Before I left, I’d asked Ruth about Roy Y. She didn’t know much. Lanerd was acquainted with him but not too well. Yaker was a transparent bore. Made passes at everything in skirts. Had attempted to seduce Ruth in Lanerd’s office once. But what I’d heard outside his door while those con girls were with him, that scarcely matched up with murderous intent. Granting that a lustful heart, by whatever name you call it, has no conscience.
And Lanerd? He could have followed me in a cab from his home, if he’d been alive then. But flatly impossible for him to have made that gun play on Atlantic Avenue; his body’d been discovered before that. No, the party who’d cracked that statuette on my cranium was still up and about.
Hacklin and Schneider would be ready to accept the adman’s death as suicide. I couldn’t buy any part of it.
His departure from this vale certainly would hit a lot of people hard. I was really sorry for Marge, Tildy, Ruth. More for Marge than Tildy; she’d still have her career. And Ruth — She seemed to me to be the self-reliant sort who could take it in her stride.
Possibly there were others I didn’t know about who’d miss him, in the same way. As Emile would say: Quel homme!
Until I reached the Continental Television Building, it hadn’t been impressed on me what a blow Mr. Giveaway’s passing might be to some of the men who’d been close to him. Jeff MacGregory, for one.
When I asked where I might find him, they directed me to studio seven, a cute little salle the size of our Blue Ballroom.
A child’s building-block, big as a trunk, was fixed to a sign: Build Health with Munchies. On a raised platform, a couple dozen shirt-sleeved musicians were rustling scores on their racks, tuning violins, blowing dixieland on trumpets. At the other end of the studio a line of swim-suited show gals were prancing with beach parasols before a theater-size movie screen with a slide of Jones Beach on it. A pint-size taptress did cartwheels. A quintette of Cubans in white frilled camisoles twanged and sang Siboney. Nice quiet atmosphere for a head which already had tom-tom accompaniment!
An announcer directed me to the glass-paneled privacy of the control room. Three owlish young men were disagreeable about MacGregory. He wasn’t there. He was “upstairs somewhere.” This was a rehearsal, couldn’t I see that? One of them finally escorted me to a door marked: No Admittance, Clients Only.
Up a flight of stairs, behind a soundproofed door, looking down through a picture window on the pleasant pandemonium of the studio, was a grim MacGregory. He was more gaudily gotten up than the first time I saw him, but his expression wasn’t gaudy. He slumped in a preview chair, chin on chest, hand over eyes.