The Four of Hearts

Chapter 1 God’s Gift To Hollywood

It is a well-known fact that any one exposed to Hollywood longer than six weeks goes suddenly and incurably mad.

Mr. Ellery Queen groped for the bottle of Scotch on the open trunk.

“To Hollywood, city of screwballs! Drink ’er down.” He guzzled what was left of the Scotch and tossed the bottle aside, resuming his packing. “California, here I go — unwept, unhonored, and unsung. And do I care?”

Alan Clark smiled that Mona Lisa smile by which you may know any member of the fraternity of Hollywood agents, fat or thin, tall or short, dewy-eyed or soiled by life. It is the sage’s, the saint’s, the cynic’s smile of pure wisdom.

“All you wacks act this way at first. Them that can take it snaps out of it. Them that can’t — they turn yellow and go squawking back East.”

“If you’re trying to arouse my ire,” growled Ellery, kicking his prostrate golf-bag, “desist, Alan. I cut my eyeteeth on the tactics of scheming agents.”

“What the hell did you expect — a Class A assignment your first week on the lot and a testimonial dinner at the Coconut Grove?”

“Work,” said Ellery unreasonably.

“Phooey,” said his agent. “It isn’t work here; it’s art. Rembrandt didn’t get his start knocking out the Sistine Chapel, did he? Give your-self a chance to learn the ropes.”

“By burying myself in that mausoleum of an office they gave me and sucking my thumbs?”

“Sure, sure,” said Clark soothingly. “Why not? It’s Magna’s dough, isn’t it? If the studio’s willing to invest six weeks’ salary in you, don’t you think they know what they’re doing?”

“Are you asking me?” said Ellery, flinging things into the trunk. “Then I’m telling you. No!”

“You’ve got to get the feel of pictures, Queen, before you can wade into a script. You’re not a day-laborer. You’re a writer, an artist, a... a sensitive plant.”

“Flapdoodle, with onions on the side.”

Clark grinned and tipped his hat. “Pleased to meet you... Just the same, what’s the rush? You’ve got a future out here. You’re an idea man, and that’s what they pay off on in Hollywood. They need you.”

“Magna gives me a six-week contract with an option for renewal, the six weeks expire today, they don’t take up the option, and that means they need me. Typical Hollywood logic.”

“They just didn’t like the contract the New York office wrote. Happens out here all the time. So they let your contract lapse and now they’ll offer you a new one. You’ll see.”

“I was brought out here to do the story and dialogue on a horse opera. Have I done a single thing in six weeks? Nobody’s paid the slightest attention to me, I haven’t been able to see or talk to Jacques Butcher even once... Do you know how many times I’ve called Butcher, Alan?”

“You’ve got to have patience. Butch is the Boy Wonder of Hollywood. And you’re just another lous — another writer.”

“You can’t prove it by anything I’ve written, because I haven’t written anything. No, sir, I’m homeward bound.”

“Sure, sure,” said the agent. “Here, you left out this wine-colored polo shirt. I know how you feel. You hate our guts. You can’t trust your best friend here; he’ll use the back of your neck for a stepladder the minute you turn your head. I know. We’re twerps—”

“Illogical!”

“No art—”

“Synthetic!”

“Throw our dough around—”

“Dog eat dog!”

“Just the same,” grinned Clark, “you’ll learn to love it. They all do. And you’ll make a hell of a lot more money writing for pictures than you ever will figuring out who wrapped a meat-cleaver around Cadwallader St. Swithin’s neck in Room 202. Take my advice, Queen, and stick around.”

“The way I figure it,” said Ellery, “the incubation period lasts six weeks. After that a man’s hopelessly infected. I’m taking it on the lam while I still have my sanity.”

“You’ve still got ten days to pick up your tickets to New York.”

“Ten days!” Ellery shuddered delicately. “If it hadn’t been for the Sperry murder I’d have been back East long ago.”

Clark stared. “I thought there was something screwy in the way Glücke’s been pinning medals on himself!”

“Ouch, I’ve let the cat out. Keep it under your hat, Alan. I promised Inspector Glücke—”

The agent pulled a gust of indignation up from his shoes. “Do you mean to stand there and tell me you cracked the Sperry case and didn’t have the brains to get your pan smeared over the front page?”

“It doesn’t mean anything to me. Where the devil can I put these spiked shoes?”

“Why, with that publicity you could have walked into any studio in Hollywood and written your own ticket!” Clark became quiet, and when Ellery looked up he saw the old Mona Lisa smile. “Look,” said Clark. “I’ve got a sweet idea.”

Ellery dropped the shoes. “Now wait a minute, Alan.”

“Leave it to me. I absolutely guarantee—”

“I gave Glücke my word, I tell you!”

“The hell with that. Well, okay, okay. I found it out somewhere else. You’ll still be the white-haired boy—”

“No!”

“I think,” mused the agent, pulling his lip, “I’ll try Metro first.”

“Alan, absolutely no!”

“Maybe I can ring Paramount and Twentieth Century in on it, too. Play ’em off against each other. I’ll have the Magna outfit eating out of my hand.” He slapped Ellery’s shoulder. “Why, man, I’ll get you twenty-five hundred bucks a week!”

In this moral crisis the telephone rang. Ellery fled to it.

“Mr. Queen? Hold the line, please. Mr. Butcher calling.”

Ellery said: “Mr. who?”

“Mr. Butcher.”

“Butcher!”

“Butcher!” Clark yanked his hat over his ears. “See, what did I tell you? Butcho the Great! Where’s your extension? Don’t mention dough, now. Feel him out. Boy, oh, boy!” He dashed into the bedroom.

“Mr. Queen?” said a sharp, nervous, young man’s voice in Ellery’s ear. “Jacques Butcher speaking.”

“Did you say Jacques Butcher?” mumbled Ellery.

“Tried to locate you in New York for four days. Finally got your address from your father at Police Headquarters. What are you doing in Hollywood? Drop in to see me today.”

“What am I do—” Ellery paused. “I beg your pardon?”

“What? I say, how is it you’re on the Coast? Vacation?”

“Excuse me,” said Ellery. “Is this the Jacques Butcher who is executive vice-president in charge of production at the Magna Studios in Melrose, in Hollywood, California, United States of America?” He stopped. “The planet Earth?”

There was a silence. Then: “Beg pardon?”

“You’re not the gag man?”

“What? Hello! Mr. Queen?” Another dead moment in Time, as if Mr. Butcher were fumbling with a memorandum. “Am I speaking to Ellery Queen, Queen the detective-story writer? Where the hell — Madge. Madge! Did you get me the wrong man, damn it?”

“Wait,” said Ellery hollowly. “Madge got you the right man, all right, all right. But my brain isn’t functioning at par these days, Mr. Butcher. I’m slicing ’em into the rough on every drive. Did I understand you to ask if I’m in Hollywood on a vacation?”

“I don’t get this.” The edge on the sharp voice was badly blunted. “We seem to have our wires crossed. Aren’t you feeling well, Queen?”

“Well?” howled Ellery, growing red in the face. “I feel terrible! Why, you incomparable nitwit, I’ve been employed by your studio for six interminable weeks now — and you ask me if I’m here on a vacation?”

“What!” shouted the producer. “You’ve been on our lot for six weeks? Madge!”

“I’ve phoned your office twice a day, six days a week, fathead — that makes seventy-two times not counting Sundays that I’ve tried to talk to you, you misbegotten apology for an idiot’s stand-in! And you wire New York for my address!”

“Why — doesn’t — somebody tell me these things!”

“Here I’ve parked on my chassis,” roared Ellery, “in that doge’s palace your minions gave me to doze in — a month and a half, do you hear? — losing weight, fretting my fool head off, dying by inches not a hundred feet from your office — and you look for me in New York!” Ellery’s voice grew terrible. “I’m going mad. I am mad. Do you know what, Mr. Butcher? Nuts to you. Double nuts to you!”

And he hurled the telephone majestically from him.

Clark came scurrying back, rubbing his hands. “Oh, wonderful, wonderful. We’re set. We’re in!”

“Go away,” said Ellery. Then he screeched: “What?”

“Hasn’t been done since Garbo gave her last interview to Screen Squeejees,” said the agent gleefully. “Telling Butch where he gets off! Now we’re getting somewhere.”

“No,” said Ellery, feeling his forehead, “now — we’re — getting somewhere?”

“Great guy, Butch. Biggest man in pictures. What a break! Get your lid.”

“Please. Please. Where are we going?”

“To see the Boy Wonder, of course. Come on!”

And the agent bustled out, looking delighted with life, the world, and the whole confused, thunderous march of events.

For a moment Ellery sat still.

But when he found himself putting a match on his head, sticking his hatbrim into his mouth, and rubbing a cigaret on his shoe, he made a gibbering sound and followed his personal representative from the apartment with the fogged air of one who will never understand.

Each studio in Hollywood has its Boy Wonder. But Jacques Butcher, it was admitted by even the other Boy Wonders, was the Boy Wonder of them all.

This paragon occupied a four-room bungalow office in the heart of the quadrangle of executive buildings on the Magna lot. The bungalow, thought Ellery grimly, was some unknown architectural genius’s conception of the kind of Spanish edifice a Spanish executive in charge of the production of Spanish motion pictures would erect in his native Spain amid blood, mayhem, and the belch of batteries. It was very yellow, stuccoed, Moorish, and archified; and it was tiled and roofed and patioed as no structure outside a cocaine-addicted hidalgo’s nightmare had ever been. In a word, it was colossal.

The Second Secretary’s office in the edifice, having been designed in the same faithful spirit to house females, resembled the interior of a Moorish prince’s zenana.

Ellery, scrutinizing this plaster and silken gingerbread, nodded unpleasantly. The Sultan of Production was probably lolling on an amethyst-studded throne puffing on a golden hookah and dictating to two houris in g-strings. As for Mr. Alan Clark, his manner had grown less and less enthusiastic as Mr. Queen grew more and more steel-dignified.

“Mr. Butcher will see you in a moment, Mr. Queen,” said the Second Secretary piteously. “Will you have a chair?”

“You,” said Mr. Queen with a nasty inflection, “are Madge, I presume?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Ha,” said Mr. Queen. “I will be delighted to have a chair.” And he had a chair. The Second Secretary bit her budding lip, looking as if she wanted chiefly to burst into tears.

“Maybe we’d better come back tomorrow,” whispered the agent. “If you’re going to have an antagonistic attitude—”

“Let me remind you, Alan,” said Mr. Queen complacently, “that coming here was your idea. I’m really looking forward to this audience. I can see him now — burlap bags under his eyes, dressed like a Radio City typist’s conception of Robert Taylor, with a manicurist on one hand and a eunuch on the other—”

“Some other time,” said Clark, rising. “I think maybe tomorrow—”

“Sit down, friend,” said Mr. Queen.

Clark sat down and began to snap at his own fingernails like a tortured turtle. A door opened; he jumped up again. But it was only a washed-out male, obviously the First Secretary.

“Mr. Butcher will see you now, Mr. Queen.”

Mr. Queen smiled. The Second Secretary looked faint, the First Secretary paled, and Clark wiped his forehead.

“Nice of him,” murmured Mr. Queen. He strolled into the First Secretary’s domain. “Ah, quite like my preconception. In the worst of possible taste. Le mauvais gout.”

“Yes, Mr. Queen,” said the First Secretary. “I mean—”

“By the way, what’s the proper form? Does one genuflect and kiss the royal hand, or will a deep bow from the waist suffice?”

“A kick in the pants would be more like it,” said a rueful voice. “Kamerad!”

Mr. Queen turned around. A young man was standing in the doorway holding his hands high. He wore a soiled pair of slacks, openwork sandals on bare feet, and a lumberman’s plaid shirt open at the throat. More wonderful than that, he was smoking a chipped clay pipe which fumed foully; his fingers were stained with ink; and he had not shaved his heavy young beard, judging from its vigorous sprout, in at least three days.

“I thought—” began Mr. Queen.

“I certainly rate one,” said the Boy Wonder. “Will you dish it out now, or can we talk things over first?”

Mr. Queen swallowed. “Are you Butcher?”

“Guilty. Say, that was the dumbest stunt I’ve ever seen pulled in this town, and we’ve pulled some beauties here.” He shook Ellery’s hand crisply. “Hello, Clark. You Queen’s agent?”

