The Four of Hearts (2 page)

Ellery almost said: ‘Yes, sir.' He came on in.

It wasn't fair! With his sharp green eyes and red hair and boy's smile and beautifully disreputable clothes, Butcher looked like a normal human being. And the holy of holies! From the exterior and ante-room decoration, one had a right to anticipate lushness along Latin-Oriental lines, with tapestries and tiles and inlaid woods of precious pastels. But no drapes smothered the sun; the walls had been repanelled in clean pine; an old missionwood desk bearing the scars of golf-shoes and cigarette burns stood higgledy-piggledy in the midst of a congress of deep, honest chairs; the desk was littered with clues to toil – yellow paper covered with ink-scrawls, a clay model of a ballroom set, an old typewriter with a battered face, photographs, mimeographed scripts, a can of film; books that looked as if they were being read bristled in the pine walls; and a small portable bar beside the desk stood open, crowded with bottles, and accessible to a nervous elbow, as a bar should.

‘Ripped out all the junk,' said the Boy Wonder cheerfully. ‘You should have seen it. Sit down, boys. Drink?'

‘It isn't fair,' moaned Mr. Queen, getting into a chair and cowering.

‘What?'

‘He says he needs some air,' said Alan Clark hastily.

‘Shouldn't wonder, after the raw deal he got,' said the young man, throwing open all the windows. ‘Have a slug of Scotch, Queen. Do you good.'

‘Brandy,' said Mr. Queen faintly.

‘Brandy!' The Boy Wonder looked pleased. ‘Now there's a man with discriminating boozing habits. It gets your ticker after a while, but look at all the fun you have waiting for coronary thrombosis. Tell you what I'll do with you, Queen. I'll crack open a couple of bottles of 125-year-old Napoleon I've been saving for my wedding. Just between friends?'

Mr. Queen wavered between the demon of prejudice and the Boy Wonder's grin. While he wavered, the tempter tilted a sun-scorched bottle and poured golden liquid.

It was too, too much. The would-be avenger accepted the fat glass and buried his nose in the seductive vapours of the aged cognac.

‘Here – here's to you,' said Mr. Queen one bottle later.

‘No, no, here's to
you
,' said Mr. Butcher.

The friendly sun was beaming on the Magna lot outside, the friendly room was cloistered and cool, the friendly brandy was pure bliss, and they were old, old friends.

Mr. Queen said fervently: ‘My m'stake, Butchie-boy.'

‘No, no.' said Butchie-boy, beating his breast ‘
My
m'stake, El ole cock.'

Clark had gone, dismissed by the Boy Wonder. He had departed with anxiety, for the magic of Butchie-boy's executive methods was legend in Hollywood and as a good and conscientious agent Clark had misgivings about leaving his client alone with the magician.

Not without cause. Already his client was prepared to do or die for dear old Magna. ‘Don't see how I could've mis-misjudged you, Butch,' said Mr. Queen, half in tears. ‘Thought you were a complete an' absolute louse. ‘Pon my word.'

‘I
yam
a louse,' said Butch. ‘No won'er people get the wrong impression ‘bout Hollywood. A yarn like that! I'll be a laughing – a laughing-stock.'

Mr. Queen grasped his glass and glared. ‘Show me the firsht man who laughsh – laughs an' I'll kick his teeth in!'

‘My pal.'

‘But nob'dy'll spread the story, Butch. It's jus' b'tween us an' Alan Clark.' Mr. Queen snapped his fingers. ‘Curse, it,
he'll
talk.'

‘Cer'nly he'll talk. Di'n't you know all agents are rats? Down with agents!'

‘The dirty shkunk,' said Mr. Queen ferociously, rising. ‘Id'll be all over
Variety
t'morrow morning.'

Mr. Butcher leered. ‘Siddown, ole frien'. I fixed
his
wagon.'

‘No! How?'

‘Gave the shtory to
Variety
m'self jus' before you came!'

Mr. Queen howled with admiration and pounded the Boy Wonder's back. The Boy Wonder pounded
his
back. They fell into each other's arms.

The First Secretary discovered them on the floor half a bottle later among sheets and sheets of yellow paper, planning with intense sobriety a mystery picture in which Ellery Van Christie, the world-famous detective, murders Jacques Bouchère, the world-famous movie producer, and pins the crime with fiendish ingenuity on one Alan Clarkwell, a scurvy fellow who skulked about making authors' lives miserable.

CHAPTER 2

STORY CONFERENCE

The First Secretary conferred with the Second Secretary and while the Second Secretary ran for raw eggs, Worcestershire, and tomato juice the First Secretary hauled the debaters into old Sigmund's pre-Butcher lavatory, wheedled them into undressing, pushed them respectfully under the needle-shower, turned on the cold water, and retired under a barrage of yelps to telephone the trainer in the studio gymnasium.

They emerged from the lavatory an hour later full of tomato juice and the piety of newly converted teetotallers, looking like a pair of corpses washed up on shore. Ellery groped for the nearest chair and wound his arms about his head as if he were afraid it was going to fly away.

‘What happened?' he moaned.

‘I think the house fell in,' said the producer. ‘Howard, locate Lew Bascom. You'll probably find him shooting craps with the grips on Stage 12.' The First Secretary vanished. ‘Ow, my head.'

‘Alan Clark will massacre me,' said Ellery nervously. ‘You fiend, did you make me sign anything?'

