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Rh him after the matinee. Nellie, dear, you are, you know, barking up the wrong tree."

A limousine was bearing him downtown to the apartment hotel in which Ernie Emerson was living.

"He's one of the best," Frankie Regan had said that afternoon. "Known all over the United States. Gives parties you can never forget. Be nice to him and he's your friend for life."

Ernie Emerson waited for Ken at the door of his penthouse apartment. He was dressed in evening clothes and Ken's first remark was one of excuse for the blue sack suit he was wearing. "You look splendid as you are," said Emerson. "Come in and let me show you my sky palace." Ken followed him through the entrance foyer to a door. They entered a balcony. The apartment was isolated—a complete dwelling, terraces facing the city on four sides, an island high above a sea of roofs. French door to the library, a stern room in 18th Century Spanish, curious setting for the Nordic Emerson, whose glass eye glittered in the light of its many candles. A deep red carpet warmed the library, where, in a corner, against a black velvet drape, hung an ivory crucifix; beneath it, many silver candelabra contained elegantly slim tapers.

"I am a mystic," Emerson said, as they stood before the bleeding Christ. "It pleases me to commune with my spiritual self when I am weary of my body. The crucifix is venerable—stolen, as they say, from the Cathedral of Valdepeñas in old Spain, by some blackamoor brigand. The candlesticks, of course, are genuinely by Cellini, the candles imported from the ancient stock of Pietro Quezon, near