The gun was the only item I was sure I’d touched since coming in the suite. But if there’d been blood on my hands when I wrangled the automatic away from him, some would have smeared that nice white linen suit. It hadn’t. His sleeve was spotless.
Watching him fiddling with the dials, some of the stuff I’d read in that magazine came back to me:... a playboy who does his most dynamic work while having fun... who goes at sport as aggressively as if it was a top-drawer business deal... shoots golf in the middle seventies... flew his own six-place jet job to Alaska for black bear... sailed his ketch to Easter Island recently for monster marlin...
There’d been pages of such guff; he was a crack squash-rackets man, one of the country’s best off the high diving-board, what it added up to — no panty-waist, he. If the kingpin of Lanerd, Kenson & Fullbright had been jittery enough to carry side arms, there was more in the wind than cheap cigar smoke.
“No use handing you a lot of horse, Vine.” Now he was giving with the man-to-man approach. No more winning grin. Just a good, honest scowl. “I don’t like this business one damn bit.”
“Makes us even.” I wasn’t certain we were talking about the same thing.
“Suppose not. Well, you may know I have something to do with certain television programs.” He kept his face toward me but his eyes were cocked up at a corner of the ceiling, the way people do when they’re trying to hear a sound behind them.
“Practically subsidize the networks, don’t you?” The bleached-wood top of the coffee table was clean as a hound’s molars. The blood hadn’t come from that.
“Putting it a bit strong.” His smile registered appreciation. “Our clients have several of the high-rated programs. This Stack O’ Jack simulcast which’ll come on here in a second is rather outstanding among audience-participation shows, one of the most popular our agency has developed.” He talked at me but turned his head to one side. His ears would have to be better than mine, to hear anything out in the corridor, over the whoopdeedo booming from the loud-speaker — a blare of trumpets and an announcer who sounded as excited as if he was describing a knockdown in a heavyweight championship:
“Hear-Ye... See-Ye... Whee-Ye!... It’s Stack... O’ Jack... time!”
On the screen, a banner waved sequin-spangled letters: