He showed up about four. He stretched his long, lanky frame out on the sofa and read. At six he knocked on my office door. “I wish to hell I had written this picture. I love the goddamned story. I love the goddamned train wreck. I’d be proud to have my name on it.”

“Good,” I said, pleased that my intuition had been correct.

“Now, where in hell are you going to offer a script like this?”

I sent it to MGM, to Jonathan’s odious father, where The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea was in preproduction, but MGM was not the least bit interested in Adios Diablo. Mr. Moore returned it to me within twenty-four hours with a terse note that read, You must be out of your mind. Peons rising up against the railroad? Communist propaganda.

One afternoon a few weeks later the phone rang, and instead of putting the call through, Thelma came to my door. Whoever it was would not give their name. She gave me a look of foreboding. I took the call in my office while she lounged in the doorway.

An ironic masculine voice said, “I understand you’re having an affair.”

Had Al Gilbert or some other slimeball sniffed out Terrence and me? “Is that so? Who with?”

“With me. I heard it from my wife. I am in deep shit, matrimonially speaking.”

I laughed with relief and waved okay to Thelma. “Sorry, Carleton. Would it help if I denied it in Variety?”

He was calling about another script by one of my clients, a modest whodunit Paragon wanted to produce. Looking for paper to take notes, I picked up one of the many rejections for Adios Diablo. I described it to Carleton in glowing terms.

“No thanks, Roxanne. It’s too Mexican, and anything with insurrection is like catnip to the American Legion and the Motion Picture Alliance. Believe me, I don’t want John Wayne and Ward Bond sniffing around Paragon. Besides, you say it has a train wreck? Too expensive. Paragon is not MGM.”

“MGM has turned it down.”

He gave a rueful laugh. “And you want me to produce it?”

“Read it. Just read it. It’s the most exciting script I’ve ever offered. Really. Stupendous. And we are lovers, don’t forget.”

“You are very persuasive. Send it over to Paragon this afternoon with your courier, and I’ll read it.”

Ha ha, I thought to myself, as I picked up my purse and keys, Carleton Grimes thinks I have a courier—or, more likely, he was trying to flatter me.