‘How should I know?' growled the Boy Wonder. Then they looked at each other and grinned.

For a time there was the silence of common suffering. Then Butcher began to stride up and down. Ellery closed his eyes, pained at this superhuman vitality. He opened them at the crackle of Butcher's voice to find that remarkable gentleman studying him with a sharp green look. ‘Ellery, I want you back on the payroll.'

‘Go away,' said Ellery.

‘This time, I promise, you'll work like a horse.'

‘On a script?' Ellery made a face. ‘I don't know a lap dissolve from a fade-in. Look, Butch, you're a nice guy and all that, but this isn't my racket. Let me crawl back to New York.'

The Boy Wonder grinned. ‘I could really care for a mug like you; you're an honest man. Hell, I've got a dozen writers on this lot who've forgotten more about scripts than you'll know in a million years.'

‘Then what the devil do you want me for?'

‘I've read your books and followed your investigations for a long time. You've got a remarkable gift. You combine death-on-rats analysis with a creative imagination. And you've got a freshness of viewpoint the old-timers here, saturated in the movie tradition and technique, lost years ago. In a word, it's my job to dig up talent, and I think you're a natural-born plot man. Shall I keep talking?'

‘When you say such pretty things?' Ellery sighed. ‘More.'

‘Know Lew Bascom?'

‘I've heard of him. A writer, isn't he?'

‘He thinks he is. He's really an idea man. Picture ideas. Gets ‘em in hot flushes. Got his greatest notion – Warner's bought it for twenty-five thousand and grossed two million on it – over a poker table when he was so plastered he couldn't tell an ace from a king. The magnificent slug-nut sold the idea to another writer in the game in payment of a hundred-dollar debt … Well, you're going to work with Lew. You'll do the treatment together.'

‘What treatment?' groaned Ellery.

‘Of an original he's just sold me. It's the business. If I turned Lew loose on it solo, he'd come up with the most fantastic yarn you ever saw – if he came up with anything at all, which is doubtful. So I want you to work out the plot with him.'

‘Does he know you're wishing a collaborator on him?' asked Ellery dryly.

‘He's probably heard it by this time; you can't keep anything secret in a studio. But don't worry about Lew; he's all right. Unstable, one of Nature's screwiest noblemen, brilliant picture mind, absolutely undependable, gambler, chippy-chaser, dipsomaniac – a swell guy.'

‘Hmm,' said Ellery.

‘Only don't let him throw you. You'll be looking for him to buckle down to work and he'll probably be over in Las Vegas playing craps with silver dollars. When he does show up he'll be boiled on both sides. Nobody in town remembers the last time Lew was even relatively sober … Excuse me.' Butcher snapped into his communicator: ‘Yes, Madge?'

The Second Secretary said wearily: ‘Mr. Bascom just whooshed through, Mr. Butcher, and on the way he grabbed my letter-knife again. I thought you'd like to know.'

‘Did she say knife?' asked Ellery, alarmed.

A chunky man whizzed in like a fat thunderbolt. He wore shapeless clothes, and he had blown cheeks, nose like a boiled onion, frizzled moustache, irritated hair, eyelids too tired to sit up straight, and a gaudy complexion not caused by exposure to the great outdoors.

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 paralysed, 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 cameraderie. ‘That's different,' he said handsomely. ‘Here, pal, have a shot. Have two shots. You, too, Butch. Let'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.'

Eyeing 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 fightin', 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 setup? 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 someone else. Jack Royle took to his handsome bosom a brawny Oklahoma débutante 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, already 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 haemorrhage but of nervous indigestion as a result of trying to keep peace on the Magna lot; and a few prematurely grey 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?'

‘Is that all you got to say about my idea, for gossakes?' snarled Lew, brandishing the bottle.

Butcher stuck his head into the room. ‘Well, Ellery, what do you think?'

‘My honest opinion?'

‘Give me anything else and I'll fire you out on your ear.'

‘I think,' said Ellery, ‘that it's an inspired notion that will never get beyond the planning stage.'

‘See?' cried Lew. ‘You hooked me to a Jonah! What makes you say that?'

‘How do you propose to get those four to work in the same picture? They're mortal enemies.'

Lew glared at Ellery. ‘The romance of the century, the most publicized cat-fight of the last twen'y years, terrific box-office appeal in four big star names, a honey of a human-int'rest story – an'
he
throws cold water!'

‘Turn it off, Lew,' said the Boy Wonder. ‘That's the major problem, of course, El. Attempts have been made before to cast them in teams, but they've always failed. This time I have a hunch it will be different.'

‘Love will find a way,' said Lew. ‘The future Mrs. Butcher wouldn't throw her tootsie, would she?'

‘Shut up,' said Butcher, reddening. ‘As far as that's concerned Lew has an in, too. He's Blythe's second cousin; aside from her father and Lew, Blythe hasn't any relatives, and I think she likes this screwball enough to listen to him.'

‘If she don't,' grinned Lew, ‘I'll break her damn neck.'

‘The four of them are broke, too – they always are. I'm prepared to offer them whopping big contracts. They simply won't be able to afford to turn it down.'

‘Listen,' said Lew. ‘When I show ‘em how they're gonna play a picture biography of themselves to an audience of millions, they'll be so damn' tickled they'll fall all over themselves grabbin' for the contracts. It's in the bag.'