“Mukluk!” cried Betty Divine. “That’s too loud even for me!”
The dog had begun barking once he smelled the familiar aroma of Joe Harris’s shaving lather. Harris himself was still outside the closed door to Betty’s office, giving a box of candy to her secretary and smiling at the two girls in matching jumpers on their way to be photographed for Pinafore. If his English journey had been a men-only interlude, he now found himself the only male inside another single-sex paradise. There could scarcely be a more charming place to spend Valentine’s Day than Betty’s magazine. From one end of the eleventh floor to the other, girls were untying candy-box ribbons, opening envelopes, and plucking eyebrows in anticipation of their evening dinner dates.
“Baby,” said Harris, once Betty figured out the cause of Mukluk’s yapping and opened the door. “Happy Valentine’s.”
She kissed him quickly and took her presents, putting the enormous heart-shaped Whitman’s sampler onto her desk. She hushed the dog, asked her secretary to find a vase for the roses, and sat Joe down in a chair in front of her desk. Then she closed the door once more.
“Jesus, baby, did you miss me? You’re acting like you’ve got some efficiency expert eyeballing you through a peephole.”
“Have you been to your office? Have you spoken to Norman?”
Harris stretched his arms in animal contentment. “Came straight here from my place. The salt air must still be in my lungs. I slept eleven hours—that’s more than even Coolidge can manage.”
Betty could see how rested he was. She hadn’t had the heart to call his apartment in Murray Hill last night; she’d called Spilkes at his home instead.
“Speaking of Coolidge,” she said after a deep breath, handing Joe the first newspaper story, clipped eight days ago, about Stuart Newman’s misadventure.
As he read it, Harris’s shoulders slumped, and his stomach poured forward in a long, defeated exhalation.
“I’ll can him,” he finally said, without relish. “This is worse than his being sober. Christ, our model of the single gentleman.”
Betty waited for some aggression to overtake mere weariness and disgust. But Harris just sat there, shaking his head.
“Joe, you can’t fire him. Not right now. Hazel told me your precious LaRoche has such a case on him she’d never put up with it.”
Harris’s eyes flared. After an extended silence, he muttered: “She’s one cover I can’t lose.”
Betty could make out the alarm in his expression, but not what he’d just said. “She’s got a lover who can’t booze?”
“SHE’S ONE COVER I CAN’T LOSE.”
Betty felt shaken, not by the volume, which she was used to during these auditory clarifications, but by the realization that he still had almost no idea how deep his troubles were.
“Jehoshaphat,” she said, using the name Harris heard even less often than Houlihan heard “Aloysius.” She leaned forward and looked straight into his eyes. “You need to start worrying about losing the whole book.”
Betty laid it all out: the tale of Mr. Palmer’s plagiarism; the scandal of Gianni’s arrest, and Harris’s own crucial role in it. If she’d known the news about Wanamaker’s, she would have thrown that in, too. Once finished, she couldn’t tell whether she’d brought Joe to his senses or thrown him permanently into shock. He’d gone so white and silent that Mukluk, observing from a corner, began moaning low.
“You never opened the telegrams, did you?” she asked.
“Get me a drink,” he said at last, knowing there were two bottles of everything in the bottom drawer of Betty’s filing cabinet.
She stared at him, fiercely. “You’re not getting so much as a Drambuie-filled chocolate. Here,” she said, tearing open the Whitman’s sampler and tossing him a caramel. “Eat that. It’ll give you energy.”
Harris meekly accepted the candy, popping the little cube into his mouth while Betty selected a coconut creme for herself. For several seconds they chewed in silence. When she saw Joe’s tongue trying to pry the sticky caramel off the roof of his mouth, she practically wanted to sing “Can’t Help Lovin’ That Man of Mine.” But she was too short and too cute to pull off Helen Morgan; besides, she’d never be that needy. She could, however, be like Winnie Winkle, that plucky female breadwinner of the funny papers, which lay open under Mukluk’s water bowl. Why couldn’t Joe just retire and let her keep at it for a couple more years until they could both call it quits for good up in Dutchess County? Because, of course, inside of two weeks he’d be drinking applejack and talking to the moosehead. No, she realized, seeing all the fight gone out of him, neither Helen Morgan nor Winnie Winkle was called for now. It was time to hardboil herself into a pint-sized Lady Macbeth.
“Joe,” she said, pitching her voice as deep as it would go. “When Hi gave you Bandbox, a magazine with no ads, no readers, and no future, how long did it take you to turn it around?”
“One business quarter,” Harris replied, with more reflex than gusto.
“And tell me, Joe,” asked Betty, getting up from her chair and going over to his, where she sat herself on his lap. “Who do I always say is the smartest man in the Graybar Building?” Her hands were streaked with chocolate, not blood, and a little of it was getting on Joe’s shirt front, but she knew, if there were no interruptions, that she could make him screw his courage to the sticking-place. Aside from all else, sitting on his lap made it easier for her to hear.
“I am,” said Joe.
Betty nodded, and kissed his nose.
“But I’m also the oldest,” said Harris. “I don’t know if I can hoist myself up out of all this. I’m fresh out of presto-changos.”
Before Betty could say she’d rather have him back in the postcard business than sounding like this, the intercom buzzed. She got up and went back to her desk.
“Mr. Spilkes on the line,” said her secretary.
She handed the receiver to Joe, who only listened and said yeah, three or four times, before hanging up.
“Wanamaker’s is moving most of their ads to Jimmy.”
Betty wanted to get back on his lap and resume her pep talk, but the mood of connubial conspiracy had been broken.
Harris continued, tonelessly: “Norman says I’ve got messages to go see the police and Oldcastle.”
“Do the easy one first,” Betty advised. “Go see the police.”