“Yes, Mr. Butcher,” said Clark. “Yes, sir.”

“Come in, both of you,” said the Boy Wonder, leading the way. “Don’t mind the spurious magnificence of this dump, Queen. The damned thing was wished on me. It was built by old Sigmund in the free-lunch days, when he was tossing away the stockholders’ dough like a hunyak on Saturday night. I’ve tried to make my own workroom livable, anyway. Come on in.”

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 anteroom 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 repaneled in clean pine; an old missionwood desk bearing the scars of golf-shoes and cigaret 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 vapors 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. You 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 Boucherre, 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 teetotalers, 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 mugg 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 slugnut 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 mustache, 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 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?”

“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.”

“I’ll tackle Bonnie and Ty,” said the Boy Wonder crisply, “and Lew goes to work on Blythe and Jack. Sam Vix, our publicity head, will start the ball rolling in the mags and papers.”

“And I?”

“Hang around Lew. Get acquainted with the Stuarts and the Royles. Gather as much material on their personal lives as you can. The biggest job will be weeding, of course. We’ll meet again in a few days and compare notes.”

“Adios,” said Lew, and wandered out with Butcher’s bottle under his arm.

A tall man with a windburned face and a black patch over one eye came strolling in. “You want me, Butch?”

“Meet Ellery Queen — he’s going to work with Lew Bascom on the Royle-Stuart imbroglio. Queen, this is Sam Vix, head of our publicity department.”

“Say, I heard about you,” said Vix. “You’re the guy worked here for six weeks and nobody knew it. Swell story.”

“What’s swell about it?” asked Ellery sourly.

Vix stared. “It’s publicity, isn’t it? By the way, what do you think of Lew’s picture idea?”

“I think—”

“It’s got everything. Know about Blythe’s old man? There’s a character for pictures! Tolland Stuart. I bet Blythe hasn’t even seen the old fossil for two-three years.”

“Excuse me,” said the Boy Wonder, and he disappeared.

“Park the carcass,” said the publicity man. “Might as well feed you dope if you’re going to work on the fracas. Stuart’s an eccentric millionaire — I mean he’s nuts, if you ask me, but when you’ve got his dough you’re just eccentric, see what I mean? Made it in oil. Well, he’s got a million-dollar estate on top of a big butte in the Chocolate Mountains — that’s below the San Bernardino range in Imperial County — forty rooms, regular palace, and not a soul on the place but himself and a doctor named Junius, who’s the old man’s pill-roller, nose-wiper, hash-slinger, and plug-ugly all rolled into one.”

“Pardon me,” said Ellery, “but I think I’d better see where Lew—”

“Forget Lew; he’ll turn up by himself in a couple of days. Well, as I was saying, they spin some mighty tall yarns about old man Stuart. Hypochondriac to the gills, they say; and the wackiest personal habits. Sort of hermit, I guess you’d call him, mortifying the flesh. He’s supposed to be as healthy as a horse.”

“Listen, Mr. Vix—”

“Call me Sam. If there’s a trail down his mountain, only a goat or an Indian could negotiate it. Doc Junius uses a plane for supplies — they’ve got a landing-field up there; I’ve seen it plenty of times from the air. I’m an aviator myself, you know — got this eye shot out in a dog-fight over Boileau. So naturally I’m interested in these two bugs up there flying around their eagle’s nest like a couple of spicks out of the Arabian Nights—”

“Look, Sam,” said Ellery. “I’d love to swap fairy tales with you, but right now what I want to know is — who in this town knows everything about everybody?”

“Paula Paris,” said the publicity man promptly.

“Paris? Sounds familiar.”

“Say, where do you come from? She’s only syndicated in a hundred and eighty papers from coast to coast. Does the famous movie-gossip column called Seeing Stars. Familiar!”

“Then she should be an ideal reference-library on the Royles and the Stuarts.”

“I’ll arrange an appointment for you.” Vix leered. “You’re in for an experience, meeting Paula for the first time.”

“Oh, these old female battle-axes don’t faze me,” said Ellery.

“This isn’t a battle-axe, my friend; it’s a delicate, singing blade.”

“Oh! Pretty?”

“Different. You’ll fall for her like all the rest, from wubble-you-murdering Russian counts to Western Union boys. Only, don’t try to date her up.”

“Ah, exclusive. To whom does she belong?”

“Nobody. She suffers from crowd phobia.”

“From what?”

“Fear of crowds. She hasn’t left her house since she came to the Coast in a guarded drawing-room six years ago.”

“Nonsense.”

“Fact. People give her the willies. Never allows more than one person to be in the room with her at the same time.”

“But I can’t see— How does she snoop around and get her news?”

“She’s got a thousand eyes — in other people’s heads.” Vix rolled his one eye. “What she’d be worth to a studio! Well, I’ll ring her for you.”

“Do that,” said Ellery, feeling his head.

Vix left, and Ellery sat still. There was an eldritch chiming in his ears and the most beautiful colored spots were bouncing before his eyes.

His telephone rang. “Mr. Queen?” said the Second Secretary. “Mr. Butcher has had to go to the projection room to catch the day’s rushes, but he wants you to call your agent and have him phone Mr. Butcher back to talk salary and contract. Is that all right?”

“Is that all right?” said Ellery. “I mean — certainly.”

Salary. Contract. Lew. Paula. The old man of the mountains. Napoleon brandy. Gatling-gun Butch. The wild Royles and Stuarts. Crowd phobia. Chocolate Mountains. High pressure. Super-spectacle. Rushes... My God, thought Ellery, is it too late?

He closed his eyes. It was too late.

Chapter 3 Mr. Queen Sees Stars

After two days of trying to pin somebody into a chair within four walls, Ellery felt like a man groping with his bare hands in a goldfish bowl.

The Boy Wonder was holding all-day conferences behind locked doors, making final preparations for his widely publicized production of Growth of the Soil. The earth, it seemed, had swallowed Lew Bascom. And every effort of Ellery’s to meet the male Royles and the female Stuarts was foiled in the one case by a nasal British voice belonging to a major-domo named Louderback and in the other by an almost incomprehensible French accent on the lips of a lady named Clotilde, neither of whom seemed aware that time was marching on and on and on.

Once, it was close. Ellery was prowling the alleys of the Magna lot with Alan Clark, who was vainly trying to restore his equilibrium, when they turned the corner of “A” Street and 1st and spied a tall girl in black satin slacks and a disreputable man’s slouch hat matching pennies at the bootblack stand near the main gate with Roderick, the colored man who polished the shoes of the Magna extras.

“There’s Bonnie now,” said the agent. “The blonde babe. Ain’t she somepin’? Knock you down. Bonnie!” he shouted. “I want you to meet—”

The star hastily dropped a handful of pennies, rubbed Roderick’s humped back for luck, and vaulted into a scarlet Cord roadster.

“Wait!” roared Ellery, beside himself. “Damn it all—”

But the last he saw of Bonnie Stuart that day was a blinding smile over one slim shoulder as she shot the Cord around the corner of 1st and “B” Streets on two wheels.

“That’s the last straw,” stormed Ellery, hurling his Panama to the pavement. “I’m through!”

“Ever try to catch a playful fly? That’s Bonnie.”

“But why wouldn’t she—”

“Look. Go see Paula Paris,” said the agent diplomatically. “Sam Vix says he made an appointment for you for today. She’ll tell you more about those doodlebugs than they know themselves.”

“Fifteen hundred a week,” mumbled Ellery.

“It’s as far as Butcher would go,” apologized Clark. “I tried to get him to raise the ante—”

“I’m not complaining about the salary, you fool! Here I’ve accumulated since yesterday almost six hundred dollars on the Magna books, and I haven’t accomplished a blasted thing!”

“See Paula,” soothed Clark, patting Ellery’s back. “She’s always good for what ails you.”

So, muttering, Ellery drove up into the Hollywood hills.

He found the house almost by intuition; something told him it would be a sane, homey sort of place, and it was — white frame in a placid Colonial style surrounded by a picket fence. It stood out among the pseudo-Spanish stucco atrocities like a wimpled nun among painted wenches.

A girl at the secretary in the parlor smiled: “Miss Paris is expecting you, Mr. Queen. Go right in.” Ellery went, pursued by the stares of the crowded room. They were a motley cross-section of Hollywood’s floating population — extras down on their luck, salesmen, domestics, professional observers of the scène célèbre. He felt impatient to meet the mysterious Miss Paris, who concocted such luscious news from this salmagundi.

But the next room was another parlor in which another young woman sat taking notes as a hungry-looking man in immaculate morning clothes whispered to her.

“The weeding-out process,” he thought, fascinated. “She’d have to be careful about libel, at that.”

And he entered the third room at a nod from the second young woman to find himself in a wall-papered chamber full of maple furniture and sunlight, with tall glass doors giving upon a flagged terrace beyond which he could see trees, flowerbeds, and a very high stone wall blanketed with poinsettias.

“How do you do, Mr. Queen,” said a pure diapason.

Perhaps his sudden emergence into the light affected his vision, for Mr. Queen indubitably blinked. Also, his ear still rang with that organ sound. But then he realized that that harmonious concord of musical tones was a human female voice, and that its owner was seated cross-kneed in a Cape Cod rocker smoking a Russian cigaret and smiling up at him.

And Mr. Queen said to himself on the instant that Paula Paris was beyond reasonable doubt the most beautiful woman he had yet met in Hollywood. No, in the world, ever, anywhere.

Now, Mr. Queen had always considered himself immune to the grand passion; even the most attractive of her sex had never meant more to him than some one to open doors for or help in and out of taxis. But at this historic moment misogyny, that crusted armor, inexplicably cracked and fell away from him, leaving him defenseless to the delicate blade.

He tried confusedly to clothe himself again in the garments of observation and analysis. There was a nose — a nose, yes, and a mouth, a white skin... yes, yes, very white, and two eyes — what could one say about them? — an interesting straight line of gray in her black-lacquer hair... all to be sure, to be sure. He was conscious, too, of a garment — was it a Lanvin, or a Patou, or a Poirot? — no, that was the little Belgian detective — a design in the silk gown; yes, yes, a design, and a bodice, and a softly falling skirt that dropped from the knee in long, pure, Praxitelean lines, and an aroma, or rather an effluvium, emanating from her person that was like the ghost of last year’s honeysuckle... Mr. Queen uttered a hollow inward chuckle. Honeysuckle! Damn analysis. This was a woman. No— Woman, without the procrusteanizing article. Or... was... it... the Woman?

“Here, here,” said Mr. Queen in a panic, and almost aloud. “Stop that, you damned fool.”

“If you’re through inspecting me,” said Paula Paris with a smile, rising, “suppose you be seated, Mr. Queen. Will you have a highball? Cigarets at your elbow.”

Mr. Queen sat down stiffly, feeling for the chair.

“To tell the truth,” he mumbled, “I’m... I’m sort of speechless. Paula Paris. Paris. That’s it. A remarkable name. Thank you, no highball. Beautiful! Cigaret?” He sat back, folding his arms. “Will you please say something?”

There was a dimple at the left side of her mouth when she pursed her lips — not a large, gross, ordinary dimple, but a shadow, a feather’s touch. It was visible now. “You speak awfully well for a speechless man, Mr. Queen, although I’ll admit it doesn’t quite make sense. What are you — a linguistic disciple of Dali?”

“That’s it. More please. Yahweh, thou hast given me the peace that passeth understanding.”

Ah, the concern, the faint frown, the tensing of that cool still figure. Here, for heaven’s sake! What’s the matter with you?

“Are you ill?” she asked anxiously. “Or—”

“Or drunk. Drunk, you were going to say. Yes, I am drunk. No, delirious. I feel the way I felt when I stood on the north rim of the Grand Canyon looking into infinity. No, no, that’s so unfair to you. Miss Paris, if you don’t talk to me I shall go completely mad.”

She seemed amused then, and yet he felt an infinitesimal withdrawing, like the stir of a small animal in the dark. “Talk to you? I thought you wanted to talk to me.”

“No, no, that’s all so trivial now. I must hear your voice. It bathes me. God knows I need something after what I’ve been through in this bubbling vat of a town. Has any one ever told you the organ took its tonal inspiration from your voice?”

