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 bootblack stand near the main gate with Roderick, the colored 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 around 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 parlor 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 parlor 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, flowerbeds, 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 ear 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 cigaret 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 some one to open doors for or help in and out of taxis. But at this historic moment misogyny, that crusted armor, inexplicably cracked and fell away from him, leaving him defenseless 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 gray 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 the 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? Cigarets 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! Cigaret?” 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 any one 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.