1958 - Not Safe to be Free Read Online Free Page A

Hollywood scandal sheet called Peep that paid him enough to buy his drink and the bare necessities.
    Peep had a large circulation. It specialized in near-pornographic photographs and an outrageous gossip column. In his heyday, Joe wouldn’t have dreamed of contributing to such a paper, no matter what he had been offered. Now he was thankful to do so.
    As he walked into the Plaza lobby, his Rolliflex camera hanging around his neck and bumping against his chest, Joe was thinking of the letter he had had that morning from
    Manley, the Editor of Peep. Manley hadn’t pulled his punches. If Joe imagined he had paid his fare to Cannes to get the insipid junk that Joe was turning in, Joe had another think coming.
    “How many more times do I have to tell you that we have got to have something that’ll stand our readers on their ears?” Manley wrote. “Cannes is a cesspit: everyone knows that. The dirt’s there. If you’ll only lay off the booze and dig for it, you’ll find it. If you can’t find it, then say so and I’ll wire Jack Bernstein to take over.”
    This letter had shaken Joe’s nerves. He knew no other paper would employ him and if Manley dropped him, he might just as well walk into the sea and keep on walking. Ever since Floyd Delaney had arrived in Cannes, Joe had been desperately trying to get a personal interview with him.
    Floyd Delaney was the most colourful character at the Festival and Joe hoped that, if he could get him talking, he could trap him into saying something indiscreet. He had worried Harry Stone, Delaney’s publicity manager, to get him an interview, but Stone had been brutally frank.
    “If you imagine F.D. wants to talk to a rumdum like you Joe,” he said, “you must be out of your mind. That pickle puss of yours would give him a nightmare.”
    Joe’s drink-sodden mind glowed with resentment when he remembered Stone’s words. If he could only dig up some dirt on Delaney, he was thinking, something really hot with photographs, maybe the snoot wouldn’t be quite so sensitive about how a man looked if his own face was turning red.
    It was a quarter to four when Joe took up his position in an alcove window that gave him an uninterrupted view of the door to suite 27. He was out of sight of anyone going into the suite and also out of sight of the occasional waiter who passed up and down the corridor.
    He sat on the window seat, his Rolliflex at the ready, satisfied that there was enough light in the corridor to get good pictures without using his flash equipment.
    He had had four double whiskies since two o’clock and his mind was a little fuddled. He wasn’t quite sure what he was waiting for, for he knew Delaney and his high-hat wife were in the cinema and they wouldn’t be out much before six o’clock. He had seen Delaney’s good-looking son sunning himself on the beach and he looked set to remain there some time. So, on the face of it, Joe was wasting his time sitting outside this door. Nothing seemed likely to happen in suite 27 until around six o’clock, and, even then, the chances of anything of value to Joe happening was remote.
    But that didn’t bother Joe. It simply supplied him with an excuse to sit still for a while and to get away from the mad crush downstairs.
    The Cannes Festival had exhausted him. The competition had been unbelievably fierce. Joe felt old and washed-up when jostling with the other photographers for position when some famous star condescended to pose for a very brief moment to allow the photographers to go into action.
    These photographers were young men, smart in their Riviera clothes, with hands that were rock steady and their ruthless keenness dazed Joe. His drink-fuddled mind made him clumsy with his camera and he had trouble in keeping it steady. They jostled him to the back of the crowd, yelling at him: “Get the hell out of the way, grandpa! Let a man work!”
    At five minutes to four by the corridor clock immediately above the door to suite 27,