Miss Paris averted her head suddenly, and after a moment she sat down. He saw a flush creeping down her throat. “Et tu, Brute,” she laughed, and yet her eyes were strange. “Sometimes I think men say such kind things to me because—” She did not finish.

“On the contrary,” said Ellery, out of control. “You’re a gorgeous, gorgeous creature. Undoubtedly the trouble with you is an acute inferiority—”

“Mr. Queen.”

He recognized it then, that eerie something in her eyes. It was fright. Before, it had seemed incredible that this poised, mature, patrician creature should be afraid of anything, let alone the mere grouping of human beings. “Crowd phobia,” Sam Vix had called it, homophobia, a morbid fear of man... Mr. Queen snapped out of it very quickly indeed. That one glimpse into terror had frightened him, too.

“Sorry. Please forgive me. I did it on a — on a bet. Very stupid of me.”

“I’m sure you did.” She kept looking at her quiet hands.

“It’s the detective in me, I suppose. I mean, this clumsy leap into analysis—”

“Tell me, Mr. Queen,” she said abruptly, tamping out her cigaret. “How do you like the idea of putting the Royles and the Stuarts into a biographical film?”

Dangerous ground, then. Of course. He was an ass. “How did you know? Oh, I imagine Sam Vix told you.”

“Not at all. I have deeper channels of information.” She laughed then, and Ellery drank in the lovely sound. Superb, superb! “I know about you, you see,” she was murmuring. “Your six weeks’ horror at Magna, your futile scampering about the lot there, your orgy the other day with Jacques Butcher, who’s a darling—”

“I’m beginning to think you’d make a pretty good detective yourself.”

She shook her head ever so slowly and said: “Sam said you wanted information.” Ellery recognized the barrier. “Exactly what?”

“The Royles and the Stuarts.” He jumped up and began to walk around; it was not good to look at this woman too long. “What they’re like. Their lives, thoughts, secrets—”

“Heavens, is that all? I’d have to take a month off, and I’m too busy for that.”

“You do know all about them, though?”

“As much as any one. Do sit down again, Mr. Queen. Please.”

Ellery looked at her then. He felt a little series of twitches in his spine. He grinned idiotically and sat down.

“The interesting question, of course,” she went on in her gentle way, “is why Jack Royle and Blythe Stuart broke their engagement before the War. And nobody knows that.”

“I understood you to know everything.”

“Not quite everything, Mr. Queen. I don’t agree, however, with those who think it was another woman, or another man, or anything as serious as that.”

“Then you do have an opinion.”

The dimple again. “Some ridiculous triviality. A lovers’ spat of the most inconsequential sort.”

“With such extraordinary consequences?” asked Ellery dryly.

“Apparently you don’t know them. They’re reckless, irresponsible, charming lunatics. They’ve earned top money for over twenty years, and yet both are stony. Jack was — and is — a philanderer, gambler, a swash-buckler who indulges in the most idiotic escapades; a great actor, of course. Blythe was — and is — a lovely, electric hoyden whom every one adores. It’s simply that they’re capable of anything, from breaking an engagement for no reason at all to keeping a vendetta for over twenty years.”

“Or, I should imagine, piracy on the high seas.”

She laughed. “Jack once signed a contract with old Sigmund calling for five thousand a week, to make a picture that was scheduled to take about ten weeks’ shooting time. The afternoon of the day he signed the contract he dropped fifty thousand dollars at Tia Juana. So he worked the ten weeks for nothing, borrowing money from week to week for tips, and he gave the most brilliant performance of his career. That’s Jack Royle.”

“Keep talking.”

“Blythe? She’s never worn a girdle, drinks Martinis exclusively, sleeps raw, and three years ago gave half a year’s salary to the Actors’ Fund because Jack gave three months’ income. And that’s Blythe.”

“I suppose the youngsters are worse than their parents. The second generation usually is.”

“Oh, definitely. It’s such a deep, sustained hatred that a psychologist, I suspect, would look for some frustration mechanism, like Love Crushed to Earth”

“But Bonnie’s engaged to Jacques Butcher!”

“I know that,” said Paula calmly. “Nevertheless — you mark my words — crushed to earth, it will rise again. Poor Butch is in for it. And I think he knows it, poor darling.”

“This boy Tyler and the girl aren’t on speaking terms?”

“Oh, but they are! Wait until you hear them. Of course, they both came up in pictures about the same time, and they’re horribly jealous of each other. A couple of months ago Ty got a newspaper splash by wrestling with a trained grizzly at one of his father’s famous parties. A few days later Bonnie adopted a panther cub as a pet and paraded it up and down the Magna lot until Ty came off a set with a gang of girls, and then somehow — quite innocently, of course — the cub came loose and began to chew at Ty’s leg. The sight of Ty running away with the little animal scampering after him quite destroyed his reputation as a he-man.”

“Playful, aren’t they?”

“You’ll love all four of them, as every one else does. In Blythe’s and Bonnie’s case, it’s probably an inheritance from Blythe’s father Tolland — that’s Bonnie’s grandfather.”

“Vix mentioned him rather profusely.”

“He’s a local character — quite mad. I don’t mean mentally. He was sane enough to amass a tremendous fortune in oil. Just gaga. He spent a million dollars on his estate on Chocolate Mountain, and he hasn’t even a caretaker to hoe the weeds. It cost him forty thousand dollars to blast away the top of a neighboring mountain peak because he didn’t like the view of it from his porch — he said it looked like the profile of a blankety-blank who had once beaten him in an oil deal.”

“Charming,” said Ellery, looking at her figure.

“He drinks cold water with a teaspoon and publishes pamphlets crammed with statistics crusading against stimulants, including tobacco and coffee and tea, and warning people that eating white bread brings you early to the grave.”

She talked on and on, and Ellery sat back and listened, more entranced by the source than the information. It was by far the pleasantest afternoon he had spent in Hollywood.

He came to with a start. There was a shadow on Paula’s face, and it was creeping higher every minute.

“Good Lord!” he said, springing up and looking at his watch. “Why didn’t you kick me out, Miss Paris? All those people waiting out there—”

“My girls take care of most of them, and it’s a relief to be listened to for a change. And you’re such a splendid listener, Mr. Queen.” She rose, too, and extended her hand. “I’m afraid I haven’t been much help.”

He took her hand, and after a moment she gently withdrew it.

“Help?” said Ellery. “Oh, yes. Yes, you’ve been of tremendous service. By the way, can you suggest the surest means of treeing those four?”

“Today’s Friday. Of course. You go down to the Horseshoe Club on Wilshire Boulevard tomorrow night.”

“Horseshoe Club,” said Ellery dutifully, watching her mouth.

“Don’t you know it? It’s probably the most famous gambling place in Los Angeles. Run by Alessandro, a very clever gentleman with a very dark past. You’ll find them there.”

“Alessandro’s,” said Ellery. “Yes.”

“Let’s see.” She turned her head a little, trying to avoid his questioning eyes. “There’s no opening tomorrow night — yes, they’ll be there, I’m sure.”

“Will they let me in? I’m a stranger in town.”

“Would you like me to arrange it?” she asked demurely. “I’ll call Alessandro. He and I have an understanding.”

“You’re simply wonderful.” Then he said hastily: “I mean, so — Look, Miss Paris. Or why not Paula? Do you mind? Would you — I mean, could you bring yourself to accompany—”

“Goodbye, Mr. Queen,” said Paula with a faint smile.

“But would you do me the honor—”

“It’s been so nice talking to you. Drop in again.”

That damned phobia!

“I warn you,” he said grimly. “You may live to regret that invitation.”

And, a little blindly, Mr. Queen made his way to the street.

What a lovely day! he thought, breathing deeply, drinking in the lovely sky, the lovely trees, even the lovely Spanish-style houses all about that supremely lovely white-frame cottage which housed surely the loveliest self-imprisoned Juliet in the history of romantic heroines.

And suddenly he remembered Vix’s cynical remark two days before: “You’ll fall for her like all the rest.” The rest... That implied a host of admirers. Well, why not? She was delectable and piquant to the jaded male palate, like a strange condiment. And what sort of figure did he cut in this land of brown, brawny, handsome men?

The loveliness went out of everything.

Crushed, Mr. Queen crept into his car and drove away.

Saturday night found him in a dinner jacket at the Horseshoe Club, cursing his wasted years of singleness and, his thoughts still hovering over a certain white-frame cottage in the Hollywood hills, not greatly caring if he cornered his quarry or not.

“Where can I find Alessandro?” he asked a bartender.

“In his office.” The man pointed, and Ellery skirted the horseshoe-shaped bar, threaded his way across the packed dance-floor past the orchestra stand where a swaying quadroon moaned a love-song, and entered a silk-hung passage at the terminus of which stood a chrome-steel door.

Ellery went up to it and knocked. It was opened at once by a hard-looking gentlemen in tails who appropriately gave him a hard look.

“Yeah?”

“Alessandro?”

“So who wants him?”

“Oh, go away,” said Ellery, and he pushed the hard-looking gentleman aside. An apple-cheeked little man with China-blue eyes wearing a huge horseshoe-shaped diamond on his left hand smiled up at him from behind a horseshoe-shaped desk.

“My name is Queen. Paula Paris told me to look you up.”

“Yes, she called me.” Alessandro rose and offered his fat little hand. “Any friend of Paula’s is welcome here.”

“I hope,” said Ellery not too hopefully, “she gave me a nice reference.”

“Very nice. You want to play, Mr. Queen? We can give you anything at any stakes — roulette, faro, baccarat, dice, chuck-a-luck, poker—”

“I’m afraid my quarter-limit stud is too rich for your blood,” grinned Ellery. “I’m really here to find the Royles and the Stuarts. Are they here?”

“They haven’t turned up yet. But they will. They generally do on Saturday nights.”

“May I wait inside?”

“This way, Mr. Queen.” Alessandro pressed on a blank wall and the wall opened, revealing a crowded, smoky, quiet room.

“Quite a set-up,” said Ellery, amused. “Is all this hocus-pocus necessary?”

The gambler smiled. “My clients expect it. You know — Hollywood? They want a kick for their dough.”

“Weren’t you located in New York a few years ago?” asked Ellery, studying his bland, innocent features.

The little man said: “Me?” and smiled again, nodded to another hard-looking man in the secret passageway, “All right, Joe, let the gentleman through.”

“My mistake,” murmured Ellery, and he entered the gaming room.

But he had not been mistaken. Alessandro’s name was not Alessandro, and he did hail from New York, and in New York he had gathered to his rosy little self a certain fame. The gossip of Police Headquarters had ascribed his sudden disappearance from Broadway to an extraordinary run of luck, during the course of which he had badly dented four bookmakers, two dice rings, and a poker clique composed of Dopey Siciliano, an assistant District Attorney, a Municipal Court Judge, a member of the Board of Estimate, and Solly the Slob.

And here he was, running a joint in Hollywood. Well, well, thought Ellery, it’s a small world.

He wandered about the place. He saw at once that Mr. Alessandro had risen in the social scale. At one table in a booth two wooden-faced house men played seven-card stud, deuces wild, with the president of a large film company, one of Hollywood’s most famous directors, and a fabulously-paid radio comedian. The dice tables were monopolized — it was a curious thing, thought Ellery with a grin — by writers and gag men. And along the roulette tables were gathered more stars than Tillie the Toiler had ever dreamed of, registering a variety of emotions that would have delighted the hearts of the directors present had they been in a condition to appreciate their realism.

Ellery spied the elusive Lew Bascom, in a disreputable tuxedo, in the crowd about one of the wheels. He was clutching a stack of chips with one hand and the neck of a queenly brunette with the other.

“So here you are,” said Ellery. “Don’t tell me you’ve been hiding out here for three days!”

“Go ’way, pal,” said Lew, “this is my lucky night.” There was a mountain of chips before the brunette.

“Yeah,” said the brunette, glaring at Ellery.

Ellery seized Lew’s arms. “I want to talk to you.”

“Why can’t I get any peace, for gossakes? Here, toots, hang on to papa’s rent,” and he dropped his handful of chips down the gaping front of the brunette’s decolletage. “Well, well, what’s on your mind?”

“You,” said Ellery firmly, “are remaining with me until the Royles and the Stuarts arrive. Then you’re going to introduce me. And after that you may vanish in a puff of smoke for all I care.”

Lew scowled. “What day is it?”

“Saturday.”

