But even the big, powerful portable failed to pick up the local station. Mrs. Goudeket refused to think of what that might mean.
Alone again, she realized that she'd have to send somebody out into that terrible rain, send them to town, the Times office or any other phone they could reach. She had to know what was coming next. Send who? Not the bartender; he was the most valuable man on the premises right now. Dave Wax was next, and the kitchen help couldn't be spared. Dick McCue, the "golf pro"—nineteen years old, doubling in trumpet—where was he? He should be in the social hall backing up Dave Wax, keeping the people busy, keeping their minds off—whatever it was. Where was he?
And then she thought, distastefully, of exactly whom she'd have to send. Sharon Froman, she called herself, and in the wild week before opening she had let Sharon Froman foist herself on Green Acres as a "publicity director"—just room, board, ten a week for the season. At first Sharon Froman had actually worked; she had written good stories that actually appeared, not cut too badly, in the issues of the New York Post which also carried Green Acres advertisements; maybe she had even got them a couple of guests. That lasted for about ten days, and then Sharon Froman had slowly withdrawn from any hotel activity except eating; when you passed her room at any time of the day or night you were as likely as not to hear the muffled thudding of a noiseless portable. When Mrs. Goudeket barged in or met her in the dining room and asked how the publicity stories were coming, Sharon Froman would smile vaguely, teasingly, and say something that didn't, after you stopped to think of it, make sense. "I think I've got a very dynamic program lined up, Mrs. Goudeket, and I'm polishing the rough spots."
Black-haired, square-jawed, near-sighted, in her early thirties, a persuasive talker—Mrs. Goudeket was the living proof of that—groomed either to perfection or not at all, maybe five feet six, easily twenty pounds overweight. Sharon Froman. The perfect expendable to go out and learn the score. Mrs. Goudeket started grimly up the steps. You better be feeling good and dynamic, Miss Sharon Froman, she thought, nerving herself for a battle. I got some real rough spots for you to polish now.
In the bat's nest that that sneaking old hag Goudeket called a room, Miss Sharon Froman was lovingly recopying chapter one of Her Novel. Her only light was a candle socketed in the sticky neck of an empty Southern Comfort bottle, and the flame flickered and turned blue regularly as the wind swept through the closed windows. What a shack, thought Miss Sharon Froman, not in anger but in judgment.
But it had its compensations. She could see the jacket copy for the novel now: "Spraddled Evening is an odd book, written at odd times in odd places. Begun in a shabby trailer outside a Mississippi Army camp—" She grimaced, remembering how perfectly foul Ritchie had been when she'd had story conferences with Don while Ritchie was restricted to the post—"it was shaped and polished by turns in the club car of a transcontinental train, a cold-water flat in the East Bronx, a luxury resort hotel and a Jersey fishing village, reaching its evocative climax while Miss Froman was—" Well, that you would have to wait and see, thought Miss Froman, taking page 2 out of the typewriter. But the end was almost in sight. The first chapter set the tone for the whole book; and now that that was nearly perfect it was only a dash to the finish line.
She lit a cigarette from the candle before she put page three into the typewriter. Page three was the one that would do Hesch in the eye. He'd be sure to recognize the savagely drawn, feudal-minded pants presser if he read it—and he'd be goddam sure to read it, if he had to hock the watch she'd given him to get the price. Sixty bucks that watch had cost out of her share of his Christmas bonus, and it was the only decent thing he owned. "So why doesn't he sell it," she demanded of the wind, "if he's so broke he can't keep up the alimony?"
She knew as soon as she heard the knock on the door that it was Mrs. Goudeket. The chapter went into the bulging file under the bed; the half-page beginning on the story about Dick McCue went into the typewriter, using the paper bail so Old Bat-Ears wouldn't hear the ratchet clicking. "Come in, please," she called, with just the proper annoyance at being interrupted.
She glanced coldly at her employer.