When he finished we gave him a friendly hand and prepared to go about our business. Unfortunately a non-professional element had slipped into the meeting and they were either too ignorant or too indignant to go along with the joke. They got up and began filing beefs. They attacked Audibon politically, philosophically, and most of all financially. What it all boiled down to was: How dast he make a speech like that when the network kept rejecting all the wonderful scripts they sent in, and took six months to reject each script? We squirmed in embarrassment. Audibon got red in the face and his replies to the hecklers became shorter and more cutting. Then an astonishing thing happened. Jake Lennox got to his feet, turned on the hecklers and blasted them. He was sardonic and icy; he took them apart, politically, philosophically and financially. They were so stunned it broke up the meeting. I saw Audibon step down from the studio stage, go over to Lennox, smile and shake his hand emphatically, Lennox grinned back. They spoke for a moment, laughed, shook hands again and were separated by the low network brass who surrounded Audibon. Lennox caught my eye, made a drink motion, and I nodded. In Sabatini's we belted down a couple of Gibsons before I had the courage to bring up Jake's defense of Audibon. "We won't discuss it," he said. "I turned whore to square that lunch hassle the other day. Which reminds me. I owe you money." He forced me to take two tens. He brooded. His expression was contemptuous. "Don't let it eat you out, Jake," I said. "We all whore. What were we doing listening to Audibon but whoring?" "It isn't that," Lennox answered. "It's the Poison Pen test. That was a bomb. You were right, Kitten. I'm an amateur. I should have stayed out of the act." "What happened?" "I showed the photostats to all of them, looking for a sign ... a give-away. You remember what I told you about Fink?" "Yes. So?" "You think those letters knocked them off balance? Hell, they loved them. They ate 'em up. It's like those arsenic eaters of yours." "Poison eaters?" He nodded. "Poison eaters. They're mixed up. Sick in the head. But trouble doesn't bother them. They live on trouble. They feed on it. Can't do without it. They've got to have a diet that would kill a normal man." "All of them?" "All of them." "Not one knocked off balance?" "Not one out of six. And just to show you what an amateur I am, each one found something in the letters I hadn't noticed.... Something that proved they couldn't be getting them." "What?" "Oh.... Like ... Charlie Hansel found a line that showed the letters are being written to someone who's big. Charlie's a midget, you know that. Plummer noticed something about a loudmouth. And you know how quiet Johnny stammers. He's always whispering the latest from the Kremlin." "Kay Hill's loud." "But she isn't dark." "Stacy's dark."