“Where is he?”
“Oh, I forgot that. The secretary, she tipped him I was on my way up here. So of course he took a run-out. He beat it right back to Hollywood, so he can still say he never had one word with me about the deal.”
“Well, what’s it all about, anyway?” says Polly. “Can you tell me that? It’s the craziest thing I ever heard of. Here we’ve been here a whole week. Not one camera has been set up, not one piece of scenery, not anything, except me, and Tim, and the hip’, and this lake. Does it make sense? What’s he trying to do? Kid us?”
“I’ll tell you what it’s about,” says Hapgood. “In the first place, it’s an animal picture. Well, they’re made in the cutting-room, but you got to have one gag. Like in ‘Congorilla’ it was the gorillas, and in ‘Chang’ it was the elephant stampede, and in ‘Bring ’Em Back Alive’ it was the snake and the tiger; you got to have a gag. So that’s where Hornison played smart. That gag, you generally got to send Martin Johnson or Frank Buck or Clyde Ellicott or somebody down to the South Seas to get it, and that costs money. That knocks out fifty grand before you even know it. So Hornison, he figured out a gag he could do right here in this lake, and do it so cheap it’s a crime. It’s the jungle ferryboat, see? I mean the hip’. And this here Kowgli — that’s Kennelly — he gets caught in a river full of crocodiles—”
“Crocodiles!” says Polly. “First a lion, then a hip’, and now crocodiles! It’s out! It’s—”
“The crocodiles,” says Hapgood, “they do them in a tank with a dummy soaked in horse blood. That’s another thing. Ever since this here Jo Metcalf figured how to run hot water into the tank and make the crocodiles come to life like a lot of crabs in a steam boiler, why they been hell on croc’s. So then when he gets caught by the croc’s, his old pal the hip’ comes along and saves him.”
“Swell,” says Kennelly.
“But get how the cheap louse saved his money and left us holding the bag. It’s good. If he could get the gag in, then he had our name on the contracts; and even if it was a grand a week, with a gag like that, it was cheap. If he couldn’t, it cost him just about what it would cost to make one screen test on his own lot. Overhead? Not a dime. That lake’s free. Camera-crews? He didn’t bring any. Guarantee? He hasn’t even read the contracts. Thirty bucks a day for the hip’, and whatever he wants to pay us. He don’t even have to stable the hip’. That secretary’s been gagging to me how the hip’ goes down under every night and stays there—”
“We know,” says Polly.
“We heard about it,” says Kennelly.
“Maybe five hundred bucks, over all, not a cent more. He’s sitting pretty. The gag’s a flop, but—”
“The gag’s not a flop,” says Polly.
“That’s what makes it nice,” says Kennelly.
“What do you mean, it’s not a flop?”
“We pulled it off. We’re ready to shoot.”
“You’re too late. That just makes it perfect.”
“How do you know we’re too late? Can’t you call him up?”
“I don’t even want to talk to the louse.”
“Then I’ll talk to him,” says Kennelly. “That’s better than the three of us talking to each other.”
“You better not let me talk to him,” says Polly, after Kennelly went inside to the phone. “I might say something we would all be sorry for.”
She jumped and ran inside. The little country exchange out there by the lake was slow, and Kennelly hadn’t got through to the studio yet. She grabbed the receiver and slammed it on the hook. “Did you get him?”
“No. Hey, how can I get him if—”
“Thank God! Now listen, Tim. It’s my turn to talk. — Hap! Come in here.”
Hap came in, and she started off. “All right,” she says. “He took us for a ride, didn’t he? Then we’re going to take him for a ride, and he’ll remember it for a while. Hap, call that girl at your office and tell her to go over and pick up those checks right away.”
“Checks?”
“So we’re closed out! Tell her to get the checks and contracts. So we’re closed out, and there’s no question about it.”
“But that’s just what we’re trying to head off!”
“Sure, and we’re all so dumb we ought to be shot. Can’t you see it? If we can ever get closed out, and get those contracts back, it’s a new deal. It’s a new deal all around, and he’ll have to pay us two thousand a week, on a ten-week guarantee—”
“You’re crazy,” says Hapgood.
“Am I? Crocodiles, my eye! Why, this gag is going to be famous before we’re done. That hip’ is going to carry Tim up and down the river, carry messages all over the jungle, save the monkey from the big bad tiger, get his back scratched by the pretty tick-bird — and then when he saves Tim from the crocodiles, those kids are going to stand up and cheer. I’m telling you. It’s our gag. I know what it’s worth, and after I get done, so will Hornison.”
“She’s not crazy,” says Kennelly. “Call your office.”
Of course it wouldn’t be Hapgood’s office if there was somebody in it. “It’s too late,” he says. “She must have gone. Say, I don’t think much of this.”
“All right, then,” says Polly. “I’m going to spend tonight in Hollywood. The very first thing in the morning I go get the checks and contracts, and then I start in on Hornison. And what you two are going to do is stay here and see that the Bohunk doesn’t move that hip’.”
When Polly hit the Brown Derby, that night around nine o’clock, who should be there but Hornison. He was across the room, and he didn’t see her. She figured that meant he saw her first, and it suited her all right, so she stayed where she was and ordered their seventy-five-cent Chinese dinner.
Pretty soon Polly could hear a mumble, and she didn’t pay any attention to it till she noticed Hornison had a phone plugged in at his table and was talking into it. Then she snapped out of it and listened. “That’s right,” he was saying. “One reservation on your train to San Francisco, leaving tonight. Hold it in my name, J. P. Hornison. I’ll pick it up by eleven forty.”
That knocked everything haywire, and meant she had to move fast. She walked down to his table like nothing had happened at all, lit one of his cigarettes, and sat down nice and friendly. “Hello,” he says. “I thought you were working.”
“I’m going back in the morning. Just ran down to look at the bright lights.”
“Tim with you?”
“No, he needed sleep. He’s been working the hip’ all day.”
Then she let him have it, and especially all the cute angles on the gag he hadn’t even thought of. She knew it was risky, because if he called off the trip, he might call off the checks too. But she figured he didn’t know what she was up to, and she could probably beat him to it at the studio in the morning before he woke up. “O. K.,” he says after a while. “I’ll run up and have a look at it.”
“I’ll run you up in the morning.”
“The morning? I mean tonight.”
“Oh.”
She thought fast some more, then figured it might even be better that way, because if they could keep Hornison out on the lake they could shoot Hapgood’s girl over, and still put the deal over. “All right,” she says. “Fine.”
“You got your car? I left mine home.”
“Right in the Derby park.”
“Then drive me up.”
They topped a hill, and the San Fernando Valley lay below, under the stars. “Gee, that’s pretty,” he says. “Hold it a minute. Pull over. Let’s look at it. You don’t see something like that often.”