“So everybody up to my room!” Evie shouted, and the stampede began. The Hungarian girl in the feather boa handed the monkey’s leash to the hapless hotel manager, who stood paralyzed as the partygoers swarmed the elevators and stairs.
“You looking to get evicted again, Evil?” Theta asked as they dashed up the gleaming wooden staircase. “What is this, hotel number two?”
“Three, but who’s counting? Besides, they won’t evict me. They love me here!”
Theta looked back down at the hotel manager, who was shouting at a bellhop who was trying to distract the screeching beast with a broom while a telephone operator frantically connected cables in search of someone, anyone, who could remove a monkey from the Grant Hotel.
Theta shook her head. “I’ve seen that look before. It ain’t love, kid.”
Evie’s room was so thick with people that they spilled out into the elegant damask-papered hallways of the Grant’s third floor. Evie, Theta, and Henry took refuge in the bathroom’s claw-foot tub, leaning their backs against one side of it and resting their legs across the other. In the room just beyond, the accordionist launched into the same doleful number he’d played twice before.
“Not again!” Evie growled and drank from her flask. “We should get him to play one of your songs, Henry. You should write for the accordion. An entire accordion revue! It’ll be a sensation.”
“Gee, why didn’t I think of that before? Henry DuBois’s Accordion Follies! The Ins and Outs of Love…” Henry sighed. “That’s almost bad enough to be a Herbert Allen song.”
“Herbert Allen! I’ve heard his songs on the radio!” Evie said. “I like the one that goes, ‘I love your hair / I love your nose / I love you from your head to toes, My daaaaarling girl!’ Or the one that goes, ‘Daaarling, you’re top banana / Baaaby, you’re my peaches and cream / Orange you gonna be my Sherbet—’”
“For the love of Pete, please stop,” Henry groaned, cradling his head in his hands.
Theta poured the rest of her booze into Henry’s glass. “Herbert keeps getting his rotten songs in the show over Henry’s just because he’s published,” she explained. “It’s all the same song. The same horrible song.”
“Gee, they do sort of sound alike, now that you mention it,” Evie said, thinking it over.