Page:Fantastic Volume 08 Number 01.djvu/24

 indebtedness. In fact, he insisted that I take six hundred dollars with me when I left his place.

"The data afforded me in connection with your case is invaluable," he told me. "I consider the time and effort spent on you to be a sound investment which will bring me ample returns in the future."

Wagram was wonderful. It was he who found me a place to live, pulled strings to get me my first sales job. From that, after a few months of orientation—during which I kept coming back to him for reassurance whenever necessary—I finally stepped into my present position with the transcription agency. And that's where I'd met Roxie.

She'd come in, one day, with an agent, a Ben Clermer. He was one of those hearty, gregarious boys, a tactile tactitian—continually patting you on the back, holding your arm while he talked to you. He pawed every woman he met. It was a compulsion, really. He couldn't help putting his hands on you, digging you in the ribs, going through all the motions employed by a successful pickpocket.

But I don't like pickpockets, and I didn't much care for Ben Clermer; particularly when I saw him pawing Roxie.

That's when I knew I was falling in love with her—when I began to resent his familiarity.

They came in several times; Roxie was hoping to get a job belting out singing commercials. Unfortunately, she didn't have the voice for it. Those husky, untrained tones just didn't lend themselves to cooing over the delights of a liquid detergent. And she lacked the disciplined projection necessary for a career as a straight singer. Roxie had, I learned, knocked around the fringes of show biz for a number of years; she'd been a nitery chorine in her teens, done bits in strawhat stock, even had a season as assistant to a carney magician. She'd started out at fifteen as a beautiful redhead, and she ended up, at twenty-three, as a beautiful redhead.

Somewhere along the line there had been a brief, unsuccessful marriage and any number of brief, unsuccessful liaisons. I never asked her about the past—I'd learned to be pretty sensitive myself about this. But I did, eventually, broach the matter of her future.

"I don't know what Clermer has told you," I said. 24