Puzzle of the Happy Hooligan (2 page)

Then they turned into a doorway and came at last into a spacious outer office hung with still photographs from old Nincom pictures, the likenesses of gigantic apes clinging to the Empire State Building, of stampeding buffalo and hooded knights of the Klan and of a lovely young woman tied very tightly to a railroad track in front of an oncoming train. All these assorted characters were enlarged to truly terrifying proportions.

This room was presided over by a lovely blond automaton with soft amber eyes and long magenta fingernails, whom Miss Withers took to be a movie star and who turned out to be Mr Nincom’s third secretary. Wagman addressed her as “Jill.”

Jill announced them to the Presence and for her pains received an angry masculine roaring. “I’m sorry—” she began. “But—” The roaring went on.

Jill’s lip was a bit redder than normal when she turned to them again. “I’m sorry,” she said coolly. “But Mr Nincom cannot be disturbed now. He’s in a story conference with the writers.”

Wagman nodded. “My clients also,” he whispered proudly to Miss Withers. Then to Jill: “How’re the boys coming with the script? Have they got it licked yet?”

She raised her eyebrows. “You mean Dobie and Stafford? Those two bums—I mean, they aren’t working on the script at the moment. They got the ax.”

Wagman wailed, “The devil! Why doesn’t somebody tell me these things?”

Jill put through a phone call, turned back to them. “Don’t ask me, Harry Wagman. They’re your writers, not mine. And you can have them.”

Miss Withers, a quiet bystander in all this, saw Wagman wink. To Jill he said, “Why, Miss Madison, are you and the boys still feuding?”

“I’m not amused at their punk gags, and neither is the boss. She lowered her voice. “You know,
he
always likes to have his writers have lunch with him so he can be sure they don’t take too much time out? Well, Dobie and Stafford decided they were tired of that and sick of the commissary food, so they brought lunch pails full of garlic sandwiches and
breathed
themselves right out of an assignment.”

“They’re under contract,” Wagman observed cheerily. “Say, how about trying His Nibs again?”

Jill Madison tried again. Once more she was met by that crackling roar of words. She looked up, biting her lip. “I’m afraid you’ll have to make another appointment,” she told them.

Wagman shrugged and took Miss Withers’ arm. “We might as well blow,” he said dispiritedly. They went back again, out into the sunshine of the studio street. “I must say—” began the miffed schoolteacher, and then stopped short. Coming down the sidewalk was a penguin who wore a white sun topee, a blue sweater with the numeral “4” on its back and a polo mallet tucked rakishly under its flipper. Following, was a sunburned young man in the uniform of a ship’s captain. He was talking to the bird, not too happily.

“Hi, skipper!” Wagman cried. “How’s Pete today?”

The captain stopped and shook his head. “Not so hot,” he admitted. “We were all set for a part in Zanuck’s new picture where Pete was going to eat a bowl of goldfish, and then they decided to save money and hire two college boys from U.C.L.A. instead.”

“That’s Hollywood,” sympathized Wagman. The captain started off again, and Penguin Pete, who had been patiently resting on his round stomach, rose and hurried after him.

“You never know in this town—” began Wagman.

Then he stopped, looked back to where Jill Madison, her face flushed, was running after them.

“I’m sorry,” she cried. “Mr Nincom didn’t want you to go. If you’ll come back and wait until the story conference is over he’ll try to see you.”

So they came back inside. Miss Withers sat down on a hard leather lounge beside the man who was to take 10 per cent of her salary if she ever got one and tried to avoid the accusing eye of the giant ape on the opposite wall.

It was a little more than half an hour before the inner door opened and a little procession emerged. Foremost was a slight youth with cropped hair and a hunted expression who was gnawing at the place where his fingernails used to be. “That’s Frankie Firsk,” whispered Wagman. “Son of Rupert Firsk, the matinee idol of the silents. Now the old man is retired and down to his last yacht, and Frankie is trying writing.” Behind Firsk came a fluttery old lady who looked like the stage version of a London “char” and who was shaking her head and muttering to herself. “Melicent Manning—she wrote the scenario for the first picture Pickford ever did back in two hundred B.C.” Then there was a wasp-waisted Slav in a green suit with an American flag in the buttonhole, and bringing up the rear was a stocky chap who looked like a middleweight fighter gone prosperous. His fists were clenched tight now, and he seemed to weave slightly as if he had run into a punch.

Wagman said, “Willy Abend, the pink playwright. And the last one is Doug August, the cowboy poet.”

“All of them on one story?”

“There were two more yesterday,” the agent advised her. “And there may be six more tomorrow.” He rose and led her toward the desk again where Jill Madison was signing for a brown envelope delivered by a tall and dreamy youth. “Shush, Buster!” she was saying.

He was staring after the writers. “They get more a week than I get in a year,” Buster went on. “And they’re just a bunch of poops. Mr Nincom and his poops! Say, that’s not bad, huh?”

“Not good,” Jill said. She clicked at the switchboard.

“Lunch today? Just this once?” He beamed hopefully.

“No, thank you,” she returned. To Wagman: “Just a moment, I think I can get you in….”

Buster lingered. “‘Girl who always buy own lunch wind up old maid,’ so Confucius say.” Then he wandered away, his broad young shoulders sagging a trifle.

“Those fresh messenger boys!” Jill Madison observed.

“There is something in what he said, all the same,” observed Miss Hildegarde Withers thoughtfully. “About buying your own lunch.
I
know.”

Then the switchboard signal flashed three times, and Jill Madison nodded. The way was clear.

They were suddenly inside the paneled study of Mr Thorwald L. Nincom. Miss Withers stopped and blinked. Behind the largest mahogany desk she had ever seen was hunched a tallish man whose once good looks had run all to chins and paunch. He wore a green knitted shawl over his shoulders and with the fingers of one hand he constantly caressed the hairless dome of his head or tugged at his wispy mustache.

Mr Nincom acknowledged their arrival by holding up his pale hand imperatively and went on talking into the telephone.

“No, no, no—no—no! I saw those tests, I tell you. And Sheridan won’t do for Lizzie. Listen, Artie, I don’t want oomph; I want sizzle!
What?
Now, seriously, can you imagine the De Havilland girl killing her parents with a hatchet? It’s got to be somebody else.
Of course,
Davis; only Harry Warner wouldn’t ask any more than a pound of flesh for her. All right. Yes.”

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.