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I’m kind of anxious about this trip to New York,” she admitted. “The business side of things, I mean. I’ve never met most of those syndicate executives before, not to mention the network people.”
    “You’ll charm them, Jane,” I assured her. “And the ones you can’t charm, I’ll take care of.”
    “I guess you’re right. Together, we can charm the birds down out of the trees.”
    “Which could result in a lot of birds underfoot,” I said. “Want to find the club car and have a drink?”
    “Not a drink, no,” she said, standing up. “But a cup of coffee maybe.”
    Soon as she located both her shoes and put them on, we moved out into the corridor of the gently swaying car.

    Our porter was standing nearby. “Help you folks?”
    “Club car is which way?” I asked.
    “It’s called the cocktail lounge, sir.” Johnson pointed forward. “Go through this car, then the dining car, and it’ll be on the other side of that.”
    The dining car, judging by the number of tables, would accommodate about three dozen. But there were only about fifteen passengers scattered around it so far. Sharing a table were the young dancer who’d interrupted Manheim and the platinum blonde who’d persuaded him to move along. He appeared to be somewhat less angry.
    The door at the other end of the car opened and a middle-aged couple came in. Some music from the cocktail lounge drifted in with them.
    “That’s Groucho singing,” realized Jane. “But I don’t recognize the song.”
    “It’s called ‘Lydia the Tattooed Lady,’” I said, frowning. “Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg wrote it for At the Circus . But I didn’t know Groucho had already made a record of it.”
    Jane shook her head. “That’s no phonograph record, ninny,” she told me. “That’s got to be Groucho himself.”
    And it was.

Six
    W e found Groucho perched on the arm of one of the brownish chairs along the wall of the lounge. Wearing an ochre-colored sports coat, an olive green polo shirt, and slacks of a shade I’d never seen before, he was strumming his steel-string guitar and finishing up “Lydia the Tattooed Lady.”
    Circled close around his chair were four of the girl dancers from Step Right Up, plus three other female passengers.
    When Groucho finished the song and tagged it with a few flamenco flourishes on the guitar, the surrounding girls applauded and made appreciative noises.
    Several of the other passengers in the moving cocktail lounge clapped as well. A plump matron seated near the bar with her plump husband started to reach into her purse.
    From his chair across from Groucho, Hal Arneson, the husky troubleshooter with the tropical sunset necktie, made a mock toasting gesture with his nearly empty highball glass. “Too bad you aren’t as funny as you think you are, Groucho,” he called.
    “Nobody is,” Groucho answered.
    “I think he’s colossal,” said a pretty blonde dancer, wrinkling her nose at Arneson.
    “Actually a recent exhaustive study conducted by the Harvard Business School determined that I was super colossal, my dear,” corrected
Groucho as he dropped his guitar into its scuffed case and then raised his left eyebrow in the direction of a pretty redhead. “And what did you think of my performance, miss?”
    “Very impressive,”
    “Why, thank you.”
    “Yeah, very impressive the way you can strum your guitar and pinch my fanny at the same time.”
    “Merely a little trick I picked up from my old chum Segovia.”
    A pretty brunette asked, “You know Andrés Segovia, the world-famous guitarist?”
    “No, this is Irwin Segovia, the world-famous fanny pincher.” Groucho shut the guitar case and stood up.
    One of the male dancers joined the group, a bottle of beer in his right hand. “The word around LA is that At the Circus is a turkey,” he remarked.
    Nodding, Groucho said, “Yes, young man, but you’ll be delighted to learn that it’s a kosher turkey. Meaning that masochists of every