“What the hell happened to Friday? Say, here’s Jack Royle. C’mon, that wheel ain’t gonna wait all night.”

He dragged Ellery over to a tall, handsome man with iron-gray hair who was laughing at something Alessandro was saying. It was John Royle, all right, in the flesh, thought Ellery; the merest child knew that famous profile.

“Jack, here’s a guy named Ellery Queen,” grunted Lew. “Give him your autograph and lemme get back to the wheel.”

“Mr. Queen,” said the famous baritone voice, and the famous mustache-smile appeared. “Don’t mind this lack-brain; he’s probably drunk as usual. Rudeness runs in the Stuart line. Excuse me a moment.” He said to Alessandro: “It’s all right, Alec. I’m filthy with it tonight.” The little fat man nodded curtly and walked away. “And now, Mr. Queen, how do you like working for Magna?”

“Then Butcher’s told you. Do you know how hard I’ve tried to see you in the past three days, Mr. Royle?”

The famous smile was cordial, but the famous black eyes were roving. “Louderback did say something... Three days! Three, did you say? Lord, Queen, that’s a hunch! Pardon me while I break Alessandro’s heart.”

And he hurried off to the cashier’s cage to exchange a fistful of bills for a stack of blue chips. He dived into the crowd at the roulette table.

“Five hundred on number three,” Ellery heard him chortle.

Fascinated by this scientific attack on the laws of chance, Ellery permitted Lew to wriggle away. Number 3 failed to come up. Royle smiled, glanced at the clock on the wall, noted that its hands stood at nine-five, and promptly placed stacks on numbers 9 and 5. The ball stopped on 7.

Blythe Stuart swept in, magnificent in a black evening gown, followed by a tall Hindu in tails and a turban, with a brown impassive face. Instantly she was surrounded.

“Blythe! Who’s the new boyfriend?”

“I’ll bet he’s a prince, or a rajah, or something. Leave it to Blythe.”

“Introduce me, darling!”

“Please,” protested the actress, laughing. “This is Ramdu Singh, and he’s a Swami from India or some place, and he has second sight or something, I’ll swear, because he’s told me the most amazing things about myself. The Swami is going to help me play.”

“How thrilling!”

“Lew darling!” cried Blythe, spying him. “Get out of the way and let me show you how to lick that thing. Come along, Mr. Singh!”

Lew looked the Swami over blearily and shrugged. “It’s your cashee, Blythe.”

A Russian director gave the actress his chair and the Swami took his place behind it, ignoring the stares of the crowd. The croupier looked a little startled and glanced at Alessandro, who shrugged, smiled, and moved off.

“Place your bets,” said the croupier.

At this moment, across the table, the eyes of John Royle and Blythe Stuart met. And without a flicker they passed on.

With an enigmatic expression Royle placed a bet. The Swami whispered in Blythe Stuart’s ear and she made no move to play, as if he had advised lying low until his Psyche could smell out the probabilities. The wheel spun, the ball clacked to a stop on a number, the croupier began raking up the chips.

“I beg your pardon,” said John Royle politely, and he took the outstretched rake from the croupier’s hand and poked it across the table at the Swami’s turban. The turban fell off the Swami’s head. His skull gleamed in the strong light — hairless, polished, pinkish-white.

The “Hindu” dived frantically for the turban. Some one gasped. Blythe Stuart gaped at the naked pink scalp.

Royle handed the rake back to the croupier with a bow. “This,” he said in an amiable tone, “is Arthur William Park, the actor. You remember his Polonius, Sergie, in the Menzies Hamlet in 1920? An excellent performance, then — as now.”

Park straightened up, murder in his eyes.

“Sorry, old man,” murmured Royle. “I know you’re down on your luck, but I can’t permit my... friends to be victimized.”

“You’re riding high, Royle,” said Park thickly, his cheeks muddy under the make-up. “Wait till you’re sixty-five, unable to get a decent part, sick as a dying dog, with a wife and crippled son to support. Wait.”

Alessandro signalled to two of his men.

“Come on, fella,” said one of them.

“Just a moment,” said Blythe Stuart in a low voice. Her hazel eyes blazed like Indian topaz. “Alessandro, call a policeman.”

“Now, take it easy, Miss Stuart,” said Alessandro swiftly. “I don’t want any trouble here—”

Park cried out and tried to run; the two men caught him by his skinny arms. “No! Please!”

Royle’s smile faded. “Don’t take it out on this poor fellow, just because you’re angry with me. Let him go.”

“I won’t be publicly humiliated!”

“Mother! What’s the matter?” Bonnie Blythe, dazzling in an ermine cape, her golden curls iridescent in the light, appeared on Jacques Butcher’s arm. She shook it off and ran to Blythe.

“Oh, darling, this beast put this man up to pretending to be a Swami, and he brought me here and — and the beast unmasked the Swami as an actor or something,” sobbed Blythe, melting into tears at the sight of a compassionate face, “and I’ve never been so humiliated in my life.” Then she stamped her foot. “Alessandro, will you call a policeman or must I? I’ll have them both arrested!”

“Darling. Don’t,” said Bonnie gently, her arm about her mother’s shoulders. “The man looks pretty much down in the mouth to me. I don’t think you’d enjoy seeing him in jail.” She nodded to Alessandro over her mother’s sleek coiffure, and the gambler sighed with relief and signalled to his men, who hurried the man out. “But as for Mr. John Royle,” continued Bonnie, her glance hardening, “that’s — different.”

“Bonnie,” said the Boy Wonder warningly.

“No, Butch. It’s time he was told—”

“My dear Bonnie,” said Royle with a queer smile, “I assure you I didn’t put Park up to his masquerade. That was his own idea.”

“Don’t tell me,” sobbed Blythe. “I know you, John Royle. Oh, I could kill you!”

And she gathered her sweeping skirts about her and ran out of the gaming room, crying bitterly. Bonnie ran after her, followed by the Boy Wonder, whose face was red with embarrassment.

Royle shrugged with a braggadocio that did not quite come off. He pressed some bills into Lew Bascom’s hand, nodding toward the door. Lew waddled out with the money.

“Place your bets,” said the croupier wearily.

Lew came back after a long absence. “What a night! It’s a conspiracy, damn it, to keep me from cleanin’ up the joint. Just when I was goin’ good!”

“I trust,” sighed Ellery, “all’s well that ends well? Nobody’s murdered anybody?”

“Damn near. Bumped into Ty Royle outside, just comin’ in. Alec’s gorillas told him what happened and he tried to make Park take some dough. That kid gives away more dough to broken-down actors than half the relief-agencies in Hollywood. The old guy took it, all right. They’re all outside now, raisin’ hell.”

“Then it wasn’t a put-up job?”

“Hell, no. Though I’ll bet Jack’s sorry he didn’t think of it.”

“I doubt that,” said Ellery dryly, glancing at Royle. The actor was sitting at the bar before a row of six cocktail glasses filled with Sidecars, his broad back humped.

“Park’s got cancer or somepin’, hasn’t had more’n extra-work for two-three years. What’d he want to come around here for?” Lew made a face. “Spoiled my whole evening. Stiff old devil! I took him around the corner and bought him a couple. He wouldn’t take Jack’s dough, though.”

“Curious ethics. And I can’t say Blythe Stuart’s spent a very enjoyable evening, either.”

“That wacky dame! Sucker for every phony in the fortune-telling racket. She won’t even take a part till she’s read the tea-leaves.”

Bonnie came stalking back, her face stormy. The Boy Wonder clutched her arm, looking harassed. He was talking earnestly to her; but she paid no attention, tapping the rug with her toe, glancing about. She caught sight of Jack Royle sitting Buddha-like at the bar and took a step forward.

“Hold it, me proud beauty,” drawled a voice, and she stopped as if she had stepped on an electric wire.

A tall young man in evening clothes, surrounded by four beautiful young women, loomed in Alessandro’s doorway. Alessandro looked positively unhappy, Ellery thought.

“You again?” said Bonnie with such colossal contempt that, had Ellery been in the young man’s shoes, he would have made for the nearest crack in the wall. “You can spare that alcoholic breath of yours. He’s got it coming to him, and he’s going to get it.”

“If this is going to be a scrap,” said Ty Royle in a cold voice, “how about mixing it with me? I’m closer to your age, and dad’s getting on.”

Bonnie looked him up and down. “At that,” she said sweetly, “he’s a better man than you are. At least he doesn’t flaunt his harem in decent people’s faces.”

The four young ladies surrounding Ty gasped, and for a moment Ellery thought there would be a general engagement in which the destruction of expensive coiffures would be the least of the damage.

“Ty. Bonnie,” said the Boy Wonder hurriedly, stepping between them. “Not here, for the love of Mike. Here—” he glanced about desperately. “Queen! What luck. Darling, this is Ellery Queen. Queen — will you?” and Butcher dragged Ty Royle aside.

“If Butch thinks I’m going to let that conceited housemaid’s hero,” said Bonnie, her magnificent eyes smoking, “talk me out of giving his father a piece of my mind—”

“But would it be wise?” said Ellery hastily. “I mean—”

“Poor mother’s positively ashamed! Of course, it’s her fault for listening to every charlatan in a Hindu make-up, but a decent person wouldn’t expose her that way in front of all the people she knows. She’s really the dearest, sweetest thing, Mr. Queen. Only she isn’t very practical, and if I didn’t watch her like a nursemaid she’d get into all sorts of trouble. Especially with those detestable Royles just watching for a chance to humiliate her!”

“Not Tyler Royle, surely? He seems like a nice boy.”

“Nice! He’s loathsome! Although I’ll admit he doesn’t pester mother — he goes after my hide, and I can handle him. But Jack Royle... Oh, I’m sure mother will cry herself to sleep tonight. I’ll probably be up until dawn putting vinegar compresses on her poor head.”

“Then don’t you think,” said Ellery cunningly, “that perhaps you’d better go home now? I mean, after all—”

“Oh, no,” said Bonnie fiercely, glaring about. “I’ve got some unfinished business, Mr. Queen.”

Ellery thought with desperation of some diversion. “I’m afraid I rather feel like an innocent Christian martyr thrown to a particularly lovely young lioness.”

“What?” said Bonnie, looking at Ellery really for the first time.

“I talk that way sometimes,” said Ellery.

She stared at him, and then burst out laughing. “Where’ve you been, Mr. Queen? That’s the nicest thing I’ve ever been told outside a set. You must be a writer.”

“I am. Hasn’t Butch mentioned my name?”

“Probably.” Her mouth curved and she took his arm. Ellery blushed a little. Her body felt terribly soft where it touched him, and she smelled delicious. Not quite so delicious as Paula Paris, of course, but still delicious enough to make him wonder whether he wasn’t turning into a positive lecher. “I like you. You may take me over to the roulette table.”

“Delighted.”

“Oh, I know! You’re the man who was with Alan Clark yesterday.”

“So you remember!”

“Indeed I do. I thought you were an insurance agent. Did any one ever tell you you look like an insurance agent?”

“To the wheel!” groaned Ellery, “before I remind you of something you saw in your last nightmare.”

He found a chair for her at the table. Butcher hurried over, looking warm but successful, and dumped two handfuls of chips before Bonnie. He winked at Ellery, wiped his face, bent over Bonnie, and kissed the nape of her neck. Ellery, thinking instantly of a lady named Paris, sighed. Damn it, she would have to be a female hermit!

He saw Tyler Royle go over to the bar, put his arm about his father’s shoulders, and say something with a cheerful expression. Jack Royle turned his head a little, and Ellery saw him smile briefly. Ty pounded his father’s back affectionately and came back to herd his adoring feminine entourage over to the roulette table, opposite Bonnie. He ignored her elaborately, saying something in an undertone to his companions, who giggled.

Bonnie pursed her lips; but then she laughed and looked up at Butcher, whispering something; and Butcher laughed, not too gaily, while she turned back to place a bet. Young Mr. Royle, gazing quizzically at the board, also placed a bet. Miss Stuart smiled. Mr. Royle frowned. Miss Stuart frowned. Mr. Royle smiled.

The croupier droned on. The wheel spun. Chips made hollow, clicking sounds. Jack Royle sat imbibing Sidecars at the bar, gazing in silence at his handsome reflection in the mirror. Bonnie seemed absorbed in the play. Ty Royle placed bets carelessly.

