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around behind it to sit down. “Listen, Easy, I think all this stuff about Gary being missing is so much crapola.” Behind his head was a vast corkboard rich with clippings, tearsheets, memos, labels and bits of paper.
    “I was at his cottage with his sister.” Easy took a chair facing Feller.
    “Now she’s got a great ass, too,” said the smiling man. “You’ve got to admit that.” Out of the corner of his eye he was looking at a pinned-up magazine ad showing three girls in bikinis walking out of the surf and away from the camera.
    “Somebody,” Easy told him, “tore your partner’s place apart.”
    The bald young man’s smile lessened. “I didn’t know that.”
    “And it looks like they may have worked him over some.”
    “You mean, beat him up?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Boy, what’s this society coming to? We might as well be living in New York or San Francisco.”
    “Can you think of any reason,” asked Easy, “why someone would do what they did?”
    “No, I really can’t. When Gay got all excited I didn’t really think too much about it. But now …”
    “Did Gary keep a lot of money around his cottage?”
    Feller laughed. “I don’t think anybody would go to his digs looking for money,” he said. “Oh, we’ve been doing pretty good with M&E the past couple years, but Gary and I still only take home around $25,000 a year each after all the expenses and sundries get taken care of.” He paused, tapping his fingers on his desktop. “It’s funny; we’ve been planning something like this, our own advertising agency, since we were kids practically. We figured by age thirty we’d both be millionaires. I keep telling my wife it’s harder to become a millionaire than I thought. Gary’s wife couldn’t wait.”
    “Where is his ex-wife?”
    “Over in England someplace and remarried,” answered Feller. “He didn’t go off to see her, if that’s what you’re wondering.”
    “You’ve known Gary since you were kids,” said Easy. “Then you also know Danny Lane.”
    Turning his back to Easy, Marks brushed at an old college dance bid tacked to his corkboard. “That’s something I’m not too very happy about. When she first walked in here to audition for that margarine thing last winter I thought— Great ! Here’s a chance for Danny to do something for us for a change. Here she was, doing commercials for fun, and married to old Goffman. I had visions of our getting a piece of the Goftoy account. That’s a billing of $12,000,000 a year.” He faced Easy again. “Instead Gary falls for her all over again and they start having an affair. Bad business thinking on his part. You shouldn’t lay the wife of an account you’re trying to pitch.”
    “Did you know Bill Goffman?”
    “Sure, he worked for Gary’s dad. Back then his father, old man Goffman, wasn’t the toy tycoon he is now.”
    “And Danny’s married to Bill’s father?”
    “Yeah. She seems to collect Goffmans,” said Feller. “Well, no, actually she collects more guys than that. It’s a damn shame, Gary’s getting hung up with her.”
    Easy said, “I need her address.”
    “She hasn’t seen Gary in a week. I phoned her right after Gay got so upset.”
    “I want to talk to her.”
    Feller picked a memo off his desk and, without looking at it, crumpled it into a ball. “Look, Easy, if you go right to the Goffman house … that’ll really screw everything up.”
    “And if Gary doesn’t turn up soon the cops are going to get in on this. They’re even less subtle than I am.
    “Okay, okay.” Feller sat motionless for nearly a half minute, then he picked up a ballpoint pen and scribbled an address on a slip of paper. “Here you go. You might ask Danny what happened to the pitch reel I gave her to show her husband.”

CHAPTER 6
    “W AIT A MINUTE,” SAID the man with the scythe.
    Easy was stretching up out of his dusty VW, which he’d just parked on a wide circle of gravel in front of the four-car garage.
    The man