A voice yelled: “Come in.”
There were three men in the small room. One sat at a typewriter near the window. He had a leathery good-natured face and he spoke evenly into the telephone beside him: “Sure... Sure...”
The other two were playing cooncan on a suit-box balanced on their laps. One of them put down his hand, put the suit-box carefully on the floor, stood up. Kells said: “Fenner.”
The man at the telephone put one hand over the mouthpiece, turned his head to call through an open door behind him: “A gent to see you, Lee.”
The man who had stood up walked to the door and nodded at someone in the next room and turned to Kells. “In here.”
Kells went past him into the room and closed the door behind him.
That room was larger. Fenner, a slight, silver-haired man of about fifty, was lying on a bed in his trousers and undershirt. There was an electric light on the wall behind the bed. Fenner put down the paper he had been reading and swung up to sit facing Kells. He said, “Sit down,” and picked up his shoes and put them on. Then he went over and raised the blind on one of the windows that looked out on Spring Street. He said:
“Well, Kells — is it hot enough for you?”
Kells nodded, said sarcastically: “You’re harder to see than De Mille. I called your hotel and they made me get a Congressional Okay and make out a couple dozen affidavits before they gave me this number.” He jerked his head toward the little room through which he had entered. “What’s it all about?” Fenner sat down in a big chair and smiled sleepily. He took a crumpled package of Home Runs out of his pocket, extracted a cigarette and lighted it. “About a year ago,” he said, “a man named Dickinson — a newspaperman — came out here with a bright idea and a little capital, and started a scandal sheet called the Coaster.” Fenner inhaled his cigarette deeply, blew a soft gray cone of smoke toward the ceiling. “He ran it into the ground on the blackmail side and got into a couple libel jams...”
Kells said: “I remember.”