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it out, Gene. We’ll call it
Joliet
. Each week an inmate is electrocuted. That would be the pitch …”
    “Right, right,” said Mathews. “Every Thursday night at nine, right here on NBC—or whatever—come watch a heinous criminal get executed!”
    “There’d be the ongoing cast of a warden, a priest, some guards, reporters and the entire population on death row that always has new people coming in to take the places of those executed …”
    “We could maybe get big-name guest stars to come on each week and take the juice. Some could get fried for murder, some for treason, some for rape …”
    Here they were, like old times, playing it out.
    Rinehart said, “There’d be flashbacks to their crimes, lots of tears from their victims and loved ones …”
    Mathews said, “We’d ask Clark Gable, The King himself, to guest star. He’d make a spectacular electrocuted corpse, don’t you think?”
    “I can smell him now …”
    “Maybe one week we’d have an attempted prison breakout from death row. Maybe even one that was successful. An innocent man gets out to prove his innocence …”
    Back and forth they went, the way they always did.
    “Or a guilty one gets out to kill the prosecutor who sent him to death row …”
    “One week, the warden could start sleeping with one of the death row inmates’ visiting wives. Maybe knock her up …”
    “The baby could be brought up in the prison nursery by a convicted murderess with a heart of gold …”
    “Every once in a while a convict would be proved innocent seconds before the switch was to be thrown. That would be where the reporter characters would come in. Heroes all, of course—”
    “Of course. We’d go into detail about last meals, last requests, last statements, last-minute confessions, last sex, last fantasies …”
    “Shoot the whole thing right there in the prison at Joliet. Think of the great publicity that’d be for the great State of Illinois …”
    “I’m not sure we could get Loretta Young or one of her TV types to go for it but who knows?”

 
    When they finished, she was the first to speak.
    “You really are The King … Mr. Gable,” she said. Gable did not say thank you or anything else, expressing whatever he had to say with a pleasant grunt as he, in several quick moves, pushed away from her, swung his legs down from the bed, stood up and pulled up his dark red silk pajama bottoms.
    “I remember that chest from
It Happened One Night,”
she said. “But it didn’t have any hair on it in the movie, like it does now.”
    “I let it grow out,” he said. The subject clearly annoyed him.
    She just laughed. Then she said, “I just have to know. One of those awful movie magazines wrote that Claudette Colbert is a … you know, a lady queer. That can’t be true, can it?”
    Gable shrugged. He was now standing with his back to her, seemingly looking for something.
    “I’ll bet you don’t even remember
my
name, do you?” she asked.
    Turning to face her, he said, “Betty?”
    “No. It’s Sarah.”
    “Same thing,” he said.
    She started to laugh but caught herself. It was clear he was not joking. He meant what he said.
    Clark Gable had found what he was looking for. He held her two light nylon stockings in one hand and her bright pink panties in the other.
    She paid no attention to that and made no move to get out of bed. She said, “I am Sarah Strother and I live in Jefferson City, Missouri. I’m going to get off in Kansas City and take an early-morning Missouri Pacific on home. My husband is a lawyer and I work for the lieutenant governor of Missouri as his legislative assistant. He’s a Democrat. What are you?”
    “A Republican,” said Gable.
    “Why?”
    “I was in the war with Ike.”
    “Everyone who was in the war was in it with Ike.”
    Now Gable extended and raised his arms, offering the woman her stockings and panties. “I think it’s time for both of us to get some sleep,” he said. “I’m going to need