The Four of Hearts (3 page)

‘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 wind-burned 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, hashslinger, 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 feaze 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 coloured 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 what 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 majordomo 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 boot-black stand near the main gate with Roderick, the coloured 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 round 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 parlour 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 parlour 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, flower-beds, 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 ears 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 cigarette 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 someone to open doors for or help in and out of taxis. But at this historic moment misogyny, that crusted armour, inexplicably cracked and fell away from him, leaving him defenceless 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 grey 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 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? Cigarettes 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! Cigarette?' 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 anyone 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 cigarette. ‘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 all 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 everyone adores. It's simply that they're capable of anything, from breaking an engagement for no reason at all to keeping up 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 everyone 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 neighbouring 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.