And suppose Beulah was dead! Oh! She should have listened to Archer in the first place! What if Beulah was dead!
CHAPTER EIGHT
“Shocking! Absolutely shocking!” Comstock Bowdler clucked.
“Why so surprised, Esquire, Esquire?” H. Reb Klein raised an eyebrow at Bowdler. “After all, we’ve always known that Beulah was a live wire.”
“Black humor!” Irving Zihnzeehr sniffed disapprovingly.
“Bigotry!” Reb shook his head with mock sadness. “Irving, there are times when I’m ashamed to call you a landsman.”
“Never mind that.” Raunch Rammer put a stop to the bickering. “We’re short one art director. Now, do we hire a substitute, or what?”
“I should think that would be up to you, Hugh,” Pierre Strongfellow said to Bowdler. “I’ve checked with the doctor and Beulah will be all right in a week or so. It’s just that she’s in a state of -- pardon the expression -- shock.”
“Can we get by for a week,?” Raunch asked Bowdler.
“I think so. Beulah left us ahead by a few days. We’ll manage.”
“All right. Then let’s get back to work.” Raunch signified that the meeting was over.
“Uh, just a minute, Raunch.” Pierre stopped the exodus from the publisher’s office. “About our little office lottery …”
“What about it?”
“Well, I was just wondering. Do we assume that Beulah had her turn and just go on with the sequence the way it was set up?”
“Of course. Obviously she failed.” Bowdler was adamant.
“Why? Just because you did?” Reb gave him a dig.
“We’re not really sure,” Pierre pointed out. “And we want to be fair.”
“When a battery’s out of juice, you can’t start the car,” Irving pointed out. “All you can do is try a new battery.”
“Or wait until the old one is recharged,” Pierre countered.
“Not if it’s been shorted out!”
“Or fizzled out,” Raunch added thoughtfully. “The question is, was it ever tried at all, or were the wires crossed before Beulah even had a chance. Now, it seems to me-— Yes? What is it?” The publisher interrupted himself in response to a knock on the door followed by the entrance of Cal Lowe.
“You said I should bring these papers in as soon as I got back,” the office boy told him. “I’m sorry if I interrupt --”
“No. It’s all right.” Raunch indicated that Cal should put the papers on his desk and picked up on his previous train of thought. “If Beulah never even got a chance to try with our Llona, then-—”
“Excuse me, sir.”
“Yes? What now?” Raunch looked at the office boy with annoyance.
“I couldn’t help overbearing. It’s none of my business, but if you’re wondering about Miss Von Dyker and our new receptionist, they went to Miss Von Dyker’s apartment for dinner the other night before Miss Von Dyker had her accident. I know because I heard them making the arrangements and I saw them leaving work together.”
“Thank you, Cal.” Rammer waited until the boy had left and then turned to the others. “Well, that would seem to settle it,” he told them. “Beulah might cry foul later on, but for now it’s up to the next fellow.”
“And that’s you,” Pierre observed as he left the office.
“And that’s me,” Rammer agreed with a touch of smugness.
He waited until lunchtime, when the rest of the staff was out of the office and Llona was covering the switchboard, to make his pitch. Then he picked up his telephone and asked her to step into his office for a moment. His eyes reviewed the charms of Llona’s naked body, but his tone was carefully businesslike.
“Something’s come up,” Raunch told her. “I have to work late tonight and I’ll need someone here to run the switchboard so I can make some calls. I know it’s an imposition, but if you can manage it . . .”
“I’d like to help you out, sir, but—” Llona hedged.
“It’s really very important. What’s the difficulty?”
“It’s my husband, sir. He’s in the hospital, you know. And the visiting hours today are from six to eight, which gives me just enough time to get there after work.”
“Your husband. Ah, yes, I’d forgotten you were married. It’s still our little secret, I trust?”
“I haven’t mentioned it to anybody.”
“Good. Good. We have to guard the Nymph image after all. Well, look, I’ll tell you what. I probably won’t need you until eight-thirty or so, Do you think you could come back here after you see your husband?”
“Yes sir.”
“Good. Good. I’ll be expecting you then. And don’t bother with dinner, my clear. I’ll have a snack sent up for both of us.”
“Thank you.” Llona left.
After she was gone, Raunch picked up his telephone and dialed a number. “Hello, Ramon? This is Mr. Rammer . . . Fine, and you? . . . Now, I’m having a little tête-a-tête in my office for two this evening . . . Champagne, yes . . . Caviar, of course . . . Cold lobster salad; just the thing! . . .”
Llona debated with herself whether she should mention to Archer that she’d be returning to the office to work late. She decided but the decision was in vain. It was taken out of her hands by Archer’s mother who had chosen that same evening to visit her son.
“As long as you’re here to visit my poor boy, before he got married he was never in the hospital a day in his life,” Archer’s mother zinged, “we might as well share a cab home together, why should we both pay?”
“I’m afraid not,” Llona told her. “I’m not going home.”
“We’d like to know why you’re not going straight home,” Archer said suspiciously. The fat nurse standing beside his bed bobbed her head in agreement.
“Yes. Why?” And Mama made three.
“I have to go back to the office to do some work”’
“Your father—how is it this woman you married should take after him?—used to say he was working late, I knew better,” Archer’s mother told him.
“We know better too,” Archer said as the fat nurse silently moved her lips. “We weren’t born yesterday.”
“Now what’s that supposed to mean?” Llona was exasperated.
“Don’t talk to Archer he’s a sick boy like that!” The tigress stuck up for her cub. “He means a woman alone belongs home so her poor, sick husband shouldn’t worry, not running around all over town with who-knows-who doing who-knows-what after dark.”
“That’s what we mean!” Archer said, he and the fat nurse both scowling disapproval.
“I’m not running around. I’m going back to the office to work!”
“We shouldn’t be upset.” The fat nurse spoke for the first time. “Our tumtum has been very shaky lately.”
“With all those enemas, I’m not surprised,” Llona muttered.
“Starting tomorrow, I’ll bring some homemade broth every day, so many enemas won’t be necessary, it’ll serve the same purpose.”
“We couldn’t possibly allow that!” The nurse stared Archer’s mother down. “The hospital regulates our diet very strictly, you know. Interference from outside simply will not be tolerated.”
“Three enemas a day!” Archer’s mother held her ground. “You call that feeding him? I call it your hospital’s got things topsy-turvy, you ask me. How can it go on without a little solid broth on his stomach?”
“We’re coming along just fine,” the nurse insisted.
“Yeah, Mom. We really are. You shouldn’t interfere,” Archer added.
“Interfere! My son, you’ve got a short memory, you don’t remember the last time you told me not to interfere. If I followed the heart of a mother and interfered then, you wouldn’t have been in such a rush to marry this what’s-her-name so you should end up hanging by a broken leg from a hospital ceiling.”