“Do call me Linda, Mr. Clayton.”
“If you’ll call me Jim.” Maybe she’d remember “Jim.”
“All right, Jim.” She smiled. “I suppose you want to know why I’m suing. Well, George was never easy to live with, but in recent years he’s been impossible.”
“In what way, Linda?” This was more like it.
“For one thing, he’s psychopathically jealous. I can’t look at a man that George doesn’t accuse me of having gone to bed with him. He’s actually beaten me at such times.”
“Actually?”
“Actually,” she said a little sharply. “Then I began finding lipstick on his handkerchiefs. Of course you see what happened.”
“I’m afraid I don’t, Linda.”
“You men! You stick together, don’t you? What’s behind all George’s jealousy, obviously, is the guilt he feels over his own adultery. He’s justifying his infidelities by transferring them to me.”
“I see,” Layton said respectfully. These do-it-yourself psychiatrists! he thought. “Then Mr. Hathaway has no basis for his jealousy?”
“You’re trying to ferret out another man, aren’t you, Tim?” she said with another smile. Layton groaned inwardly. He would be Tim Clayton to her until she died. “Well, of course, many men have admired me. I certainly can’t help that.”
“Certainly not,” Layton said in a warm tone.
“The last time I accused George of taking up with some trollop or other,” the woman in the bikini went on, “he beat me so brutally I was under my doctor’s care for a month. I began to fear for my life. So I locked him out of the house and got a court injunction to keep him out. Have you interviewed George yet?” she asked suddenly.
“Not about the divorce,” Layton said. “I saw him yesterday on a different story.”
“The Tutter King suicide, I suppose.” She shrugged. “When you do interview him about the divorce, he’ll undoubtedly fill you full of psychotic lies about me. You know, of course, that he’s countercharging adultery with numerous young men. He claims I maintain a whole stable of them — stable! That’s his word, Tim, as if I were some sort of brood mare or something. He’s so transparent. He’s just making a fool of himself.”
Layton promptly moved into the opening. “Talking about the Tutter King business,” he said, “do you think maybe the strain of the payola scandal and its possible effect on Mr. Hathaway’s position at KZZX might have had something to do with his emotional condition?”
“Rubbish,” she snapped. “Our troubles came to a head long before that story broke.”
“Maybe he knew it was on its way, and the worry—”
“He never mentioned it to me.”
“Well, it certainly has him on the ragged edge now,” Layton said ruefully. “He nearly chewed my head off yesterday when I asked him a perfectly harmless question.”
“That’s George,” she said, nodding. “So you know what a vicious temper he has. Though I should think the subject of payola would upset him.” she laughed. “I was so amused when I read that sanctimonious statement he authorized at the time he fired King.”
“How come?” Layton asked in a carefully careless tone.
“Because George was as guilty as King. He accepted payola from the record companies, too.”
Layton repressed his elation with difficulty. Was it possible she didn’t realize the implications of her statement? He decided not to look a gift harpy in the mouth.
“That’s interesting,” Layton said. “Is he that much of a hypocrite?”
“George? There isn’t a sincere bone in his head,” she said, laughing again. “What’s worse, he’s a stupid hypocrite. You’d think if he was going to take payola, he’d make it worth his while. Instead, he accepted peanuts. I don’t think the total ever amounted to more than four or five thousand dollars a year. Can you imagine that?”
Layton shook his head. “Unbelievable. What was he supposed to do in return?”
“Nothing,” she said indifferently.
“Nothing?”
“He wasn’t to interfere with Tutter King’s subsidized plugging of certain songs, that’s all.”
“I get it.” Layton chuckled. He was thinking furiously. He decided to take a calculated risk. “I don’t want to stray too far from the main purpose of our interview, Linda, but I wonder if this story about Hathaway doesn’t tie in with your divorce action. It would certainly make him look bad.”
“It certainly would,” she said softly.
So she had spilled it to him deliberately. Layton relaxed. He could take off the velvet gloves.
“Yes,” he said. “Of course, an unsupported charge of this seriousness, Linda, can’t be printed. What I need is proof. If I had some documentation, the Bulletin wouldn’t hesitate to plaster it all over the front page.”
“What kind of documentation?”
“Correspondence, records, bank deposits — anything like that. Did Hathaway take all his personal effects with him when you sent him packing?”
“He was lucky I let him have his clothes,” she said lazily. “I don’t know exactly what there is, Tim... Suppose I have a look.”
“That would be fine,” Layton murmured.
The aging woman pattered down the long, curved staircase from upstairs and through the wide archway into her living room with an eagerness as nearly naked as her bikini-clad body. She was carrying a big cardboard box filled with Christmas cards and what looked like letters. She dumped the box on a low tiled table before the huge sofa from which Layton had risen and flung herself into a baroque Italian chair opposite.
“It’s all Christmas stuff,” she said, “but I think you’ll find what you’re looking for.”
Linda Norman had taken off her sunglasses. The stony eyes were glittering. Medusa, Layton thought, and he went to work.
The cards yielded nothing; among them were many from record companies, but they were the customary seasonal pap. The letters were all on the stationery of different record companies, the majority handwritten — Christmas greetings of a more personal nature from company executives. The rest, also bearing Christmas greetings, were typed. It was among these that Layton struck pay dirt. Some of them went back five years.
One was typed on the letterhead of The Best-Play Recording Company, was addressed to George Hathaway at his Carmelita Avenue address, and read:
DEAR MR. HATHAWAY:
Just a note to wish you a Merry Xmas and a Happy New Year. May you and yours enjoy the holiday season and the coming year in health and prosperity.
Sincerely,
REINHARD K. AULT,
Dir. Publ. Rel.
RKA/nj
Enc.: Check #8271 for $200.
Not all the secretarial typists had made the automatic error of “nj.” On some there was no “Enc.: Check #— for$—.—,” althought Layton had no doubt that in these cases, too, checks for several hundred dollars had been “Enc.”-ed with the harmless-sounding message. But there were enough examples of the ironies of secretarial habit to hang George Hathaway several times over.
“You’re going to let me have these, Linda, aren’t you?”
“With my blessing, darling,” the woman said. “They’re what you want?”
“They’re what I want, all right.” Layton tucked the incriminating letters, folded, away in his inside breast pocket.
She smiled, and for a few minutes she chattered on about her post-divorce plans — she might try the movie comeback, she might take a trip around the World instead, oh, she had so many plans, although none of them included remarriage... Layton let her rattle away, on the lookout for an excuse to escape.