Ellery was just beginning to feel relieved when a bray offended his left ear, and he turned to find Lew Bascom, grinning like a potbellied Pan, beside him.

“’Stoo peaceful,” murmured Lew. “Watch this.”

Ellery felt a premonition. The glint in Lew’s bleared eye promised no advancement of the cause of peace.

The players were distributing their bets. Bonnie had pushed a stack of blue chips onto number 19 and, scarcely paying attention, Ty shoved a similar stack on the same number. At this moment Alessandro ushered into the room a very famous lady of the screen who had just married Prince Youssov, whose royal line was reputed to stand close to the Heavenly Throne; the Prince was with her, in full panoply; and everyone turned his attention from the table, including the croupier, to admire the gorgeous pair.

Lew calmly picked up Bonnie’s stack and moved it from number 19 to number 9.

“My God,” groaned Mr. Queen to himself. “If 19 should win...!”

“Nineteen,” announced the croupier, and the hands of Bonnie and Ty stretched from opposite sides of the table to meet on the pile of chips shoved forward by the croupier. Bonnie did not remove her hand.

“Will somebody,” she said in an ice-in-glass voice, “inform the gentleman that this is my stack?”

Ty kept his hand on hers. “Far be it from me to argue with a lady, but will somebody wise her up that it’s mine?”

“The gentleman is trying to be cute. It’s mine.”

“The lady couldn’t be if she tried. It’s mine.”

“Butch! You saw me cover nineteen, didn’t you?”

“I wasn’t watching. Look, dear—”

“Croupier!” said Ty Royle. “Didn’t you see me cover number nineteen?”

The croupier looked baffled. “I’m afraid I didn’t see—”

“It’s Ty’s!” said one of his companions.

“No, it vuss Bonnie’s. I see her put it there,” said the Russian director.

“But I tell you I saw Ty—”

“Bonnie—”

The table was in an uproar. Ty and Bonnie glared nakedly at each other. The Boy Wonder looked angry. Alessandro ran up.

“Ladies, gentlemen. Please! You’re disturbing the other players. What’s the trouble?”

Ty and Bonnie both tried to explain.

“That’s not true,” stormed Bonnie. “You let my hand go!”

“I’m sorry,” barked Ty, “but I don’t see why I should. If it were anybody else I might accept her word—”

“How dare you!”

“Oh, stop mugging. You’re not doing the big scene now. It’s a cheap stunt.”

“Mugging, am I?” cried Bonnie. “You — comedian!”

Ty applauded. “Keep it up, sister; you’re going great.”

“Pretty boy!”

That stung him. “I ought to slap your face—”

“You took the words right out of my mouth!” And Bonnie whacked his cheek resoundingly.

Ty went pale. Bonnie’s bosom heaved. The Boy Wonder whispered sharply in her ear. Alessandro said something to Ty in a curt undertone.

“I don’t give a damn. If she thinks she can maul me and get away with it—” said Ty, his nostrils quivering.

“Insulting pup!” raged Bonnie. “Accuse me of cheating—”

“I’ll pay you back for that smack if it’s the last thing I do!” shouted Ty across Alessandro’s fat shoulders.

“There’s more where that came from, Ty Royle!”

“Please!” thundered Alessandro. “I’ll credit each of your accounts with the winnings on that bet. Now I’ll have to ask you, Miss Stuart and Mr. Royle, either to quiet down or leave.”

“Leave?” shrieked Bonnie. “I can’t get away from the contaminated air surrounding that fake old lady’s delight soon enough!”

And she wrenched herself from the Boy Wonder’s grasp and flew to the door. Ty shook Alessandro off and ran after her. The Boy Wonder dived after both.

They all disappeared to the accompaniment of screams and bellows.

“That,” said Ellery to Lew Bascom, “was one damfool trick, my playful friend.”

“Ain’t it the truth?” sighed Lew. “C’mon, toots, let’s watch the wind-up of this bout.” And he dragged his brunette companion away from the wheel and hurried her after the vanished trio.

Something made Ellery turn and look at Jack Royle. The actor still sat at the bar, motionless, as if he had not heard a word of the quarrel behind him.

But in the mirror Ellery caught a glimpse of his lips. They were twisted into a bitter smile.

Chapter 4 Battle Royle

The seven days following that quiet evening at Alessandro’s whistled by Mr. Ellery Queen’s ears with the terrifying intimacy of bullets; it was like being caught out in No Man’s Land between two blasting armies. By the end of the week he had not only collected a smoking mass of notes but several lesions of the nervous system as well.

He was entangled in a mass of old Royle-Stuart clippings in the studio library, trying to unsnarl his notes, when he was summoned by page to Jacques Butcher’s office.

The Boy Wonder looked gaunt, but triumphant. “Mirabile dictu. We’re sitting on top of the world.”

“Peace, it’s wonderful,” grinned Lew. “It sure is.”

“They’ve agreed?” asked Ellery incredulously. “Absolutely.”

“I refuse to believe it. What did you use — hypnosis?”

“Appeal to their vanity. I knew they’d fall.”

“Blythe put up a battle,” said Lew, “but when I told her Jack didn’t want her but was holding out for Cornell, she got tongue-tied trying to say yes.”

“How about Jaunty Jack?”

“A pushover.” Lew frowned. “It was hooey about Cornell, of course. Looked to me almost as if he wanted to play opposite Blythe.”

“He has looked peaked this week,” said Ellery thoughtfully.

“Hell, he ain’t had a drink in five days. That would poop up any guy. I tell you something’s happened to Jack!”

“Let’s not pry too deeply into the ways of Providence,” said the Boy Wonder piously. “The point is — they’re in.”

“I shouldn’t imagine, Butch, you had quite so smooth a time winning the youngsters over.”

The producer shuddered. “Please... Ty finally gave in because I convinced him his public was demanding a real-life role from him — biography’s the vogue, following the Muni hits — and what could Ty Royle’s public like better than Ty Royle’s own life on the screen? Know what he said? ‘I’ll show ’em real life,’ he said, ‘when I get my hands around your fiancée’s lily-white throat!’”

“Sounds bad,” said Ellery.

“Doesn’t sound good,” chortled Lew.

“Bonnie,” said the Boy Wonder sadly, “Bonnie was even worse. The only condition on which she’d give in was that the script must include at least one scene in which she had to slap, scratch, and punch Ty into insensibility.”

“Who’s directing?” asked Lew.

“Probably Corsi. Swell Broadway background. And you know what he did last year with the human-interest situations in Glory Road. Why?”

“I was thinking,” said Lew dreamily; “it’s going to be a lot of fun. Corsi’s the most finicky retake artist in pictures. After two-three days of slapping Ty around to Corsi’s satisfaction for that one scene Bonnie’ll have had Ty’s pound of flesh — under her fingernails.”

The historic ceremony of the Great Signing took place on the 11th, which was the following Monday. From the preparations he heard and witnessed in the office adjoining his, Ellery thought whimsically of a landing-field, with a crippled plane circling above, and fire-apparatus and ambulances scurrying about below in readiness for the inevitable crack-up.

But, all things considered, the contracts were signed without the blazing wreckage the Boy Wonder apparently anticipated. Peace was achieved by a simple expedient: the signatories did not open their mouths. Jack Royle, dressed even more carefully than usual, stared out of Butcher’s windows until his turn came to sign; then he signed, smiled for the photographers, and quietly walked out. Blythe, eye-filling in a silver fox-trimmed suit, preserved a queenly silence. Bonnie, it was true, stared steadily at Ty’s throat throughout the ceremony, as if contemplating assault. But Ty, to whose better nature Butch had appealed beforehand, ignored the challenge in her eyes.

The trade-paper reporters and photographers were plainly disappointed.

“For gossakes,” said Lew disgustedly, when they had all left, “that’s a hell of a way to build up the conflict angle. Look at the chance we muffed, Butch!”

“Until they signed,” said the producer calmly, “I couldn’t risk one of them blowing up the whole business by backing out. You don’t fumble when you’re playing catch with dynamite, Lew.”

“Then it’s okay to shoot the works now, Butch?” asked Sam Vix.

“We’re rolling, Sam.”

Vix proceeded to roll. Exactly how it occurred Ellery did not discover — he suspected a conspiracy between the publicity man and Lew Bascom — but on Monday night Bonnie and Ty collided at the bar of the Clover Club. Lew, conveniently present, tried with suspicious gravity to effect a reconciliation “for dear old Magna.” Bonnie, who was escorted by a wealthy Argentine gentleman, flared up; Ty flared back; the Argentine gentleman resented Ty’s tone; Ty resented the Argentine gentleman’s tone; the Argentine gentleman pulled Ty’s nose vigorously; and Ty threw the Argentine gentleman over the bartender’s head into the bar mirror, which did not stand up under the strain. Whereupon Bonnie had Ty arrested for assault. Bailed out in the early hours of Tuesday morning by his father, Ty swore vengeance in the presence of half the newspapermen in Hollywood.

The Tuesday papers made Sam Vix look content. “Even Goldwyn,” he told Ellery modestly, “would be satisfied with that one.”

But Mr. Vix did not look so content on Friday. The very patch over his eye was quivering when he burst into the Boy Wonder’s office, where Lew and Ellery were shouting at each other in a “story conference,” while Butcher listened in silence.

“We’re sunk,” panted Vix. “Never trust an actor. They’ve done it. Paula Paris just tipped me off!”

“Who done what?” asked Butch sharply.

“The one thing that blows the Royle-Stuart picture higher than the Rockies. Jack and Blythe have made up!”

He sank into a chair. Lew Bascom, Ellery, goggled at him. Butcher swiveled and stared out his window.

“Go on,” said Lew in a sick voice. “That’s like saying Trotsky and Stalin were caught playing pinochle with J. P. Morgan.”

“It’s even worse than that,” groaned Vix. “They’re going to be married.”

“For gossakes!” yelled Lew, jumping up. “That screws everything!”

The Boy Wonder spun around and said into his communicator: “Madge, get Paula Paris on the wire.”

“Requiescat in pace,” sighed Ellery. “Anybody know the dope on the next train to New York?”

Lew was racing about, declaiming to the ceiling. “Wham goes the big idea. Conflict — huh! Feud! Build up a natural for over twenty years and then they go into a clinch and kill the whole thing. They can’t do this to me!”

The telephone rang. “Paula, Jacques Butcher. Is it true what Sam Vix says you say about Jack and Blythe?”

“They agreed to forgive and forget Wednesday night,” answered Paula. “I heard it late yesterday. It seems Jack saw the light Saturday night at the Horseshoe Club after that fuss over Park, the actor, and he’s been brooding over his own cussedness ever since. Seems to be true love, Mr. Butcher. They’re rushing plans for the wedding.”

“What happened?”

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

“Well, I’m counting on you to give it a royal send-off in your column, Paula.”

“Don’t worry, Mr. Butcher,” cooed Paula. “I shall.”

Lew glared. “Is it on the level?”

And Ellery said: “Did she... did she mention me?”

“Yes to you, no to you.” The Boy Wonder sat back comfortably. “Now, boys, what’s the panic about?”

“I’m dying,” howled Lew, “and he cracks wise!”

“It’s a cinch,” argued the publicity man, “this marriage knocks the feud for a loop, Butch. Where’s your publicity build-up now? If they had to get hitched, blast it, why couldn’t they wait till the picture was released?”

“Look,” said the producer patiently, getting to his feet and beginning to walk around. “What’s our story? The story of four people in a romantic conflict. Jack and Blythe as the central figures. Why?”

“Because they’re crazy,” yelled Lew. “This proves it.”

“Because, you simpleton, they’re deeply in love. You’re doing a love story, gentlemen, although neither of you seems aware of it. They love, they break off, they become bitter enemies, and after twenty years they suddenly fall into a clinch.”

“It’s illogical,” complained Ellery.

“And yet,” smiled the Boy Wonder, “it’s just happened. Don’t you see what you’ve got? The natural wind-up of your picture! It follows real life like a photostat. After a generation of clawing at each other’s throats, they’ve made up.”

“Yes, but why?”

“How should I know the motivation? That’s your job, and Lew’s. You’re writers, aren’t you? What’s the gag? What’s the answer to this romantic mystery? What do you think you men are being paid for?”

“Wow,” said Vix, staring.

“As for you, Sam, you’ve got an even bigger publicity angle now than the feud.”

