This apparition skidded to a stop, danced an intricate measure symbolizing indignation, and brandished a long letter-knife. Then he hopped across the rug to the Boy Wonder’s desk, behind which Mr. Queen sat paralyzed, and waggled the steel under the petrified Queen nose.
“See this?” he yelled.
Mr. Queen nodded. He wished he didn’t.
“Know what it is?”
Mr. Queen gulped. “A knife.”
“Know where I found it?”
Mr. Queen shook his head at this inexplicable catechism. The chunky man plunged the steel into Jacques Butcher’s desk-top. It quivered there menacingly.
“In my back!” howled Mr. Bascom. “Know who put it there — rat?”
Mr. Queen pushed his chair back an inch.
“You did, you double-crossing New York story-stealer!” bellowed Mr. Bascom; and he seized a bottle of Scotch from the Boy Wonder’s bar and wrapped his lips fiercely about its dark brown neck.
“This,” said Mr. Queen, “is certainly the second feature of an especially bad dream.”
“Just Lew,” said Butcher absently. “Always the dramatist. This happens at the start of every production. Listen, Lew, you’ve got Queen wrong — Ellery Queen, Lew Bascom.”
“How do you do,” said Mr. Queen formally.
“Lousy,” said Lew from behind the bottle.
“Queen’s just going to help you with the treatment, Lew. It’s still your job, and of course you get top billing.”
“That’s right,” said Ellery, with an ingratiating smile. “Just your little helper, Lew, old man.”
Mr. Bascom’s wet lips widened in a grin of pure camaraderie. “That’s different,” he said handsomely. “Here, pal, have a shot. Have two shots. You, too, Butch. Le’s all have two shots.”
Gentle Alan Clark, the peace and sanity of New York’s quiet streets, the milieu of normal people, seemed light-years away. Mr. Queen, hangover and all, wrested the Scotch from Mr. Bascom with the artificial courage of a desperate man.
There was a spare workroom off the Boy Wonder’s office which smelled slightly of disinfectant and was furnished with all the luxury of a flagellant monk’s cell.
“It’s where I go when I want to think,” explained Butcher. “You boys use it as your office while you’re on this assignment; I want you near me.”
Ellery, facing the prospect of being caged within the four nude walls with a gentleman whose whimsies seemed indistinguishable from homicidal mania, appealed to the Boy Wonder with mute, sad eyes. But Butcher grinned and shut the door in his face.
“All right, all right,” said Mr. Bascom irritably. “Squat and listen. You’re bein’ let in on the ground floor of next year’s Academy prizewinner.”
Eying the door which led to the patio and possible escape in an emergency, Ellery squatted. Lew lay down on the floor and spat accurately through an open window, arms behind his frowsy head.
“I can see it now,” he began dreamily. “The crowds, the baby spots, the stinkin’ speeches—”
“Spare the build-up,” said Ellery. “Facts, please.”
“What would you say,” Lew went on in the same drifting way, “if M-G-M should all of a sudden make a picture out of Garbo’s life? Huh?”
“I’d say you ought to sell the idea to M-G-M.”
“Nah, nah, you don’t get it. And they should star Garbo in it, huh? Her own life!” Lew paused, triumphantly. “Say, what’s the matter with you, anyway? Don’t you see it — her virgin girlhood in Sweden, the meeting with Stiller the genius, Stiller’s contract in Hollywood — he takes the gawky kid along, Hollywood falls for her and gives Stiller the cold mitt, she becomes a sensation, Stiller kicks off, the Gilbert romance, the broken heart behind the dead pan — for gossakes!”
“But would Miss Garbo consent?” murmured Ellery.
“Or s’pose,” continued Lew, ignoring him, “that Paramount took John and Lionel and Ethel and slung ’em together in a story of their lives?”
“You’d have something there,” said Ellery.
Lew sprang to his feet. “See what I mean? Well, I’ve got a real-life yarn that’s got those licked a mile! Y’know whose lives we’re gonna make? The dizziest, grandest, greatest names in the American theatre! Those dynamos of the drama — the screwballs of the screen — the flghtin’, feudin’, first families of Hollywood!”
“I suppose,” frowned Ellery, “you mean the Royles and the Stuarts.”
“For gossakes, who else?” groaned Lew. “Get it? Get the set-up? On one side Jack Royle and his cub Ty — on the other Blythe Stuart and her daughter Bonnie. The old generation an’ the new. A reg’lar four-ring circus!”
And overwhelmed by his own enthusiasm, Lew staggered out, returning a moment later from Butcher’s office with the unfinished bottle of Scotch.
Ellery sucked his lower lip. It was an idea, all right. There was enough dramatic material in the lives of the Royles and the Stuarts to make two motion pictures, with something left over for a first-class Broadway production.
Before the War, when John Royle and Blythe Stuart had dominated the New York stage, their stormy love-affair was the romantic gossip of Mayfair and Tanktown. It was like the courtship of two jungle cats. They mauled each other from Times Square to San Francisco and back again, leaving a trail of glittering performances and swollen box-offices. But no one doubted, despite their fighting, that in the end they would marry and settle down to the important business of raising a new royal family.
Astonishingly, after the furious passion of their romance, they did nothing of the kind. Something happened; gossip-writers from that day to this had skinned their noses trying to ferret out exactly what. Whatever the cause, it broke up their romance — to such an accompaniment of tears, bellows, recriminations, escapades out of pique, and bitter professions of undying enmity as to set the whole continent to buzzing.
Immediately after the débâcle each married some one else. Jack Royle took to his handsome bosom a brawny Oklahoma debutante who had come to New York to give the theatre a new Duse, presented Royle with a son instead, publicly horsewhipped her husband a month later for an unexplained but easily imagined reason, and died shortly after of a broken neck as the result of a fall from a horse.
Blythe Stuart eloped with her publicity man, who fathered her daughter Bonnie, stole and pawned the pearl necklace which had been presented to her by Jack during their engagement, fled to Europe as a war correspondent, and died in a Paris bistro of acute alcoholism.
When Hollywood beckoned, the Royle-Stuart feud was already in the flush of its development, its origin long forgotten in the sheer fury of the feudists’ temperaments. It communicated itself to their progeny, so that the hostility of Bonnie Stuart, who already was an important screen ingénue, for Tyler Royle, who was Magna’s leading juvenile, became scarcely less magnificent than that of their parents.
From Wilshire to Hollywood boulevards the feud raged. It was said that old Sigmund, to whom Jack and Blythe had been under contract, had died not of cerebral hemorrhage but of nervous indigestion as a result of trying to keep peace on the Magna lot; and a few prematurely gray hairs at the back of Jacques Butcher’s head were ascribed to his similarly futile efforts in the case of their respective issue. One studio wit stated that the Boy Wonder had proposed marriage to Bonnie Stuart as a last desperate measure, on the theory that love sometimes works miracles.
“That’s right,” said Ellery aloud. “Butch and Bonnie are engaged, aren’t they?”