Gin and Panic: A Discreet Retrieval Agency Mystery (Discreet Retrieval Agency Mysteries) by Maia Chance

Author:Maia Chance [Chance, Maia]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2017-10-24T07:00:00+00:00

Somehow I’d forgotten all about selecting a caterer for my sister’s wedding. I’d choose Delguzzo’s. I mean, they were all more or less alike, weren’t they? All that remained, then, was to stop by and pay the deposit with a blank check my father had signed for me, weeks ago, for the purpose.

16

WPAF was housed in the towering granite American Telephone and Telegraph building at 195 Broadway. Berta and I rode the elevator to the fourth floor, and stepped into a carpeted corridor in which men and women dashed about.

“Berta,” I said, “that radio program in which Jillie Harris, Glenn Monroe’s former lady friend, stars—”

“The High-Jinx Club.”

“That’s the one—is it produced in this station?”

“Yes. But why?”

“You’ll see.”

We located the reception room, as Glenn had instructed, and no sooner had we entered than a woman with a clipboard approached us.

“You must be from the Discreet Retrieval Agency,” she said.

Berta and I nodded.

“You’re almost too late, you know.” She eyed Cedric, who was panting in my large handbag. “What about the pooch?”

“Oh, he might wish to say a few words,” I said. “You don’t suppose you could give me Jillie Harris’s telephone number, do you?”

Suspicion clouded the secretary’s face.

I added quickly, “Jillie and I are great friends, and she was at a party at my family’s Park Avenue place, you see, and she said she’d give me the name of her hairdresser, but she forgot.”

The secretary thawed. With certain people, the words Park Avenue work like sunbeams on cream cheese. She ruffled through her clipboard and then read aloud, “KL5-1711.”

“Thanks!” I beamed, committing the telephone number to memory.

The secretary stashed our coats and hats, and led us into what she called the main studio. Chairs were arranged on the nearer side of the room, occupied by a few people. The other half of the room was taken up by a grand piano, a felt-covered table holding several unidentifiable items, and a cluster of people looking over papers—scripts, I guessed—and murmuring amongst themselves. At the center of it all stood a microphone on a brass stand. A cord snaked away from the microphone to a large wooden box on wheels. I hadn’t the foggiest how radio transmission worked, so this wheeled box may as well have been Ali Baba’s cave.

Windows overlooked the tall buildings opposite, and thick curtains hung on all the other walls—presumably for sopping up extra sound like bread for gravy.

I took out my notebook, jotted down Jillie Harris’s telephone number, and stuffed it back inside my handbag beside Cedric. “There’s Glenn,” I whispered to Berta. “In a tuxedo. Why is everyone wearing formal attire if the audience can’t see them?”

“According to Radio News magazine, it is to help the performers get in the proper mood,” Berta said. “Many of them are or were stage performers as well.”

“Girls!” Glenn said, striding our way. “Boy am I glad you showed! I was starting to get worried you were blowing me off, and after I had to beg my producer to let you on.

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