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The bar was beginning to fill up. It hadn’t looked particularly empty when I came in, but now the contrast showed. Little silver bowls of peanuts, olives and shrimp chips had appeared. The bartender was talking to an elderly man in a string tie at the other end of the bar. I drew a happy face with my finger in the wet ring where my glass had been sitting.

“Did anybody come looking for Vanessa while I was out this afternoon, Sally?”

“Only about three or four hundred came in raising hell.”

“What?”

“I mean it was business as usual around there. You’ve seen it, but you haven’t seen the traffic when it gets bad. Multiply Hy Newman by fifty and you’ll begin to get an idea of my job.”

“You feel sorry for Hy, don’t you?” She stared into her glass. Droplets of moisture forced their way through cloudy condensation on the sides.

“Hy was part of NTC from the beginning. Now he can’t get past Reception most days. Security has his picture and orders not to let him in.”

“Does he run amok? Does he threaten people? What’s the problem?”

“Hy reminds most of them where they were when Hy was the best producer of big shows that the network had ever seen. He hired some of them and promoted others. Hy’s the sort of person who makes up for all the times we fail, or don’t measure up to who we should be.”

“You take this very personally, don’t you, Sally?”

“Benny, somebody has to.” I quite liked Sally then. And I believed her. There must be a lot of people on the payroll who aren’t trying to make the worst programs possible, people who feel a responsibility to the public, who are aware of the lightweights they have been delivering over the years.

“What brings you to NTC, Benny? You’re not a broadcaster.” I considered telling Sally the truth and then I took another sip of my drink.

“I know Vanessa from a long time ago. She’s in a bind and I’m trying to help her. I suggested that she get Hy Newman to sort out some of her production muddles for her.”

“That was a great idea!”

“She didn’t think so.”

“Give her a day or two. I’ve seen her take suggestions of mine a couple of days after she told me to mind my business. It is a good idea, Benny. So, she found you in Grantham at loose ends?” I could see she was pumping me, but I didn’t see the harm. I could use it to reinforce my cover story.

“Yes, I was just waiting around to go on a European holiday. She got me at the right moment. Tell me, Sally, did you know Renata Sartori at all?” I watched the reaction to the question in her eyes. She was suddenly guarded. I’d lost yards by trying to get too much too soon.

“Not … too well, Benny. She’d worked here for a long time, but it’s a busy place. We used to have coffee together occasionally. I liked her. She did my income-tax returns for two or three years until I started doing them myself. She was clever with figures. She could have been a certified accountant if she troubled to take the exam. She did the books for a lot of people around the network.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“Well, she was so good at it.”

New people were filling up the empty spaces behind me, crowding the bar and raising the din, so that it was becoming harder to hear Sally without leaning close, which I didn’t mind a bit.

“Getting back to Renata: did she really look all that much like Vanessa?”

“Well, they weren’t dead ringers. From the back they could pass for one another: same height, proportions, hair colour and length, but from the front, Vanessa has finer features. Renata had brown eyes and used heavier makeup. I guess in the dark it might be hard to tell them apart. The papers said she was wearing a dressing gown of Vanessa’s. The murderer would have an expectation of seeing Vanessa answer her own front door.”

“Didn’t she have a man in her life? A lawyer?”

“Renata had been seeing Barry Bosco. He’s with Raymond Devlin’s firm. But I don’t know that it was a burning passionate affair. It may have been. Don’t get me wrong. I just don’t know the details. She didn’t talk about him at all when we had lunch that last time. They went out together; that’s all I know for a fact. He had a sports car as well as other cars and she liked that. I don’t know whether Barry felt as casual about Renata.”

“How do you happen to know Bosco?”

“He’s a fraternity brother of Gordon’s. He was on the fringe of a crowd I used to know better than I do now.” She sipped her drink thoughtfully. “Barry is hard to figure. He has all the charm in the world, but he can’t be pinned down on anything. He’s a strange sort of lawyer, now that I think of it. He hates to sign things. Can you imagine it? A lawyer who hates to put his name on the dotted line. Raymond is just the opposite. He’ll get you to sign a contract just for coming in to keep an appointment. I’ve never seen anyone who was so paper-bound. Well, you saw him in good form yesterday, Benny. He probably gets the kid who cuts his grass to sign a contract. He had kids of his own: they died in a car accident when they were teenagers. But when they were eight and six, Ray made them draw up wills!”

“Is he married?”

“Technically. He’s been separated from his wife for over ten years. She left him a year after the accident; moved to Julian, California; opened a second-hand bookstore.”

“How do you know all this?”

“Barry did some legal work for Vanessa, and Raymond took me out twice, before I married Gordon. I’ve been a Raymond Devlin watcher for years. He tried to get me up to his cottage once, but I out-foxed him.”

“At the meeting, this morning, I met Philip Rankin and Ken Trebitsch. Where would you place them on Vanessa’s enemies list?”

“That’s hard to say. I haven’t had much contact-”

“This could be important, Sally. Renata was murdered, remember.” Sally’s mouth stood open for a few seconds. Some sort of mental process was going on behind her well-shaped brows. “Tell me,” I said quietly.

“Like the rest of the people in that boardroom, Ken and Philip are ambitious. Both would like to add some of the clout Entertainment has to their own empires. Entertainment has the squeeze on prime time. They both want a bigger share. Ken, at least, isn’t subtle about how he goes about things. If he likes the apple on your desk, he’ll grab it. If you catch him at it, he was ‘only fooling.’ Philip’s not as easy to read. While Dermot Keogh was alive, Philip Rankin was a somebody, as they say in the muffler commercials. Recently, he’s had to work harder, do more scouting around to find talent. Dermot’s death really shook Philip. He hasn’t got over it yet, I think. Whenever I overhear him talking, he’s telling stories about the old days. He shared Dermot’s passion for antique cars and rare wines. The only thing that Dermot collected that Philip disapproved of was motorcycles.”

“I can’t picture a cellist on a chopper.”

“Neither could Philip. Thought it was too dangerous. Also, he didn’t run after women the way Dermot did. He just didn’t have the looks or the glamour for it. But you should have heard his eulogy at Dermot’s funeral. There wasn’t a dry eye in the church.”

“Does everybody call him ‘Philip’? Isn’t he ‘Phil’ to anyone?”

“Philip’s rather particular about his name. Actually, he has a string of initials he uses in writing, plus his degrees, both the earned and the honorary ones. Plain Philip Rankin is as simple as it gets. The whole name is something like Philip Ross Gardiner Rankin, F.R.C.O., D.M., R.A.M., R.C.M. Shall I keep going?”

“Was part of his value to NTC his closeness to Keogh?”

“Naturally. Philip could get around him, get him to agree to do the promotion necessary to ballyhoo his shows. Dermot believed that the programs sold themselves, that his name sold them. He hated to appear to be pushing or giving a sales pitch. You could never catch him bragging, although he was on first-name terms with all of the greats of the musical world. Philip once said that he dropped in on him, this must have been five or six years ago, and the Three Tenors were making salad in the kitchen. Dermot was boiling potatoes. Apart from his playing in public, he was really rather shy without Hector to lean on.”