The telephone rang. June leaped up. “Don’t answer, Graham. It’s probably from the asylum. I’ll tell them you’re not here. Hello. Hello. Oh, Mr. MacDunlap… She heaved a sigh of relief, then covered the mouthpiece and whispered horasely, “It might be a trap.”
“Hello, Mr. MacDunlap!…No, he’s not here…Yes, I think I can get in touch with him…At Martin’s tomorrow, noon… I’ll tell him…With who?…With who???” She hung up suddenly.
“Graham, you’re to lunch with MacDunlap tomorrow…
“At his expense! Only at his expense!”
Her great blue eyes got greater and bluer, “And Reginald de Meister is to dine with you…
“What Reginald de Meister?”
“Your Reginald de Meister.”
“ My Reg-”
“Oh, Gramie, don’t… Her eyes misted, “Don’t you see, Gramie, now they’ll put us both in an insane asylum-and Mr. MacDunlap, too. And they’ll probably put us all in the same padded cell. Oh, Gramie, three is such a dreadful crowd.”
And her face crumpled into tears.
Grew S. MacDunlap (that the S. stands for “Some” is a vile untruth spread by his enemies) was alone at the table when Graham Dorn entered. Out of this fact, Graham extracted a few fleeting drops of pleasure.
It was not so much, you understand, the presence of MacDunlap that did it, as the absence of de Meister.
MacDunlap looked at him over his spectacles and swallowed a liver pill, his favorite sweetmeat
“Aha. You’re here. What is this corny joke you’re putting over on me? You had no right to mix me up with a person like de Meister without warning me he was real. I might have taken precautions. I could have hired a bodyguard. I could have bought a revolver.”
“He’s not real. God damn it! Half of him was your idea.
“That,” returned MacDunlap with heat, “is libel. And what do you mean, he’s not real? When he introduced himself, I took three liver pills at once and he didn’t disappear. Do you know what three pills are? Three pills, the kind I’ve got (the doctor should only drop dead), could make an elephant disappear-if he weren’t real. I know.”
Graham said wearily, “Just the same, he exists only in my mind.”
“In your mind, I know he exists. Your mind should be investigated by the Pure Food and Drugs Act.”
The several polite rejoinders that occurred simultaneously to Graham were dismissed almost immediately as containing too great a proportion of pithy Anglo-Saxon expletives. After all-ha, ha-a publisher is a publisher however Anglo-Saxony he may be.
Graham said, “The question arises, then, how we’re to get rid of de Meister.”
“Get rid of de Meister?” MacDunlap jerked the glasses off his nose in his sudden start, and caught them in one hand. His voice thickened with emotion. “Who wants to get rid of him?”
“Do you want him around?”
“God forbid,” MacDunlap said between shudders. “Next to him, my brother-in-law is an angel.”
“He has no business outside my books.”
“For my part, he has no business inside them. Since I started reading your manuscripts, my doctor added kidney pills and cough syrups to my medicines.” He looked at his watch, and took a kidney pill. “My worst enemy should be a book publisher only a year.”
“Then why,” asked Graham patiently, “don’t you want to get rid of de Meister?”
“Because he is publicity.”
Graham stared blankly.
“Look! What other writer has a real detective? All the others are fictional. Everyone knows that. But yours-yours is real. We can let him solve cases and have big newspaper writeups. He’ll make the Police Department look silly. He’ll make-”
“That, “ interrupted Graham, categorically, “is by all odds the most obscene proposal I have ever had my ears manured with.”
“It will make money.”
“Money isn’t everything.”
“Name one thing it isn’t…Shh!” He kicked a near-fracture into Graham’s left ankle and rose to his feet with a convulsive smile, “MI. de Meister!”
“Sorry, old dear,” came a lethargic voice. “Couldn’t quite make it, you know. Loads of engagements. Must have been most borin’ for you.”
Graham Dom’s ears quivered spasmodically. He looked over his shoulder and reeled backward as far as a person could reel while in a sitting position. Reginald de Meister had sprouted a monocle since his last visitation, and his monocular glance was calculated to freeze blood.
De Meister’s greeting was casual. “My dear Watson! So glad to meet you. Overjoyed deucedly.”
“Why don’t you go to hell?” Graham asked curiously.
“My dear fellow. Oh, my dear fellow.”
MacDunlap cackled, “That’s what I like. Jokes! Fun! Makes everything pleasant to start with. Now shall we get down to business?”
“Certainly. The dinner is on the way, I trust? Then I’ll just order a bottle of wine. The usual, Henry.” The waiter ceased hovering, Flew away, and skimmed back with a bottle that opened and gurgled into a glass.
De Meister sipped delicately, “So nice of you, old chap, to make me a habitue of this place in your stories. It holds true even now, and it is most convenient. The waiters all know me. Mr. MacDunlap, I take it you have convinced Mr. Dom of the necessity of continuing the de Meister stories.”
“Yes,” said MacDunlap. “
“No,” said Graham.
“Don’t mind him,” said MacDunlap. “He’s temperamental. You know these authors.”
“Don’t mind him,” said Graham. “He’s microcephalic. You know these publishers.”
“Look, old chappie. I take it MacDunlap hasn’t pointed out to you the unpleasanter side of acting stubborn.”
“For instance what, old stinkie?” asked Graham, courteously.
“Well, have you ever been haunted?”
“Like coming behind me and saying, Boo?”
“My dear fellow, I say. I’m much more subtle than that. I can really haunt one in modem, up-to-date methods. For instance, have you ever had your individuality submerged?”
He snickered.
There was something familiar about that snicker. Graham suddenly remembered. It was on page 103 of Murder Rides the Range:
His lazy eyelids flicked down and up. He laughed lightly and melodiously, and though he said not a word, Hank Marslowe covered. There was hidden menace and hidden power in that light laugh, and somehow the burly rancher did not dare reach for his guns.
To Graham it still sounded like a nasty snicker, but he cowered, and did not dare reach for his guns.
MacDunlap plunged through the hole the momentary silence had created.
“You see, Graham. Why play around with ghosts? Ghosts aren’t reasonable things. They’re not human! If it’s more royalties, you want-”
Graham fired up. “Will you refrain from speaking of money? From now on, I write only great novels of tearing human emotions.”
MacDunlap’s flushed face changed suddenly. “
“No,” he said.
“In fact, to change the subject just a moment-” and Graham’s tone became surpassingly sweet, as the words got all sticky with maple syrup-”I have a manuscript here for you to look at.”
He grasped the perspiring MacDunlap by the lapel firmly. “It is a novel that is the work of five years. A novel that will grip you with its intensity. A novel that will shake you to the core of your being. A novel that will open a new world. A novel that will-”
“No,” said MacDunlap.
“A novel that will blast the falseness of this world. A novel that pierces to the truth. A novel-”
MacDunlap, being able to stretch his hand no higher, took the manuscript.
“No,” he said.
“Why the bloody hell don’t you read it?” inquired Graham.
“Now?”
“Well, start it.”
“Look, supposing I read it tomorrow, or even the next day. I have to take my cough syrup now.”
“You haven’t coughed once since I got here.”
“I’ll let you know immediately-”
“This,” said Graham, “is the first page. Why don’t you begin it? It will grip you instantly.”
MacDunlap read two paragraphs and said, “Is this laid in a coalmining town?”