House of Wax.

“Hey, what’s the matter with you?” Mike asked me. “You look awful.” Mike Davidson was

DD’s tall, wiry assistant editor and head staff writer (I was the tail). Mike was a lousy writer, but-thanks to the sexist policies of our woman-hating editorial director, Brandon Pomery-his bylines outnumbered mine twenty to one. “Who picked out your clothes this morning?” Mike jeered, skimming his palm over the shelf of his sand-colored flattop. “Rin Tin Tin?”

Now, do you think that wisecrack was even the weeniest bit funny? Neither did I. I thought it was as lame and sloppy as the pitifully dull stories Mike cranked out for

Daring Detective. Mario, on the other hand, must have found Mike’s quip to be the funniest darn thing he ever heard in his life, because he was laughing so hard I thought he was going to spit up. His fat, swarthy face turned as pink as my blouse, and his spasms of hilarity were so violent his greasy ducktail was coming unglued.

But my dear friend Lenny Zimmerman, the lowly art assistant whose desk was situated in the farthest depths of the common workroom, wasn’t laughing at all. He was peering at me through his crooked, black-rimmed, bottle-thick glasses, with a look of intense concern on his pale, narrow face. He knew that something was wrong-that something bad had happened to me. Ever since the day he’d saved my life (which was over a year ago, when I was working on my very first murder story), Lenny had been able to read me like a book.

And that was what he was doing now-turning my pages, so to speak-trying to judge how much trouble I’d gotten myself into this time.

“Pipe down!” Harvey Crockett barked, sticking his large white-haired head through his open office door. “Get back to work! It’s ten fifteen!” He gave me a snarly, disgruntled look. “Especially you, Paige. Gotta make up for lost time.”

It wasn’t just my lateness that had upset him. It was also the holiday. Crockett was a smart but stodgy ex-newspaperman whose only reason for living was his job. He wasn’t proud that he was now the executive editor of

Daring Detective magazine instead of a reporter for the Daily News, but he wasn’t ashamed of it, either. The actual product or the nature of his work didn’t matter that much to him; it was just the job. And right now, coming off an unwelcome three-day weekend, Crockett was suffering from job withdrawal.

Caffeine withdrawal, too. “Make some coffee, Paige,” he sputtered, “and make it now. This place needs a jumpstart.”

“Yes, Mr. Crockett,” I said, dropping my purse down on my desk (which, since I also served as the office receptionist, was the one closest to the entrance). I hurtled across the room, hoisted the heavy Coffeemaster off the table where it was always stationed, and hauled it toward the door. Pitching Lenny what I hoped was a reassuring smile, I scooted out into the hall and headed for the ladies’ room to wash out the percolator and fill it with water.

As the only female on the

DD staff, I always had to make the coffee. (That’s women’s work, in case you haven’t heard.) I normally resented being the coffee slave, but today I was grateful for the chore. The ladies’ room was quiet and the water was cool. And when I’d finished cleaning and filling the pot, I had a chance to catch my breath, adjust my makeup, and straighten my stocking seams. I couldn’t do anything about the mismatched colors of my crazy outfit, but after realigning the buttons on my blouse, and closing the zipper on my skirt, I looked and felt a little better.

When I returned to the workroom and began spooning coffee into the percolator, Mr. Crockett was satisfied. “Bring me a cup when it’s ready,” he said, stepping back inside his office.

“Ditto,” said Mario, who was watching (or rather, ogling) my every move and making ugly smoochy faces whenever I glanced in his direction.

“Me, too,” Mike chimed in, never looking up from the story he was pecking out, with two fingers, on his typewriter.

Lenny didn’t ask me for coffee. (He rarely drank the stuff, but when he did, he got up and got it himself.) And he didn’t say anything else to me, either. He didn’t have to. His urgent, puzzled, anxious gaze was saying it all.

I was sorry to be causing Lenny such worry, but there was nothing I could do to ease his concerns right now. If I went over to talk to him, Mario would start making more nasty-and loud-remarks, and then Mr. Crockett would come bursting out of his office to growl at us again. And that wouldn’t do anybody any good. Lifting my shoulders in an apologetic shrug, I winked at Lenny and tossed him another quick smile. Then I turned my back on the boys in the workroom and faced a different pile of problems.

THERE WAS SO MUCH WORK STACKED UP on my desk I wanted to run back to the ladies’ room and hide out there till lunchtime. There were letters to open and sort, newspapers to clip, stories to edit and rewrite, galleys to proofread, invoices to record, photos to label and file. And it was already twenty to eleven! And I had to call Binky at noon! And if

DD’s second-in-command, Brandon Pomeroy, happened to stroll into the office before I left on my lunch hour, he would see all the paperwork on my desk, and find out how late I’d come in this morning, and then he wouldn’t let me leave at all.

Which would throw a big wrench in my plans to visit the Actors Studio.

However, I wasn’t

that worried about Pomeroy coming in early. Truth was, he hardly ever made it into the office before lunch. (When you’re a close relative of Oliver Rice Harrington-the powerful and wealthy publishing mogul who owns the magazine you work for-you can show up whenever you like. And when you’re a lazy, jaded snob who breakfasts on dry martinis, you like to show up late.) Nevertheless, Pomeroy had been known to pull surprises out of his hat from time to time, and I was praying that today would not be one of those times.

After I served my boss and coworkers their coffee, I took another survey of my work load. The newspapers were taking up the most room on my desk, so I chose to tackle them first. Snatching the

Daily Mirror off the top of the pile, I began flipping through it as fast as I could, looking for juicy crime stories to clip out for our files (one of my more mindless daily chores). There was one story about Gray, but it was even briefer and less informative than the article I’d read on Sunday. A wave of sadness washed over me as I cut the piece out and put it in the labeled and dated manila folder I had set aside for Pomeroy. (Reading the new crime clips was the only aspect of his job Pomeroy seemed to relish, and if the folder of clippings wasn’t sitting on his desk when he came in, he’d have a royal snit fit.)

The other three morning editions also ran short articles about Gray’s murder, merely recapping the barest facts and reporting that the case was still under investigation. Two other homicides had occured in the city in the past week (one in Harlem, one in the Bronx), and they were rehashed as well.

As I was cutting out these articles and putting them in the folder, I snuck a quick look at some of the day’s top stories: The national economy had shown a strong upsurge during the first six months of 1955, smashing all peacetime records; Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson had suffered a moderately severe heart attack while visiting a friend in Virginia; The grand opening of Disneyland Amusement Park in Anaheim, California, was scheduled for July 17th.

But the biggest story of the day, bar none, was the heat. WE’RE HAVIN’ A HEAT WAVE! one headline proclaimed. NO RELIEF IN SIGHT! cried another. Actually, the temperature

had dropped a bit-all the way down to 95.8 degrees!-but the humidity was so high nobody could tell the difference. So the papers were jammed with advertisements for products that promised to keep you cool and dry. I gazed with longing at the full-page ad for Ambassador Window Air Conditioners, knowing I’d never be able to save up the 169 bucks I’d need to buy one. But all was not lost; there was hope for me yet. For just seventy-nine cents I could “Beat the Heat with Mexsana Medicated Powder!” Maybe I’d go get some after work.