“They’ve made up,” said Vix reverently.

“Yes,” snapped Butcher, “and every movie fan within arm’s-length of a newspaper or fan mag will wonder why the hell they did. There’s your line, Sam — crack down on it!”

The publicity man slapped the desk. “Sure — why did they clinch after twenty years’ scrapping around? See the picture and find out!”

“Now you’ve got it. You talk about holding up their marriage until the picture’s released. Nuts! They’re going to be spliced right away, and to the tune of the loudest ballyhoo you’ve ever blasted out of this studio.”

“Leave it to me,” said Vix softly, rubbing his hands.

“We’ll make it a super-marriage. Shoot the works. Brass bands, high hats, press associations... It’s a colossal break for the production.”

“Wait,” whispered Lew. “I’ve got an idea.” He rubbed his nose viciously.

“Yes?”

“Everybody out here puts on the dog the same way when they take the sentence. We’ve got to do it different. The preacher, the ceremony don’t mean nothin’; it’s the build-up that gets the headlines. Why not put reverse English on the marriage?”

“Spill it, you tantalizing slug!”

“Here’s the gag. Offer ’em the use of Reed Island for the honeymoon.”

“Reed Island?” frowned Ellery.

“I’ve got a place there,” explained Butcher. “It’s just a hunk of rock in the Pacific — southwest of Catalina — fishing village there. Go on, Lew.”

“That’s it!” cried Lew. “You can have ’em flown down. Just the two of ’em — turtle-doves flying off into the setting sun, to be alone with lo-o-ove. But — before they take off, what happens? They’re hitched right on the field! We can use old Doc Erminius, the Marryin’ Parson. You’ll have a million people at the airport. There’s more room on a flying field than in a church.”

“Hmm,” said the Boy Wonder. “It has its merits.”

“Hell, I’ll fly ’em down in my own crate,” grinned Lew. “I’ve always thought I’d look swell in a g-string and a bow-and-arrow. Or Sam here could do it.”

“Say,” chuckled Vix, “the screwball’s got something. Only I got a better idea. How about getting Ty Royle to pilot them? Son Forgives Father, Plays Cupid to Famous Film Duo. He can fly like a fool, and that’s a sweet ship he’s got.”

“That’s it,” said the Boy Wonder thoughtfully. “We can really go to town on a stunt like that. Dignified, too. They want to be alone. Going to spend their honeymoon on famous producer’s hideaway estate in lonely Pacific, far from the maddening crowd. Newspapers, for God’s sake stay away... Yes, they won’t! Reed Island will look like Broadway during the Lindy reception. Lew, it’s in.”

Lew seized a bottle. “To the bride!”

“Lemme out of here,” muttered Vix, and he scrambled out.

“Pardon the small still voice,” said Ellery, “but aren’t you boys being a little optimistic? Suppose our friends the lovebirds refuse to be exploited? Suppose Ty Royle frowns on his eminent father’s hatchet-burying ritual?”

“Leave the details to me,” said Butcher soothingly. “It’s my job to worry. Yours is to whip that story into shape. I want an adaptation okayed by the time they get back; if possible, the first sequence of the script ready. Get going.”

“You’re the boss,” grinned Ellery. “Coming, Lew?”

Lew waved the bottle. “Can’t you see I’m celebratin’ the nup-chu-als?”

So Ellery set out on his quest alone.

After a few telephone calls he headed his rented coupe towards Beverly Hills. He found the Royle estate near the grounds of the Los Angeles Country Club — an enormous castellated pile in the mediaeval English manner, faithful even unto the moat.

The portals gaped, and flunkies seemed nonexistent; so Ellery followed his ears and soon came to an upper hall from which the raucous noises of a small but brisk riot were emanating. There he found the missing servants, grouped at a door in various attitudes of excited and pleasurable eavesdropping.

Ellery tapped an emaciated English gentleman on the shoulder. “Since this seems to be a public performance,” he drawled, “do you think there would be any objection to my going in?”

A man gasped, and the Englishman colored, and they all backed guiltily away. “I beg pawdon. Mr. Royle—”

“Ah, Louderback,” said Ellery. “You are Louderback?”

“I am, sir,” said Louderback stiffly.

“I am happy to note,” said Ellery, “that your mastiff quality of loyalty is leavened by the human trait of curiosity. Louderback, stand aside.”

Ellery entered a baronial room, prepared for anything. Nevertheless, he was slightly startled. Bonnie Stuart sat campfire fashion on top of a grand piano, gazing tragically into her mother’s calm face. On the other side of the room Jack Royle sat sipping a cocktail while his son raced up and down the hearthstone flapping his arms like an agitated penguin.

“—won’t stand for it,” moaned Bonnie to her mother.

“Darling, you won’t stand for it?”

“—hell of a note,” said Ty. “Dad, are you out of your mind? It’s... it’s treason!”

“Just coming to my senses, Ty. Blythe, I love you.”

“I love you, Jack.”

“Mother!”

“Dad!”

“Oh, it’s impossible!”

“—even make me set foot in this house,” cried Bonnie. Blythe rose from the piano bench and drifted dreamy-eyed towards her fiancé. Bonnie jumped down and began to follow her. “Even that’s a concession. Oh, mother darling. But I wouldn’t, only Clotilde said you’d come here to visit that... that man, and—”

“Do you have to marry her?” pleaded Ty. “After so many years? Look at all the women you could have had!”

“Blythe dear.” Jack Royle rose, too, and his son began a second chase. Ellery, watching unobserved and wide-eyed, thought they would soon need some one to direct traffic. They were weaving in and out without hand-signals, and it was a miracle no collisions occurred.

“—old enough to lead my own life, Ty!”

“Of all the women in the world—”

“The only one for me.” Jack took Blythe in his arms. “Two against the world, eh, darling?”

“Jack, I’m so happy.”

“Oh, my God.”

“—after all the things you said about him, mother, I should think you’d be ashamed—”

“Bonnie, Bonnie. We’ve made up our minds. We’ve been fools—”

“Been?” Bonnie appealed to the beamed ceiling. “Fools, fools!”

“Who’s a fool?”

“Oh, so the shoe fits!”

“You keep out of this!”

“She’s my mother, and I love her, and I won’t see her throw her life away on the father of a useless, pretty-faced, contemptible Turk!”

“You should talk, with your weakness for Argentine polo-players!”

“Ty Royle, I’ll slap that hateful face of yours again!”

“Try it and I swear I’ll tan your beautiful hide — yes, and where you sit, too!”

“Ty—”

“Bonnie, sweet child—”

“Oh, hello, Queen,” said Jack Royle. “Have a ringside seat. Ty, you’ve got to cut this out. I’m old enough to know what I’m doing. Blythe and I were made for each other—”

“Page ninety-five of the script,” growled Ty. “We’re shooting the clinch tomorrow. For the love of Pete, dad!”

“Who is that man?” murmured Blythe, glancing at Ellery. “Now, Bonnie, I think you’ve said enough. And you need some lipstick.”

“Hang the lipstick! Oh, mother, mother, how can you?”

“Jack darling, a Martini. Extra dry. I’m parched.”

“Mr. Queen,” wailed Bonnie, “isn’t this disgraceful? They’re actually making up! Mother, I simply will not allow it. Do you hear? If you insist on going through with this impossible marriage—”

“Whose marriage is this, anyway?” giggled Blythe.

“I’ll... I’ll disown you, that’s what I’ll do. I won’t have this leering, pop-eyed, celluloid stuffed shirt for a step-brother!”

“Disown me? Bonnie, you silly child.”

“That’s the only sane thing I’ve ever heard this blondined, arrow-chinned, lopsided female Gorgonzola say!” shouted Ty to his father. “Me, too. If you go through with this we’re quits, dad... Oh, Queen; sorry. You are Queen, aren’t you? Help yourself to a drink. Come on, dad, wake up. It’s only a bad dream.”

“Ty, chuck it,” said Jack Royle crisply. “Cigars in the humidor, Queen. It’s settled, Ty, and if you don’t like it I’m afraid you’ll have to lump it.”

“Then I lump it!”

“Mother,” said Bonnie hollowly, “are you going to leave this hateful house with me this minute, or aren’t you?”

“No, dear,” said Blythe sweetly. “Now run along, like a sweet baby, and keep that appointment with Zara. Your hair’s a fright.”

“Is it?” asked Bonnie, startled. Then she said in a tragic voice: “Mother, this is the end. Goodbye, and I hope he doesn’t beat you, although I know he will. Remember, you’ll always be able to come back to me, because I really love you. Oh, mother!” And, bursting into tears, Bonnie made blindly for the door.

“Now, it’s Sidecars,” said Ty bitterly, “but after a year with her it’ll be absinthe and opium. Dad, goodbye.”

Thus it came about that the prince and princess of the royal families endeavored to make their dramatic exits simultaneously, and in so endeavoring bumped their royal young heads royally at the door.

“Lout!” said Bonnie through the tears.

“Why don’t you watch where you’re going?”

“Such a gentleman. Where did you get your manners — from Jem Royle, the celebrated horse-thief of Sussex?”

“Well, this is my house, and you’ll oblige me by getting out of it as quickly as those Number Eights of yours can carry you,” said Ty coldly.

“Your house! I thought you’d just renounced it forever. As a matter of fact, Tyler Royle, you’re probably behind this absurd idea of mother’s. You’ve manipulated it some way, you — you Machiavelli!”

“I? I’d rather see my dad playing off-stage voice at Minsky’s than tied up to your family! If you ask me, the whole thing is your doing.”

“Mine? Ha, ha! And why should I engineer it, please?”

“Because you and Blythe are on the skids. While in our last picture—”

“Yes, I read those rave exhibitor reports in the Motion Picture Herald. And weren’t those Variety box-office figures encouraging!”

“Ah, I see you’re one of the Royle public.”

“What public?”

“Mugger!”

“Camera hog!”

At this breathless moment, as Ty and Bonnie glared sadistically at each other in the doorway, and Jack and Blythe wrapped their famous arms defiantly about each other near the fireplace, and Mr. Queen sighed over a hooker of aged brandy, Louderback coughed and marched stately in bearing a salver.

“Beg pawdon,” said Louderback, regarding the Fragonard on the opposite wall. “A French person has just delivered this letter for Miss Blythe Stuart. The person says it has just arrived at Miss Stuart’s domicile in the last post, and that it is marked ‘important.’”

“Clotilde!” cried Bonnie, reaching for the envelope on the salver. “Delivering your mail here? Mother, haven’t you any shame?”

“Bonnie, my child,” said Blythe calmly, taking the envelope. “Since when do you read your mother’s mail? I thought you were leaving me forever.”

“And you, Ty,” chuckled Jack Royle, sauntering over. “Have you changed your mind, too?”

Blythe Stuart said: “Oh,” faintly.

She was staring at the contents of the envelope. There were two pieces of colored pasteboard in her hand, and with the other she was shaking the envelope, but nothing else came out.

She said: “Oh,” again, even more faintly, and turned her back.

Mr. Queen, forgotten, approached quietly and peeped. The two pieces of pasteboard were, as far as he could see, ordinary playing-cards. One was a deuce of clubs, the other a ten of spades. As Blythe turned the cards slowly over he saw that their backs were blue and were decorated with a golden horseshoe.

“What’s the matter, mother?” cried Bonnie.

Blythe turned around. She was smiling. “Nothing, silly. Somebody’s idea of a joke. Are you really so concerned about your poor old mummy, whom you’ve just renounced forever?”

“Oh, mother, don’t be tedious,” said Bonnie, tossing her golden curls; and with a sniff at Mr. Tyler Royle she flounced out.

“See you later, dad,” said Ty glumly, and he followed.

“That’s that,” said Jack with relief. He took Blythe in his arms. “It wasn’t so bad, was it, darling? Those crazy kids! Kiss me.”

“Jack! We’ve quite forgotten Mr. Queen.” Blythe turned her magnificent smile on Ellery. “What must you think of us, Mr. Queen! And I don’t believe we’ve been introduced. But Jack has mentioned you, and so has Butch—”

“Sorry,” said the actor. “My dear, this is Ellery Queen, who’s going to work with Lew Bascom on our picture. Well, what do you think of us, Queen? A little meshugeh, eh?”

“I think,” smiled Ellery, “that you lead horribly interesting lives. Queer idea of humor. May I see them, Miss Stuart?”

