BSS-620 The Unfaithful Girlfriend by Clarence Tydings


Chapter 1


Though it was scarcely thirty minutes into twilight, darkness was 
beginning to settle thickly over the city of New York, and night's 
sudden approach was nowhere more apparent than by the fountain in 
Central Park. But the sudden encroachment of darkness was halted this 
particular evening, and the well-manicured lawns of the Park, still 
bearing the traces of summer green well into September, were brightly 
lighted with a half dozen carbon arcs, their bluish smoke-streams 
faintly trailing out behind them as they cast a daylight-bright glow 
onto the trio of fashion models being led through their practiced 
motions by one of the city's leading ad agency creative directors, 
Marty Felder. And mingled in with the crowd of curious passers-by and 
agency hangers on were two young people who viewed the fascinating 
scenario of television color commercials being created with particular 
interest, Jessica Richards and her boyfriend, Phillip Wright, had not 
chanced on this happening-in-the-Park; their presence had been 
carefully calculated, right down to the cost of the subway that brought 
them here from Jessica's aunt's brownstone house down near the Village. 
Actually, the scheming was more of Jessica's doing than of Phillip's, 
for she alone had a real and clearly defined reason for being present 
when Marty Felder put his models through their paces. Jessica, too, was 
a model; at least, she'd studied successfully with one of the east's 
top modeling schools and had been through the necessary requisites of 
fifteen dollar modeling assignments and posing for the mandatory badge 
of the modeling profession, the portfolio of stills every girl lugged 
from agency to agency until she found just that right break that tossed 
her into the hundred dollar an hour league and splashed her features 
across the country's biggest magazines. But Jessica Richards had not 
yet discovered that break, though she'd tried as diligently and 
determinedly as any girl in New York, and Marty Felder offered her the 
one shortcut available. But it was a painful shortcut she dreaded to 
take, one that would destroy everything between her and Phillips if he 
were to find out.

It was a week ago today, almost exactly to the minute, when she'd 
finally managed an interview with the heavy, beady eyed Felder in his 
plush paneled offices on the thirteenth floor of a Madison Avenue 
skyscraper. Phillip, true to their long-standing rules of job-hunting, 
had waited outside on the Avenue; he'd finished his own round of agency 
visits before noon, unsuccessful for the third week running in his hunt 
for an art opening where he could use his New York School of Fine Arts 
training better than at the bargain-basement department store 
advertising department he'd just quit. Most of the agency people had 
already cleared their desks and gone back to Connecticut and Long 
Island when Felder remembered his four-thirty appointment still sitting 
in his reception office, and with a flourish of obviously contrived 
courtesy, ushered her in for a quick cursory glance at her well-
traveled portfolio, now slightly the worse for wear from being dragged 
from one agency to another, from modeling house to advertising agency 
to television package producers to network casting offices.


End of Page 1. See bss-620.txt for full story.