Hit and Run

One hot July evening, the whole set-up suddenly exploded in my face. I was working late at the office. The time was just after nine o'clock. Only Pat Henessey, my secretary, and Joe Fellowes, my layout artist, were with me. The rest of the staff had gone home. We were working on a promotion scheme to put over a new toilet soap. It was a big job, with a TV hook-up and a two-million-dollar allocation.

Fellowes was showing me some pulls of the ad he intended to run in the weeklies: good stuff, and Pat and I were chewing the rag about it when the telephone bell on Pat's desk came alive.

She went over and lifted the receiver.

Pat was a lovely looking girl: tall and long-legged with honey-colour hair, big blue eyes and a complexion that looked too good to be real, but was. She was around twenty-six and as sharp as a razor. She and I worked as a team. Without her to nudge my memory I would have been hard pressed to keep pace with the stuff Aitken kept piling into my lap.

I didn't pay any attention to what she was saying on the telephone. Joe and I were altering one of his layouts. I wasn't too satisfied with the girl he was using as a model.

'Look, Joe, if a girl had a bosom like this in real life,' I said, 'she'd get it caught in the first revolving door she tried to go through.'

'That's the idea,' Joe said with his direct simplicity. 'That's exactly what I want to convey. I want the fellas, as soon as they see this ad, to ask themselves what a dame like this one does when she gets to a revolving door. It's a psychological drawing.'

I threw the layout at him, but that didn't stop me from laughing, then Pat hung up and said in her quiet calm voice, 'Mr. Aitken has broken his leg.'

'Now if you had said he had broken his neck ...' Joe began, then broke off to gape. 'You kidding?'

Pat looked at me.

'That was Mr. Aitken's housekeeper,' she said. 'Mr. Aitken slipped on the steps of the Plaza Grill. He has broken his leg.'

'That's just like R.A.,' Joe said unfeelingly. 'Trust him to break his leg somewhere high-toned. Did she say which leg?'

'Will you shut up, Joe?' I said. To Pat: 'Where is he? In hospital?'

'They took him home. He wants you. The housekeeper said for you to go right on over.'

It was then I realized I didn't even know where Aitken lived.

'Where do I find him?' I asked, getting to my feet.

'He has a little shack out on Palm Boulevard,' Joe said with a cynical smile. 'A twenty-fourbedroom job with a lounge big enough to serve as a bus garage; just a throw away: a weekend cabin.'

I ignored him, looking at Pat.

'The Gables, Palm Boulevard,' she said briskly. 'Third house up on the right.'

She began to open drawers and files, taking out papers and dumping them in a folder.

'What are you up to?' I asked, staring at her.

'You may need these. I can't imagine R.A. wants to see you so you can hold his hand. There's a board meeting tomorrow. You'll have to handle it. He'll want to see all the papers, and here they are,' and she thrust the folder at me.

'But he's broken his leg! He won't want to talk business.

'He'll be in pain. Maybe they'll have given him a shot by now.'

'I'd take them, Ches,' Pat said seriously. 'You could need them.'

And as it turned out, she was right. I did need them.

The Gables was a vast house standing in a two-acre garden with a view over the sea and the distant hills. I wouldn't have said it had twenty-four bedrooms, but it had at least ten. It was a nice house: the kind of house I would have liked to have owned. The kind of house your friends would have to admire even if they secretly hated you.

There was a fair-sized swimming-pool to the left of the house and a four-car garage which housed R.A.'s Bentley, a Cadillac tourer, a Buick estate wagon and T.R.2 runabout.

The garden, a mass of rose trees, begonias, petunias and such like, was floodlit. The swimmingpool was floodlit too, and looked lonely as I drove up the sanded drive: it was the kind of pool that would only look its best when dressed with bikini-clad beauties.

I was slightly stunned by this affluence. I knew R.A. was a Big Wheel, but I had no idea his earnings could run to a show this big and this lavish.

I left my car, toiled up twenty marble steps that led to the front door and rang the bell.

There was the usual short delay before the door opened and a tall, fat man wearing an English butler's outfit raised white eyebrows at me. I learned later his name was Watkins, and he had been imported from England at a considerable cost.

'I'm Chester Scott,' I said. 'Mr. Aitken is expecting me.'

'Yes, sir. Will you step this way?'

I followed him through a large hall, down some stairs and into a room R.A. obviously used as his workroom. There was a desk, a dictaphone, four lounging chairs, a radio and about two thousand books lining the walls.

'How is he?' I asked as Watkins turned on the lights and made ready to fold his tent and steal away into the distant spaces of the house.