Puzzle of the Happy Hooligan Read online

  He hung up wearily, reached into his desk drawer and sniffed at a small bottle filled with bits of cork and aromatic spirits of ammonia. “The people I have to work with!” he moaned. “It was different when we were making silents. Ah, those days!” He suddenly frowned on his visitors, and Miss Withers wondered if she were expected to genuflect. But the great man turned to Wagman. “A type,” he said judicially. “Most definitely a type! Might fit into the dead-pan, sour-puss New England background. But has she worked for me before? I always try to cast people who’ve worked for me before.”

  “This isn’t for talent, Mr Nincom,” Wagman hastily explained. “I suggested that Miss Withers here might work out on the technical end—remember?”

  “Hmm, possibly.” Nincom waved them to chairs. “I suppose she’s had experience along such lines?”

  Miss Withers somewhat resented being spoken of as if she were not in the room. “I must confess, Mr Nincom, that I—”

  She stopped talking because nobody was listening. “In this story,” Nincom went on, “we are faced with bringing to the screen the epic biography of a fiery, inhibited woman—a daughter of icy New England. A great dramatic true story packed with suspense and murder and love interest, laid in the Gay Nineties with bicycles built for two, hoop skirts and bustles, everybody dancing the polka—it’s bound to be powerful!”

  Miss Withers saw that Wagman was nodding, so she nodded too.

  Mr Nincom rose to his feet, produced a conductor’s baton from behind his desk and started to stalk up and down, now and then pausing to conduct an imaginary orchestra. “A lovely young woman, driven to murder by a combination of circumstances. Or was she? After the jury sets her free, what then? What of the loyal sweetheart who has saved her from the noose? With the dark cloud hanging over her head, still hanging in spite of the acquittal, what can she do but send him away? Nothing!”

  Mr Wagman shook his head, and Miss Withers seconded it. She was conscious of the fact that, half concealed by a screen in one corner, a small mouse-like woman was hammering a noiseless typewriter. And Mr Nincom went on and on.

  The interview went swimmingly, as monologues usually do. At one time the schoolteacher had a sudden fear that she was being hired under the impression that she was Lizzie Borden herself, or at least a contemporary. With this point cleared up, and the newspaper clipping read aloud again by her agent to qualify her as a technical expert, all was serene. She listened as she was bound out to Mammoth Pictures as a technical adviser on Nincom production number 11-23 at a salary of five hundred dollars a week with a four-week guarantee. “Your job is to make sure that we follow the actual practice of the time, particularly in the detective stuff,” Nincom advised her. “And, please, I beg of you, keep this assignment absolutely to yourself. Tell nobody the nature of your work. I don’t want Selznick to rush in and make a murder picture. The first sequence of the script will be on your desk sometime this afternoon, Miss Withers.”

  “My—my desk?”

  Nincom pressed one of the many buttons before him. There was a pause, evidently a longer pause than he expected. He rang again, then snatched up one of his telephones.

  “Jill? What the goddam and all to hell?” He stopped. “What? Oh. Well, find her and tell her to get in here and get in quick. Don’t I ever get any loyalty and co-operation around this place? What? WHAT?” He jiggled the instrument angrily.

  Then, surprisingly, the door was flung open, and Jill Madison entered. She was still the perfect secretary, still the beautiful blond automaton, except that a loop of her yellow hair had fallen rakishly over one eye and she seemed out of breath.

  “Yes, Mr Nincom?” she said in a somewhat choked tone.

  The great man relaxed, assuming an instantaneous mantle of good fellowship. “This is Miss Withers, Jill. She is joining our little family. Will you be good enough …?”

  His voice died away in his throat, for it was only too apparent that she was not listening. Moreover, she was making a noise.

  It was a noise usually considered vulgar. Jill Madison made it, not in the Bronx fashion, nor yet in the soft Italian style, but with curled thumb and forefinger pressed against her tightened lips, as they do within the sound of London’s Bow bells. When it had died away she bowed and departed, slamming the door after her as a sort of punctuation mark.

