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wife. She was evidently furious with him for his stupidity and said so into his ear. He turned his back on her and went to Claire Feltner. She went over to see if she couldn’t pump some information out of Shanaman. Jakie stood near them, glumly watching his wife puckering up to Jones.
    “Try to keep away from Jakie,” I said, turning back to Maria. But she had slipped away when I was looking at Jones. She was standing by the window behind me, kneading her hands and staring out into the night. I figured it was best to leave her alone as long as she could stand it. Meanwhile, I was going to try to keep the restof them away from her. I barged in on Shanaman’s conversation with Mrs. Jones. It was short and sweet. She was just winding up what must have been quite a scintillating piece of vituperation.
    “—and don’t think I don’t know what you’re up to, you old wolf,” she was saying. She was hopping mad. Shanaman looked bewilderedly indignant. It was too late to do anything about it.
    “My dear lady,” he said pompously, “I regret exceedingly that your suspicions should have reached such a state. Ah—Mr. Jones. Will you come here a minute?” Jones looked up, saw what was happening, came rabbiting over. I saw the studio deal flitting out the window when I saw Jones reach out and clip his wife across the mouth. Shanaman held up his hands in horror, then barged across the room to his wife.
    Then everything happened at once. Maria popped up from nowhere, nudged Jakie Feltner, whispered in his ear, nodded toward Claire. Jakie roared, reached out, spun Jones around and smeared him with a terrific right hook. Shanaman, fear of publicity plastered all over his fat face, bolted for the door with his wife.
    And that was the wind-up of Jones’s precious little dinner party. Maria filled in the details for me on the way home. It seemed that Jones had been seeing Jakie’s wife, and Maria, possessed, told Jakie how far it had gone, and he punched Jones’s mouth. Mrs. Jones’s hysterical calling of Shanaman’s bluff sprang, I imagine, from jealousy and the desire to hurt Jones. It was an unholy mess, one of those awful things that are awful when they happen and funny afterward. Except for one thing. Jones didn’t get up after Jakie knocked him down. He smashed his silly brains out on the brass andiron in the fireplace.
    The rest of it was rough. When the trial was over and poor old Feltner got sent up for thirty years on a second-degree murder charge, there wasn’t much left for me. Unfavorable publicity pulled a lot of advertising contracts, and anyway, as I said, there are too many radio stations in this town. But the notoriety hadn’t finished with me when it took my living away from me. Eddie Gretchen turned out to be the guy with a thousand friends who never heard of him. The radiogame was strictly on the receiving end, for me. Old Shanaman’s bolting for the door the night of the murder hadn’t done him a bit of good; he was subpoenaed and put on the grill with the rest of us. I hadn’t liked the way he cried about it—after all, big shots and little, we were all in the same boat—and he got even with me by passing the word around the studios that I wasn’t to get so much as an audition. That, after seven years in radio! Yeah, it was rough. I’d always had money and I didn’t know how to go about being poor. I learned. Maria had a couple of grand in the cooler but that went quickly, along with what I’d saved, which wasn’t a hell of a lot. I hit the jolly old rock-ribbed bottom the day I tried to get a job as a studio page and got well treated until somebody remembered me and I got handed the rush. The smell even reached into publishing houses, and the feature articles I used to sell brought checks every six months instead of every two weeks. I sold a little stuff under a phony name; but for that Maria and I would have starved. We lost our place and our furniture and the car. Bad. But I couldn’t