Gootes lost his British speech instantly. "What other thirty, bum?"
"Why, the balance of the fifty. For an introduction to Mi—to the maker of the Metamorphizer. To compensate me, you know, for my loss of revenue."
"Weener, you have all the earmarks of a castiron moocher. Let me tell you, suh—such methods are unbecoming. They suggest damyankee push and blackmail. Remember Reconstruction and White Supremacy, suh."
If I were hypersensitive to the silly things people say, I should have given up selling long before. I pretended not to hear him. We walked into a drugstore and he dropped a nickel into a payphone, hunching the receiver between ear and shoulder. "Fifty your last word?" he asked out of the corner of his mouth.
I nodded.
"Hello? 'Gencer? Gootes. Hya, beautiful? Syphilis all cleared up? Now ... now, baby ... well, if youre going to be formal—gimme W R." He turned to me and leered while he waited.
"... Chief? Gootes. Got the Dinkman story. You know—Freak Growth Swallows Hollywood Mansion. Yeah. Yeah. I know. But, Chief—this was what I wanted you for—on the followup; I have the fellow who put the stuff on the grass. Yeah. Sure I did. Yeah. And the sonofabitch wants to hold us up for another thirty. Or else he won't sing. Yeah. Yeah. I know. But I can't, Chief. I havent got a lead. I don't know, Chief, not much of a one, I guess. Wait a minute."
He turned to me. "Listen, little man: Mr Le ffaçasé"—he pronounced it l'fassassy and he pronounced it with awe. I too was properly solemn, for I hadnt realized before to whom he referred when he talked so lightly of "W R." I knew—as what newspaper reader didnt—of William Rufus Le ffaçasé, "The Last of the Great Editors," but I hadnt connected him with the Daily Intelligencer— "—Mr Le ffaçasé will shoot you another sawbuck and no more. What's the deal?"
Now, the famous editor's reputation was such that you didnt tell him to go to the devil, even through the medium of an agent; it would have been like writing your name on the Lincoln Memorial. It was reluctantly therefore that I shook my head. "I'm sorry, Mr Gootes," I apologized, "I'd certainly like to oblige—"
He cut me off with a waving hand and turned cheerfully back to the telephone. "No soap, Chief. O K. O K. All right—put the rewrite man on." And for the next ten minutes he went over the events at the Dinkmans', carefully spelling out all names including the napoleonic firechief's. I began to suspect Gootes wasnt so inefficient a reporter as he appeared.