Before Midnight

"I don't listen to the radio in the morning. Neither does Mr. Goodwin."

"To hell with the radio," Assa snapped. "Get on, Rudolph."

"I am. One of LBA's big accounts--we call Lippert, Buff and Assa LBA--is Heery Products, Incorporated. One of the Heery products is the line of cosmetics that they call Pour Amour. They introduced it some years ago and it was doing fairly well. Last spring a young man on the LBA staff named Louis Dahlmann conceived an idea for promoting it, and he finally succeeded in getting enough approval of the idea to have it submitted to the Heery people, and they decided they liked it, and it was scheduled to start the twenty-seventh of September. It was a prize contest, the biggest in history, with a first prize of five hundred thousand dollars in cash, second prize two hundred and fifty thousand, third prize one hundred thousand, and fifty-seven smaller prizes. I have to explain it to you. Each week for twenty weeks there appeared in newspapers and magazines a four-line verse, from which-"

"I can save you that," Wolfe told him. "I know about it."

"Did you enter?" O'Garro demanded.

"Enter the contest? Good heavens, no."

"Get on," Assa snapped.