  For as long as one might have counted one hundred by tens all was dead silence within the sanctum sanctorum of Mr Thorwald L. Nincom. He did not look like a man amazed. He did not look angry. He simply stared at the door, as jarred as if a canary bird had spat in his eye.

  Miss Hildegarde Withers had an uncomfortable feeling that all clocks in the world had stopped, that time was standing still. She cleared her throat. “You were saying … ?”

  That broke the spell. Nincom took a deep, shuddering breath and fumbled into the drawer for his smelling salts. “Have her report … Writers’ Building,” he managed to say, and waved them off.

  In the outer office, by way of effective contrast, all was excitement. There was a little knot of men and girls around Jill, all noisily congratulating her. Harry Wagman loudly demanded, “What makes?” several times, but they were too busy to answer him. “Probably getting married and leaving the business,” he told Miss Withers. They went on outside.

  They were halfway down the narrow canyon of glittering white sunlight when there came the patter of footsteps behind them, and a small mouselike woman rushed up, thrust typewritten sheets into their hands. She turned out to be Miss Smythe, Nincom’s number-two secretary.

  “Here—I most forgot,” she gushed. “Isn’t it wonderful about Jill Madison drawing the favorite in the Irish Sweep? And maybe going to win a hundred and fifty thousand dollars?” She swallowed and rushed away again.

  “Well!” observed Harry Wagman. “No wonder she blew her top.” He looked vaguely around as if searching for a tablecloth to write the figures down upon. “A hundred and a half grand isn’t hay!”

  “What isn’t which?” Things were happening a bit too fast for Miss Hildegarde Withers, and when Wagman deposited her at the doorway of the high, boxlike Writers’ Building she was still dizzy.

  “Just go right up to the third floor and tell the girl at the information desk that you’re the new Nincom writer, and Gertrude will assign you to an office,” he said. “I’ll run over to the Administration Building and make sure this is all official. Good luck!”

  “Wait! What’s all this?” Miss Withers was looking at the typewritten sheets in her hand.

  “Oh, that! You’ll get used to it. I meant to warn you about Nincom’s having a stenographer in his office to take everything right down on the typewriter for a permanent record of all conferences.” He waved and departed.

  The schoolteacher stood there, still staring at the strange and disconcerting record of her own uncertain speeches, at the rich, round phrases of Mr Thorwald L. Nincom interrupting her. She realized that she was getting into very deep water indeed, a world as different to her as a valley in the bottom of the sea might have been. It was a world in which to move cautiously.

  She took a deep breath and climbed into the little automatic elevator which bore her waveringly upward. On the third floor she emerged to face a glass window marked “Information” with a small office and a large sultry-looking girl behind it.

  “Sorry, but there is no soliciting in the building!” was the greeting.

  “I beg your pardon?” The Withers eyebrows went up.

  “Oh, aren’t you with the Community Chest?”

  Miss Withers explained that she would like an office. The sultry girl surveyed her long purple fingernails dubiously. “I don’t know about that,” she said. “Gertrude usually takes care of that and she’s out to lunch. I’m Lillian Gissing from the secretarial department. I don’t—Excuse me.” A light flamed red on the board, and she pressed a key. “Third floor, Writers. Who? I’m sorry, Mr Josef is working at home today. Yes.” She turned back to Miss Withers confidentially. “The
lies I have to tell! If I really said where he was—wow!”

  “Really? But about my office?”

  Lillian tapped purple fingernails against her rather prominent front teeth. “There’s 303—Mr Dinwiddie has it but he’s on his layoff. He won’t be back for six weeks….” She looked at the schoolteacher, making it plain that she did not think she’d last that long. “I’ll stick you in 303.” She slid a key under the window. “Next to the last door on the right.”

  It was a nice office. Miss Withers made up her mind to that the very instant she walked in. There was a big oak desk, a typewriter on a stand, two chairs and an uncertain-looking lounge. · The one window was covered with a Venetian blind, but since the view consisted only of the flat roofs of studio sound stages, with some round brown hills beyond, that was small loss.

  Connecting doors, both locked, opened right and left, and there was a radiator in the corner which she turned on at once.