“Really, it’s nothing—” began Blythe, but somehow the cards and envelope managed to pass from her hand to Mr. Queen’s; and before she could protest he was examining all three intently.

“The Horseshoe Club, of course,” murmured Ellery. “I noticed that distinctive design on their cards the other night. And your practical joker has been very careful about the envelope. Address block-lettered by pen in that scratchy, wishy-washy blue that’s so characteristic of American post-offices. Postmarked this morning. Hmm. Is this the first envelope of its kind you’ve received, Miss Stuart?”

“You don’t think—” began Jack Royle, glancing at Blythe.

“I told you...” Blythe tossed her head; Ellery saw where Bonnie had acquired the habit. “Really, Mr. Queen, it’s nothing at all. People in our profession are always getting the funniest things in our fan-mail.”

“But you have received others?”

Blythe frowned at him. He was smiling. She shrugged and went over to the piano; and as she returned with her bag she opened it and extracted another envelope.

“Blythe, there’s something behind this,” muttered Royle.

“Oh, Jack, it’s such a fuss about nothing. I can’t understand why you should be so interested, Mr. Queen. I received the first one this past Tuesday, the day after we signed the contracts.”

Ellery eagerly examined it. It was identical with the one Clotilde had just brought, even to the color of the ink. It was postmarked Monday night and like the second envelope had been stamped by the Hollywood post-office. Inside were two playing-cards with the horseshoe-backed design: the knave and seven of spades.

“Puzzles and tricks amuse me,” said Ellery. “And since you don’t ascribe any significance to these doojiggers, surely you won’t mind if I appropriate them?” He put them into his pocket. “And now,” Ellery went on cheerfully, “for the real purpose of my visit. Sam Vix just got the news at the studio of your reconciliation—”

“So soon?” cried Blythe.

“But we haven’t told a soul,” protested Royle.

“You know Hollywood. The point is: How come?”

Jack and Blythe exchanged glances. “I suppose Butch will be on our heads soon, so we’ll have to explain anyway,” said the actor. “It’s very simple, Queen. Blythe and I decided we’ve been idiots long enough. We’ve been in love for over twenty years and it’s only pride that’s kept us apart. That’s all.”

“When I think of all those beautiful years,” sighed Blythe. “Darling, we have messed up our lives, haven’t we?”

“But this isn’t good story material,” cried Ellery. “I’ve got to wangle a reason for your burying the hatchet. Plot, good people, plot! Where’s the complication? Who’s the other man, or woman? You can’t leave it at just a temperamental spat!”

“Oh, yes, we can,” grinned Royle. “Ah, there’s the phone... Yes, Butch, it’s all true. Whoa! Wait a minute... Oh! Thanks, Butch. I’m a little overwhelmed. Wait, Blythe wants to talk to you, too...”

Foiled, Mr. Queen departed.

Mr. Queen emerged from the gloomy great-hall of the Royles’ Elizabethan castle and spied, to his astonishment, young Mr. Royle and young Miss Stuart sitting on the drawbridge swinging their legs over the waters of the moat. Like old friends! Well, not quite. He heard Mr. Royle growl deep in his throat and for an instant Mr. Queen felt the impulse to leap forward, thinking that Mr. Royle contemplated drowning his lovely companion among the lilies below.

But then he stopped. Mr. Royle’s growl was apparently animated more by disgust with himself than with Miss Stuart.

“I’m a sucker to do this,” the growl said, “but I can’t run out on the old man. He’s all I’ve got. Louderback’s prissy, and the agent only thinks of money, and if not for me he’d have been like old Park long ago.”

“Yes, indeed,” said Bonnie, gazing into the water.

“What d’ye mean? He’s got more talent in his left eyebrow than all the rest of those guys in their whole bodies. I mean he’s so impractical — he tosses away all this dough.”

“And you,” murmured Bonnie, “you’re such a miser. Of course. You’ve got millions.”

“Leave me out of this,” said Ty, reddening. “I mean, he needs me. That’s why I’ve agreed.”

“You don’t have to explain to me,” said Bonnie coldly. “I’m not interested in you, or your father, or anything about either of you... The only reason I’ve agreed is that I don’t want to hurt mother. I couldn’t desert her.”

“Who’s explaining now?” jeered Ty.

Bonnie bit her lip. “I don’t know why I’m sitting here talking to you. I detest you, and—”

“You’ve got a run in your stocking,” said Ty.

Bonnie jerked her left leg up and tucked it under her. “You nasty thing! You would notice such things.”

“I’m sorry I said that about — I mean, about your Number Eights,” mumbled Ty. “You’ve really got pretty fair legs, and your feet are small for such a big girl.” He threw a pebble into the moat, gazing at the resulting ripples with enormous interest. “Nice figure, too — of sorts, I mean.”

Bonnie gaped at him — Ellery noticed how the roses faded from her cheeks, and how suddenly little-girlish and shy she became. He noticed, too, that she furtively wet the tip of one finger and ran it over the run on the tucked-in leg: and that she looked desperately at her bag, as if she wanted more than anything else in the world to open it and take out a mirror and examine her lips — did they need lipstick? — and poke at her honey-gold hair and generally act like a normal female.

“Nice figure,” muttered young Mr. Royle again, casting another stone.

“Well!” gasped Bonnie. And her hand did dart to her hair and begin poking with those expert pokings so meaningless to the male eye.

“So,” continued the young man irrelevantly, “we’ll be friends. Until the wedding, I mean? Hey?”

Mr. Queen at this psychological moment struggled to suppress a cough. But the cough insisted on erupting.

They both jumped as if he had shot off a revolver. Ty got red all over his face and scrambled to his feet. Bonnie looked guilty and then bit her lip and then opened her bag and then closed it and then said icily: “That’s not the bargain. Oh, hello, Mr. Queen. I’d sooner get chummy with a polecat. No dice, my fine-feathered friend. I know your intentions with women. I just won’t fight with you in public until mother and your father are married.”

“Hello, Queen. Say, did you ever see a more disagreeable woman in your life?” Ty was busy brushing himself off. “Not a kind word in several million. All right, have it your way. I was just thinking of dad, that’s all.”

“And I wouldn’t do a thing like this for any one else in the world but mother. Help me up, please, Mr. Queen.”

“Here, I’ll—”

“Mr. Queen?” cooed Bonnie.

Mr. Queen silently helped her up. Ty worked his powerful shoulders up and down several times, like a pugilist loosening his muscles. He glared at her.

“All right, damn it,” growled Ty. “Till the wedding.”

“You’re so chivalrous, you great big beautiful man.”

“Can I help it if I was born handsome?” yelled Ty. And they stalked off in opposite directions.

Mr. Ellery Queen gazed after them, mouth open. It was all too much for his simple brain.

Chapter 5 Gone with the Wind

Paula Paris’s column gave the news to a palpitating world on Saturday morning, and on Saturday afternoon the Magna Studios doubled the guards at the main gate. The hounds were baying outside Jack Royle’s mansion in Beverly Hills; Blythe had shut herself up in her mosque of a house in Glendale, its door defended by the loose-chested, tight-lipped Clotilde; and Ty and Bonnie, playing their strange roles, granted a joint interview to the puzzled press in which they said nice things about each other and were photographed smiling into each other’s eyes.

“It’s all set,” said Sam Vix to Ellery at the end of a furious day. He wiped his face. “But, boy, oh, boy — tomorrow!”

“Isn’t Bonnie going along?” asked Ellery.

“She wanted to, but I discouraged her. I was afraid that when Ty flew her back from Reed Island, they’d strangle each other in midair.”

“It’s wonderful how cooperative Jack and Blythe have been,” beamed the Boy Wonder. “And with Ty piloting ’em — is that a story, Sam?”

“Sweet mama,” grinned Lew Bascom. “Gimme that bottle.”

“Boys will handle the jamboree tomorrow at the field, Butch,” said the publicity man. “I’m hopping off for Reed Island to direct the preparations for the reception. See you tomorrow night.”

“Not me,” said Butcher hastily. “I hate these Hollywood shindigs. I’ve told Jack and Blythe my doctor advised a rest, and Bonnie understands. Driving out to Palm Springs tomorrow morning for a day in the sun. Conference Monday morning.”

At noon on Sunday Ellery and Lew Bascom drove out to the airport in Ellery’s coupe. Los Feliz Boulevard was jammed with cars crawling bumper to bumper. They wasted an hour getting to the turn-off at Riverside and another along the Los Angeles River drive through Griffith Park to the field. After fifteen minutes of trying to park his car, Ellery abandoned it and they shouldered their way through the mob.

“Too late,” groaned Lew. “There’s Erminius doing his stuff!”

Ty’s brilliant red-and-gold cabin monoplane, gleaming in the sun, was surrounded by a cordon of cursing police. The Royles and the Stuarts, arms locked about one another, bowed and smiled in the vortex of a maelstrom of photographers, radio men, and friends screaming above the blare of a brass band. Dr. Erminius, his sleek black whiskers flowing fluently in the wind, beamed on every one over his prayer-book and sidled closer to the crowded spot on which the cameras were trained.

“Swell work, Doc!” shouted some one.

“Boy, was that a ceremony?”

“Neat, neat. How about a snifter, Doc Erminius?”

“He’ll never marry me!”

“It’s like the Judgment Day,” grinned Lew. “Hey, lemme through here! Come on, Queen. Jack! Blythe!”

The band stopped playing Here Comes the Bride and swung into California, Here I Come.

“Lew! Mr. Queen! It’s all right, officer!”

“Bonnie — Bonnie Stuart! This way, please. Smile at Ty!”

“Won’t you say a few words to the radio audience, Jack?”

“Dr. Erminius, how about a few shots?”

“Yes, my son,” said the good man hastily, and stepped in front of Jack Royle.

“Jack! Blythe! Let’s take a shot of clasped hands showing those wedding rings!”

“Get those people away from that plane, damn it!”

“Miss Blythe! Miss Blythe!” shrieked a feminine voice, and a primly attired French lady of middle age elbowed her way through to the wall of police, waving an envelope frantically.

“Clotilde!” screamed Blythe. She was radiant, her arms full of flowers; her hat askew on her head. She ran over; and as she saw the envelope she gasped aloud, going pale. Then she snatched it from Clotilde’s hand over a policeman’s shoulder and tore it open. Ellery saw her close her eyes, crumple the envelope convulsively. She hurled it away.

Then she put on a smile and returned to the group before the plane.

Ellery picked his way through the fruit and flower baskets littering the ground and managed to pick up the envelope unnoticed. It was another of the post-office-written envelopes, this time sent by special delivery. Inside were the torn halves of a horseshoe-backed playing-card, the eight of spades.

Torn in half. Blythe had not torn it, Ellery was certain. Queer... He frowned and pocketed the envelope, looking about. The Frenchwoman had vanished in the mob.

“Ty! Kiss Bonnie for the newsreel!”

“Jack! Jack! Go into a clinch with the blushing bride!”

“What’s this?” yelled some one, holding aloft a handsome wicker hamper.

“Somebody sent it!” roared Jack Royle.

“Open it!”

Bonnie straightened up with two enormous thermos bottles from the hamper. “Look what I found, people!”

“Sidecars!” bellowed Jack, unscrewing the cap of one of the bottles and sniffing. “Thanks, anonymous friend. How’d you know my weakness?”

“And mine? Martinis!” screamed Blythe over the other bottle. “Isn’t that the loveliest going-away gift!”

“Toast to the bride and groom!”

The thermos bottles were hurled from hand to hand; for a few moments they were all laughing and struggling for a drink. Lew battled desperately with a large stout lady, rescued both bottles, and poured out another round in a nest of paper-cups which appeared from somewhere magically.

“Hey, save some for us,” growled Jack.

“Can’t you get drunk on love?”

“An old buck like you — d’ye need a stimulant?”

“Love — Marches — on!”

“I said save some!” howled Jack, laughing.

Lew reluctantly dropped the thermos bottles into the hamper, screwing on the caps. The hamper lay beside a pile of luggage near the plane.

Lew and Ellery were squeezed, pummeled, pushed, and mauled, stumbling over the luggage. Ellery sat down on the hamper and sighed: “No wonder Butch went to Palm Springs.”

“Who swiped my helmet?” yelled Ty Royle. “Mac! Rev ’em while I get another!” And he darted into the crowd, fighting towards the nearby hangar.

