New York (N.Y.) -- Fiction; Television game show hosts -- Fiction
At Sabatini's he had three very dry Gibsons and entered the dining room
where he ordered oysters, turtle soup, Shrimps Livornese, marinated
asparagus, escarole and coffee. The dining room was half empty; very
few of the people in the business are around on Saturdays, and fewer
still on the afternoon before New Year's Eve. Lennox consumed his
oysters and soup and allowed his gaze to relax on a couple at the next
table. He didn't know the man, but the young lady was familiar.
She was a blonde, with enormous blue eyes and an exquisite pouting
mouth. She wore a black siren-type dress that exposed her neck,
shoulders and altogether too much cleavage.
"That's a Theda Bara dress," Lennox muttered in annoyance. "No ingénue
ought to be wearing it."
What annoyed him even more was the fact that the ingénue was behaving
like a road-company Theda Bara. She pouted, she hooded her eyes, she
undulated her shoulders and heaved her poitrine like the High Priestess
of the Python.
"Now where have I seen that corn-ball playing that routine before?"
Lennox asked himself. Suddenly he remembered. An ingénue in a velvet
gown trimmed with miniver, batting her eyes at Oliver Stacy over a
champagne glass. He began to laugh. The girl looked up, caught his
eye, and gave him a slinky undulation. Lennox arose and bowed. Then
he reached into his water glass, took out a lump of ice and dropped it
into her cleavage.
He didn't have to pick himself up off the sidewalk, but there was no
doubt he'd been thrown out of Sabatini's.
"Live dangerously," he chuckled and was afflicted with thirst. He
quenched it with a bottle of stout at the saloon in the network
building and then wandered upstairs to visit the studios.
He poked his head into rehearsals and waved affectionately to friends
and strangers. The last studio down the corridor was on the air with
some kind of radio mystery. Lennox tip-toed in, waved, and placed
himself alongside the sound table where the soundman stood with a gun
poised in his hand while a couple of gangster-type actors snarled at
each other on mike. Lennox watched the script over the soundman's
shoulder, and as the gunshot cue came up, on sudden impulse he snatched
the gun out of the soundman's hand.
The director behind the glass waved frantically. The actors shook their
scripts at him. The soundman struggled to get hold of the gun.
"Bang!" Lennox shouted. He beamed, put the gun down quietly and
tip-toed out.
"My girl doesn't approve of violence. Guns and such," he confided to
the bartender in the Greek's.
"The peaceful teep, huh, Jake?"
"A veritable dove of peace." He considered. "Chris.... What's the
difference between doves and pigeons?"
"There ain't no difference, Jake."
"There has to be. Otherwise wouldn't have two different names," Lennox
said. "That's relentless logic."
"No," Chris said. "I keep 'em. I ought to know. Doves is white pigeons.
You sure you want all this garbage in your old fashioned, Jake?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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