  The desk was bare and empty except for stationery, paper clips and some badly chewed pencils. Well, the powers that be were paying her ten dollars an hour to sit here, so she sat. After a while she took a sheet of letter paper from the desk and under the imposing letterhead she began typing a note to her old friend and sparring partner, Inspector Oscar Piper, back in Manhattan.

  It began: “My dear Oscar, guess where I am! You wouldn’t believe it if I told you! But Hollywood is the sort of place about which anything you can say, good or bad, is true. It is also a place where surprisingly novel things happen….”

  At that moment there was a click, and then the connecting door on her right opened suddenly. “Hey, Stinkie!” came a masculine voice.

  Miss Withers blinked and looked up to see a short, blue-chinned man in the doorway, a man with a leonine head and wide, surprised eyes. He was holding a glass of water in a hand which trembled.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” said Saul Stafford, backing away. “I heard the typewriter and I thought old Dinwiddie was back.”

  “I’m afraid not,” she confessed. “But since we’re to be neighbors—” She introduced herself.

  “Neighbors, eh?” He cocked his head, then spoke in a strange, excited voice. “This may sound funny to you, but would you mind tasting this water? To see if there’s anything funny about it?”

  She took the glass, sipped it. “It tastes like water to me. Why—you don’t think it’s poisoned, do you?” The remark was intended as a pleasantry, but when she saw his face she knew that it had rung the bell.

  “Maybe,” he said hoarsely. Then he shrugged. “Don’t mind me. I’ve worked on so many quick B epics that I’m probably trying to live the part of Charlie Chan in the Death-Ray Tunnel or something. All the same, a lot of funny things have been happening to me lately.”

  “Such as?”

  He shrugged. “Oh, near accidents to my car and funny-tasting drinks and so on. It’s all a headache. By the way, you don’t happen to have any aspirin kicking around, do you?”

  Miss Withers was sorry. “Tell me more about these things that have been happening to you,” she pressed.

  But Stafford wisely shook his head. “There’s probably nothing to it. I’m maybe a mild case of paranoia. But, anyway, I saw something in the Reporter just now—Nincom is importing a famous New York detective as technical expert on his new picture, and when the guy gets here I’m going to retain him and lay the whole thing in his lap!”

  “But—” began Miss Withers, and stopped. She had given her word to Mr Nincom not to divulge the nature of her assignment.

  “It’s probably Ellis Parker,” Stafford went on. “Or he’s in jail, isn’t he? So maybe it’s William J. Burns or one of the Pinkertons.”

  He stood in the doorway nodding—a man supremely confident that he could see powerful assistance in the offing. Miss Withers followed, eager and unhappy. “I wonder—” she began, and stopped. For she was looking into Saul Stafford’s office, into a room crowded with incredible objects, large and small. She noticed a typewriter stand equipped with an endless roll of paper, a high chair of the type used by tennis umpires, tables and desks covered with china animals, advertising statuettes, ship models, pipes and tobacco and every other imaginable object. The walls were covered with vast twenty-four sheets advertising the Folies Bergères, the Midland Railways and old Mammoth gangster pictures. One tremendous poster, an artist’s conception of Josephine Baker wearing a G string, ran up one wall and halfway across the ceiling.

  “No wonder,” said the awed schoolteacher. “That room is enough to give anyone the jitters.”

  “We got started and we couldn’t stop,” Saul Stafford admitted. “It got so crowded in here that Virgil had to move across the hall, and still we keep collecting things.” He shook his head. “Well, it’s nice to have met you, Miss Withers. Drop in any time. I think I’ll lie down and try to sleep off this headache.”

  With the connecting door closed again, Miss Withers returned to stare at the virgin expanse of her desk blotter. But she had no heart to continue her letter to the inspector. All she could think of was that frightened man next door who saw—rightly or not—the shadow of death all around him.

  She had no idea of just how seriously Mr Nincom intended the pledge of secrecy to be taken, but he had been very pointed about it. It was a nice problem in ethics, complicated still further by the fact that Stafford would probably be very surprised to find that the famous New York detective he expected was really only the inquisitive spinster next door.

