Peter brushed this aside. “That’s no problem. We can go down to the newspaper office first thing tomorrow morning and talk to my friend. His name, by the way, is Johnny Dwyer. Johnny has a room full of old clippings and photographs, and I bet he can give us a lead on Tom. Then you can follow it up and let me know tomorrow evening. How about it?”
Peggy smiled. “Well, I once discovered a hidden theater. Maybe I’ll be lucky enough to find a hidden actor.”
Peter bounced to his feet with a broad smile. “Good girl!” he said. “Can you meet me on the fourth floor of the Chronicle building at nine o’clock tomorrow morning?”
“I’ll be there,” Peggy said.
“Good.” Peter gathered his papers and stuffed them in his pocket. “We’ll have your contract prepared tomorrow, and when I meet you I’ll give you a copy, and you can look it over. Then, if everything’s satisfactory, you can sign it and deliver it back to us. Okay?”
Peggy sighed. “Sounds wonderful to me.”
“Sounds pretty good to us, too,” Peter replied. “I think we’re signing on a first-class actress.”
VIII
The Search
“Tom Agate? Sure, what can I tell you?”
Johnny Dwyer settled back in his chair and waved a hand invitingly at a pair of battered office chairs. Peggy sat down in one of them and looked at the figure in front of her with interest. Johnny Dwyer was a small, birdlike man with a cheerful, pink face, snow-white hair and the bushiest eyebrows Peggy had ever seen. At the moment, he was perched in front of an old-fashioned rolltop desk in a musty corner of the big metropolitan newspaper office, his coat off and the sleeves of his shirt held up by a pair of elastic armbands. Outside of actors in costume and old photographs, Peggy had never seen anyone wear armbands. But Johnny Dwyer did, and it gave him the appearance of someone out of a turn-of-the-century tintype. Despite his age—and Peggy guessed that he was over seventy—Johnny Dwyer moved with a quick, catlike grace. But when he walked, it was with the help of a cane.