached into his water glass, took out a lump of ice and dropped it into her cleavage.
He didn't have to pick himself up off the sidewalk, but there was no doubt he'd been thrown out of Sabatini's.
"Live dangerously," he chuckled and was afflicted with thirst. He quenched it with a bottle of stout at the saloon in the network building and then wandered upstairs to visit the studios.
He poked his head into rehearsals and waved affectionately to friends and strangers. The last studio down the corridor was on the air with some kind of radio mystery. Lennox tip-toed in, waved, and placed himself alongside the sound table where the soundman stood with a gun poised in his hand while a couple of gangster-type actors snarled at each other on mike. Lennox watched the script over the soundman's shoulder, and as the gunshot cue came up, on sudden impulse he snatched the gun out of the soundman's hand.
The director behind the glass waved frantically. The actors shook their scripts at him. The soundman struggled to get hold of the gun.
"Bang!" Lennox shouted. He beamed, put the gun down quietly and tip-toed out.
"My girl doesn't approve of violence. Guns and such," he confided to the bartender in the Greek's.
"The peaceful teep, huh, Jake?"
"A veritable dove of peace." He considered. "Chris.... What's the difference between doves and pigeons?"