  Should she tell him? Would he put any faith in her if she did tell him? Impulsively Miss Withers picked up the telephone and got through to Nincom’s office where a bored young man answered and told her that the great man was out on the test stage. “Will you please ask him to call me the moment he is free?” she demanded, and the faraway voice promised to leave the message.

  So she waited. There was something soothing and hypnotic in the air, but of course she couldn’t go to sleep at the switch—not on her first day. She leaned back in the chair, staring at the opposite wall and a photograph of some tired-looking calla lilies, funeral lilies. She found herself slipping finally into a sort of waking dream in which that sheaf of lilies rested across the chest of Mr Thorwald L. Nincom. She, herself, a disembodied spirit, floated above the great man’s funeral pyre, while around it, in a vast, wavering circle, danced his writers and secretaries and assistants, chanting a wordless, tuneless dirge.

  The voices rose to a hideous cacophony. There was something she must do immediately, but she was bound in the dreadful paralysis of nightmare, bound and drowned and floating. Then she woke up suddenly to find that she was being shaken unmercifully by a tall and moderately frightened youth. It was Buster, the boy she had seen making calf’s eyes at Mr Nincom’s secretary. “Excuse me,” he said, and slapped her face.

  She tried to slap back, but her strength was gone. There was a sweetish-sick taste in her mouth, as if a stale lemon drop had died there.

  “It’s the gas,” Buster was saying. “You have to light these heaters when you turn them on or else the room gradually fills up with natural gas. You all right, ma’am?”

  “Of course I’m all right.” She took deep breaths in front of the opened window, refused Buster’s offer of a visit from the studio doctor, of a glass of water, of anything. “Though I’m very grateful to you, young man,” she told him, “in spite of your rather drastic methods.”

  He grinned engagingly. “Confucius say, ‘Better to wake up being slapped than sleep forever under tombstone.’”

  Miss Withers frowned at him. “Sometimes I think Confucius say too much. By the way, young man, do you mind a well-meant suggestion? The next time you want a blond young lady to go out to lunch with you why not forget about these synthetic Confucius sayings and quote something more powerful? Such as:

  “Can such delights be in the streets

  And open fields, and we not see’t?

  Come, well abroad, and let’s obey

  The proclamation made for M
ay….”

  Buster looked at her, nodded. He said slowly, “I remember….

  “And sin no more, as we have done, by staying;

  But, my Corinna, come, let’s go a-Maying.”

  Yes, before I set out to learn the motion-picture business I was exposed to things like that. But I still think Confucius is more suitable to this town.” He produced a large envelope, made Miss Withers sign for it. “From the Research Department,” he explained, and hastened away.

  Miss Withers shook her head. Hollywood, where messenger boys quoted Herrick and everything was topsy-turvy. She opened the envelope, found three books dealing with the Borden case. One was from the Famous Trials series, and she opened it at a paragraph discussing the theory that Lizzie Borden had stripped herself to the buff to save her blue calico dress before taking the ax to Ma and Pa.

  She hastily turned a page. But after a moment she pushed the books away. Lizzie Borden was cold potatoes at the moment.

  It was getting well on into the afternoon, and still no call from Mr Nincom. On a sudden impulse Miss Withers went over to the door leading into Stafford’s office, knocked and tried to open it. The latch had been caught on the other side. That was odd. She knocked again. “Mr Stafford? It’s I—Miss Withers.”

  Frowning, she went out into the hall and knocked on the main door to Stafford’s office. Then she tried the knob and found that it turned. She went inside.

  No, her neighbor had not gone home. The room was just as she had seen it before, except that now the gigantic poster of Josephine Baker hung from the ceiling by only one thumbtack, except that Saul Stafford himself lay sprawled akimbo upon the carpet.

  There was a half-filled glass of water on the table beside a large bottle of aspirin tablets. The desk chair had been overturned, and three thumbtacks lay on the floor. Stafford was beyond all help. She forced herself to make sure of that, felt the heavy leonine head roll loosely upon its broken neck, before she turned and ran out of the room.