“What’s going on here, the Revolution?” panted a voice. Ellery, trying to save his hat from being crushed, turned to find Alan Clark, his agent, grinning down at him.

“Just a quiet Sunday in Hollywood, Alan. They’re almost ready to take off.”

“I gotta kiss the bride, for gossakes,” shouted Lew frantically. He grabbed at Blythe, caught her, and bussed her heartily while Jack Royle, grinning, began to toss things into the cabin of the plane. Bonnie, heart-stopping in a knee-length leopard coat and Russian leopard hat, was obviously his next victim, but just then a man ran up.

“Miss Bonnie Stuart! Mr. Tyler Royle wants to see you in the hangar.”

Bonnie made a face, smiled for the benefit of the staring public, and slipped after him.

Bonnie looked around inside the hangar. It seemed empty. She turned to question the man who had brought Ty’s message, but he was gone.

“Ty?” she called, puzzled. Her voice echoed from the high roof.

“Here I am!” She followed the sound of Ty’s voice and found him behind a tarpaulined biplane, rummaging in a steel locker.

Ty stared at her. “What do you want, pest?”

“What do I want! What do you want?”

“Me? Not a thing — from you.”

“Look here, Ty Royle, I’ve stood enough from you today without playing puss-in-the-corner. You just sent a messenger to me. What do you want?”

“I sent a messenger? The hell I did.”

“Ty Royle, don’t stand there and be cute!”

Ty clenched his hands. “Oh, God, if only you weren’t a woman.”

“You seemed thankful enough just now that I was a woman,” said Bonnie coldly. “That was quite a kiss you gave me.”

“The cameraman asked for it!”

“Since when do you follow a cameraman’s orders?”

“Listen!” yelled Ty. “I wouldn’t kiss you of my own free will if I hadn’t seen a woman for five years. Your lips tasted like two hunks of rouged rubber. How your leading men can keep kissing you in front of the camera... They ought to get medals for exceptional heroism in line of duty!”

Bonnie went white. “You... You—” she began in a fury.

Some one coughed behind them. They both turned around. They both blinked.

A tall figure in heavy flying clothes, wearing a helmet and goggles, hands gloved in fur, stood there widelegged and still. One hand pointed a revolver at them.

“All right, I’ll bite,” said Ty. “What’s the gag?”

The revolver waved a little, with an unmistakable meaning: Silence. Ty and Bonnie drew sharp breaths simultaneously.

The figure sent a chair skittering across the hangar floor. The revolver pointed to Ty, to the chair. Ty sat down in the chair. Bonnie stood very still.

A bundle of ropes, cut in short lengths, came flying through the air from the tall figure and struck Bonnie’s legs. The revolver pointed to Ty.

Ty jumped out of the chair, snarling. The revolver covered him instantly, trained on his chest.

“Ty,” said Bonnie. “Please. Don’t.”

“You can’t hope to get away with this stunt,” said Ty in a thick voice. “What do you want, money? Here—”

But the weapon’s weaving eye stopped him. Bonnie quickly stooped, picked up the ropes, and began to bind Ty to the back and legs of the chair.

“I see,” said Ty bitterly. “I see the whole thing now. One of your little jokes. This time, by God, you’ve gone too far. I’ll put you in clink for this.”

“That revolver’s no joke,” whispered Bonnie, “and I may play rough, but not with guns. Can’t you see he means business? I won’t bind you tightly—”

The revolver poked her between the shoulder-blades. Bonnie bit her lip and bound Ty tightly. A prepared gag materialized in one gloved hand. She gagged Ty.

Things blurred. It was absurd — this deadly silence, this tongueless figure, the menace of the revolver. She opened her mouth and screamed. Only the echo answered.

The figure was upon her instantly, however. Glove over her mouth, she was forced into another chair. She fought back, kicking, biting. But soon she was strapped to the chair, as gagged and helpless as Ty; and the figure was stooping over Ty, tightening his bonds, adding others.

And then, still without a word, the figure pocketed the revolver, raised one arm in a mocking salute, and darted out of sight behind the tarpaulined biplane.

Ty’s eyes were savage above the gag; he struggled against the ropes, rocking the chair. But he succeeded only in upsetting himself. He fell backwards, striking his head against the stone floor with a meaty thunk! that turned Bonnie’s stomach.

He lay still, his eyes closed.

“Here he comes!” shouted Jack, his arm about Blythe as they stood on the movable steps of the plane. “Ty! Come on!”

“Where’s Bonnie?” screamed Blythe. “Bon-NIE!”

“Crowd’s got her. Ty!”

The tall goggled figure shoved his way through the mob and began to toss the remaining luggage into the cabin. Ellery stood up, helpfully handing him the hamper. He waved Blythe and Jack into the plane, raised the hamper in a farewell to the crowd, and vaulted into the cabin. The door slapped shut.

“Happy landings!” roared Lew.

Blythe and Jack pressed their faces to one of the windows, and the band struck up the Wedding March from Lohengrin.

Everybody sang.

Bonnie looked frantically about. And then she caught her breath. Through the hangar window nearest her she saw the tall goggled figure running towards Ty’s plane; and for the first time Bonnie realized that the figure was dressed in a flying suit identical with Ty’s. Jack... Blythe... waving, shouting... The brassy sounds of the band came faintly through the hangar walls.

And then, before her distended eyes, the red-and-gold plane began to move, taxiing down the field, rising... rising...

The last thing Bonnie saw before everything went black was her mother’s handkerchief signalling a farewell in the cabin window.

Bonnie opened her eyes aeons later to a blank world; slowly it filled in. She was lying on her side, on the floor. A few feet away lay Ty, looking very pale, looking... dead. Ty!

She stirred, and thousands of needles began to shoot into her numb flesh. With the pain came full awareness. Blythe... Blythe was gone.

She had fallen sidewise when she fainted. How long ago? What — what time was it?

Blythe. Blythe was gone. Like smoke in thin air.

In her fall the gag had been dislodged from her mouth.

And Ty was dead. Mother...

Bonnie screamed. Her own screams came screaming back at her, lying on the cold floor of the hangar behind the concealing plane.

Ty moaned.

Bonnie inched her way painfully the few feet across the floor towards him, dragging the chair to which she was bound. He opened his bloodshot eyes.

“Ty,” she gasped. “They’ve been kidnapped! Jack — my mother... That man — he flew them off the field, pretending to be you!”

Ty closed his eyes. When he opened them again Bonnie was shocked by their unnatural red color. The gag over his lips worked spasmodically, as if he were trying to speak. She could see the cords of his neck distend.

She bared her teeth, face pressed to his, gnawing at his gag like a mouse, tugging, worrying it. His cheek felt cold.

“Bonnie.” His voice was unrecognizable. “Loosen these ropes.”

For an instant their breaths mingled and their eyes locked. Then Bonnie looked away and Ty turned over, and with a little cry she bent her head to his bound, straining hands.

Luckily Ellery and his two companions had not left the field. Ellery had looked once at the thousands milling about the parked cars and wisely suggested procrastination. So he and Lew and Alan Clark went over to the airport restaurant for sandwiches and coffee.

They were roused out of a listless discussion of the picture story by a commotion outside, and near one of the hangars they came upon an anthill of officials and pilots and mechanics and police. They were swarming about Ty, who was rubbing his skinned hands, and Bonnie, who was seated with folded hands, paler than her own handkerchief, staring numbly at all the busy ants without seeing them.

“My father’s in that plane,” said Ty. There was a purplish lump on the back of his head; he looked ill. “Queen! Thank God there’s one face I recognize. And Lew! Get Butch. Call Reed Island. Do something, somebody!”

“No point in calling Reed Island first,” said Ellery to Lew. “That’s the one place this chap didn’t take them to. I wonder if...”

“Took mother,” said Bonnie simply. A female attendant tried to lure her away, but she shook her head.

Ellery rang Information, then put in a call to Tolland Stuart’s estate. A man with a dry, peevish voice answered after a long time.

“Is this Mr. Tolland Stuart?”

It seemed to Ellery that the voice was instantly cautious. “No, this is Dr. Junius. Who’s calling Mr. Stuart?”

Ellery explained what had happened and asked if Ty’s monoplane had passed near the Chocolate Mountain estate. But Tolland Stuart’s physician crushed that possibility.

“Not a plane near here all day. By the way, isn’t it possible that Mr. Royle and Miss Stuart merely took that way of escaping the crowds? Perhaps — it would be natural — they wanted a really private honeymoon.”

“And hired some one to tie up Ty Royle and Bonnie Stuart and kidnap the plane?” said Ellery dryly. “I hardly think so, Doctor.”

“Well, let me know when you get word,” said Dr. Junius. “Mr. Stuart went rabbit-hunting this morning and hasn’t got back yet.”

Ellery thanked him, disconnected, and called Palm Springs. But Jacques Butcher could not be located. So Ellery left a message and telephoned Reed Island. Sam Vix was not about — he had flown off somewhere: Ellery could not clearly get his destination.

“Then Mr. Royle’s plane hasn’t landed on Reed Island?”

“No. We’ve been waiting. Is something the matter? They should have been here by this time.”

Ellery sighed and hung up.

The police appeared, county men; swarms of newspaper reporters descended, a plague of locusts. In a short time the field was more blackly populated than at the take-off, and it was necessary to summon police reserves. Meanwhile, searching planes from the municipal airport and the nearest Army field were darkening the sky, streaming southwestward on the probable route of the red-and-gold monoplane.

The afternoon lengthened; toward sunset a small two-seater skimmed in from the west and the Boy Wonder leaped to the ground from the cockpit and ran for the hangar.

He put his arms about Bonnie and she sobbed against his chest while Ty paced up and down consuming cigaret after cigaret.

“Here it is!” shouted an airport official, dashing up. “An Army scout has just sighted a red-and-gold monoplane on a barren plateau in the Chocolate Mountains! No sign of life.”

“A wreck?” asked Ty harshly.

“No. It’s just grounded there.”

“That’s strange,” muttered Ellery, but he said nothing more as he saw the expression on Bonnie’s face. He had seen expressions like that on the faces of condemned criminals reprieved at the eleventh hour.

And so more planes were commandeered, and a small fleet rose from the airport in the dusk and preened their wings in the setting sun.

And soon, in the darkness, they were feeling their way over the San Bernardino Mountains, guided by radio. Then they followed a brightness in the hills to the south, which grew into flares on a flat, deserted plateau.

When they landed Army men challenged them with drawn revolvers. There seemed a curious diffidence in their manner, as if they were indisposed to talk in the evening under the white stars in the cold pale light of the flares.

“My father—” began Ty, breaking into a run. His red-and-gold plane rested quietly on the plateau, surrounded by men.

“My mother—” said Bonnie, stumbling after him.

A helmeted officer said something in a low voice to Jacques Butcher, and he made a face and instantly smiled in the most peculiar way; and he beckoned to Ellery and Lew and called out to Bonnie: “Bonnie. Just a minute.”

And Bonnie stopped, her face turned sidewise in the ghostly light, looking frightened and yet trying not to look frightened; and Ty stopped, too, very abruptly, as if he had come up to a high stone wall.

And Ellery and Jacques Butcher entered the cabin of Ty’s plane, and some one shut the door behind them.

Outside, Ty and Bonnie stood a few feet apart, two rigid poles in a mass of stirring humanity. Neither said anything, and both kept looking at the closed door of the monoplane. And no one came near them.

The sky was so near, thought Bonnie, so close here in the mountains at night.

The cabin door opened and Jacques Butcher came out with a strong heavy step, like a diver walking on the bottom of the sea. And he went up to Ty and Bonnie and stood between them and put his right arm about Bonnie’s shoulder and his left arm about Ty’s, and he said in a voice that hissed against the silence of the plateau:

“The pilot is missing, Bonnie. Ty. What can I say? Jack and Blythe are in that plane...”

“In the plane,” said Bonnie, taking a half-step forward. And she stopped. “Inside?” she asked in a small-child, wondering voice. “Why don’t they... come... out?”

Ty turned and walked off. Then he stopped, too, his back dark and unmoving against the stars.

“Bonnie. Darling,” said Butcher thickly.

“Butch.” Bonnie sighed. “They’re... they’re not...?”

“They’re both dead.”

The sky was so close.