On the terrace at The Dancers a few early birds were getting ready to drink their lunch. The glass-fronted upstairs room had the awning let down in front of it. I drove on past the curve that goes down into the Strip and stopped across the street from a square building of two stories of rose-red brick with small white leaded bay windows and a Greek porch over the front door and what looked, from across the street, like an antique pewter doorknob. Over the door was a fanlight and the name Sheridan Ballou, Inc., in black wooden letters severely stylized. I locked my car and crossed to the front door. It was white and tall and wide and had a keyhole big enough for a mouse to crawl through. Inside this keyhole was the real lock. I went for the knocker, but they had thought of that too. It was all in one piece and didn’t knock.
So I patted one of the slim fluted white pillars and opened the door and walked directly into the reception room which filled the entire front of the building. It was furnished in dark antique-looking furniture and many chairs and settees of quilted chintz-like material. There were lace curtains at the windows and chintz boxes around them that matched the chintz of the furniture. There was a flowered carpet and a lot of people waiting to see Mr. Sheridan Ballou.
Some of them were bright and cheerful and full of hope. Some looked as if they had been there for days. One small dark girl was sniffling into her handkerchief in the corner. Nobody paid any attention to her. I got a couple of profiles at nice angles before the company decided I wasn’t buying anything and didn’t work there.
A dangerous-looking redhead sat languidly at an Adam desk talking into a pure-white telephone. I went over there and she put a couple of cold blue bullets into me with her eyes and then stared at the cornice that ran around the room.
“No,” she said into the phone. “No. So sorry. I’m afraid it’s no use. Far, far too busy.” She hung up and ticked off something on a list and gave me some more of her steely glance.
“Good morning. I’d like to see Mr. Ballou,” I said. I put my plain card on her desk. She lifted it by one corner, smiled at it amusedly.
“Today?” she inquired amiably. “This week?”
“How long does it usually take?”
“It has taken six months,” she said cheerfully. “Can’t somebody else help you?”
“No.”
“So sorry. Not a chance. Drop in again won’t you? Somewhere about Thanksgiving.” She was wearing a white wool skirt, a burgundy silk blouse and a black velvet over-jacket with short sleeves. Her hair was a hot sunset. She wore a golden topaz bracelet and topaz earrings and a topaz dinner ring in the shape of a shield. Her fingernails matched her blouse exactly. She looked as if it would take a couple of weeks to get her dressed.
“I’ve got to see him,” I said.
She read my card again. She smiled beautifully. “Everyone has,” she said. “Why—er—Mr. Marlowe. Look at all these lovely people. Every one of them has been here since the office opened two hours ago.”
“This is important.”
“No doubt. In what way if I may ask?”
“I want to peddle a little dirt.”
She picked a cigarette out of a crystal box and lit it with a crystal lighter. “Peddle? You mean for money—in Hollywood?”
“Could be.”
“What kind of dirt? Don’t be afraid to shock me.”
“It’s a bit obscene, Miss—Miss—” I screwed my head around to read the plaque on her desk.
“Helen Grady,” she said. “Well, a little well-bred obscenity never did any harm, did it?”
“I didn’t say it was well-bred.”
She leaned back carefully and puffed smoke in my face.
“Blackmail in short.” She sighed. “Why the hell don’t you lam out of here, bud? Before I throw a handful of fat coppers in your lap?”
I sat on the corner of her desk, grabbed a double handful of her cigarette smoke and blew it into her hair. She dodged angrily. “Beat it, lug,” she said in a voice that could have been used for paint remover.
“Oh oh. What happened to the Bryn Mawr accent?”
Without turning her head she said sharply: “Miss Vane.”
A tall slim elegant dark girl with supercilious eyebrows looked up. She had just come through an inner door camouflaged as a stained-glass window. The dark girl came over. Miss Grady handed her my card: “Spink.”
Miss Vane went back through the stained-glass window with the card.
“Sit down and rest your ankles, big stuff,” Miss Grady informed me. “You may be here all week.”
I sat down in a chintz winged chair, the back of which came eight inches above my head. It made me feel shrunken. Miss Grady gave me her smile again, the one with the hand-honed edge, and bent to the telephone once more.
I looked around. The little girl in the corner had stopped crying and was making up her face with calm unconcern. A very tall distinguished-looking party swung up a graceful arm to stare at his elegant wrist watch and oozed gently to his feet. He set a pearl-gray homburg at a rakish angle on the side of his head, checked his yellow chamois gloves and his silver-knobbed cane, and strolled languidly over to the red-headed receptionist.
“I have been waiting two hours to see Mr. Ballou,” he said icily in a rich sweet voice that had been modulated by a lot of training. “I’m not accustomed to waiting two hours to see anybody.”
“So sorry, Mr. Fortescue. Mr. Ballou is just too busy for words this A.M.”
