Laughing Gas (21 page)

And I hadn't gone more than a couple of hundred yards, by Jove, when I was arrested by a "Hey!" in my rear, and turned to see a figure in a grey suit and powder-blue socks, the whole terminating in tasteful suede shoes.

For one moment as I beheld him, I had the idea that the voice of conscience must have been whispering in this changeling's ear, causing him to abandon his foul project. Such, however, was not the case. His first words told me that his hat was still in the ring.

'Suddenly remembered,' he said, 'that I don't know April June's address. You can tell me, I guess. Where do I find this beasel, buddy?'

I eyed him with all the cold loathing at my disposal. I was revolted to the core. That he should expect me, who had told him that I loved this girl, to sit in with him on his loathsome programme of giving her a poke in the snoot struck me as being about as near the outer rim as you could get.

'You tell me,' he said, 'and I'll slip you that money you wanted.'

'No,' I said firmly. I did not waver for an instant To my mind, the man who sells the woman he loves for gold is a bit of a tick, and I know other fellows who think the same. 'No, certainly not.'

'Ah, come on.'

'No. My lips are sealed.'

His brow darkened. I had never realized before what an ugly brute I looked when peeved. He so closely resembled a gorilla at this juncture that I should not have been surprised if he had suddenly started beating his chest, as I believe gorillas do when things aren't going too well. The spectacle was an intimidating one, but my chief emotion, oddly enough, was not alarm but a marked increase in the fervour of my love for April June. I felt that a girl who could contemplate matrimony with a chap with a face like that must be a girl in a million.

He clenched a fist and advanced a step.

'You'd best come clean.'

'I will do no such dashed thing.'

'Suppose I poke
you
in the snoot?'

'I defy you.'

'Tough, eh? What could you do if I did?'

'I could call for assistance,' I said quietly. I pointed down the road. 'You will observe that we are not alone. You see that boy standing over there by the lamp-post? One slosh from you, one yell from me, and off, no doubt, like the wind he will be bounding to fetch the police force.'

My words appeared to baffle him less than I had hoped and expected. About now, it seemed to me, he ought to be looking fairly thwarted, but he wasn't. He didn't look thwarted a dashed bit. In fact, I noted that he was smiling

in a nasty way, as I have seen fellows smile at the bridge table when producing the unexpected trump. 'Friend of yours?'

'No. I have, never seen him before. But I have little doubt that he has enough civic spirit to rally round in the event of any sloshing, even though not personally acquainted with the victim.'

'Husky-looking guy.'

I had not examined the boy closely up to this point, but I now did so, and I agreed with him. He appeared to be a lad, for his years, of considerable muscular development. Not that I could see what that had to do with it. I had never suggested that I expected physical aid from him.

'Yes,' I said. 'He seems robust.'

'I'll say he is. Listen, shall I tell you something?'

'Do.'

He smiled unpleasantly.

T will,' he said. 'Before Joey Cooley became the Idol of American Motherhood, a kid named Tommy Murphy had the job. His pictures used to gross big. And then I came along, and he dropped right into the discard. Nobody needed him any more, and he didn't get his contract renewed, and it made him pretty sore. Yessir, good and sore it made him. Ever since then he's been going around saying he wants my blood and claiming he's going to get it. Well, sir, if that boy has tried to catch me once, he's tried a dozen times and, believe me, it's taken some mighty shifty foot work to hold him off.'

A cold hand seemed to clutch my vitals. I began to get the drift.

'That's Tommy Murphy over there by that lamp-post. He puts in most of his time waiting outside the house, hoping for the best. I guess he saw you come out and followed you.'

The cold hand tightened its clutch. It was plain that in assuming the outer envelope of this gifted child I had stepped straight into a bally jungle, full of sinister creatures that might pounce at any moment. I had had no idea, till I became one, that the life of a child star in Hollywood was one of such incessant peril. I was not surprised that my companion had dreamed so wistfully of getting away from it all and going back to Chillicothe, Ohio. Miss Brinkmeyer alone was enough to take the gilt off the gingerbread. Add Tommy Murphy and you had something which might fairly be called a bit above the odds.

'Now, if you'd have been nice and told me where April June lives, I'd have stuck around and seen you home. But now I won't. I'll just walk off and leave you to it. Unless you change your mind and slip me that address.'

Well, it was a pretty frightful posish for a lover to be placed in, you'll admit. I shot a swift glance at this Murphy. It merely served to confirm my former opinion. I had said he looked robust, and he was robust. He was one of those chunky, square sort of striplings. He might have been the son of that chauffeur. And now that I examined him more closely, it was easy to note the hostility in his eye. It
would not be too much to say th
at he was glaring at me like a tiger at the day's steak.

The landscape seemed to flicker, and I flickered a bit myself. What with the peril in which I stood and the peril in which April June stood, I don't mind admitting that I was all of a dither.

But Love triumphed over Self.

'No,' I said. 'Positively no.'

'You mean that?'

'Definitely.'

He shrugged my shoulders.

'Okay. Have it your own way. Well, sir, I wouldn't be in your shoes for something. No, sir
I
Because it isn't only Tommy Murphy. As I was coming along, I saw Orlando Flower lurking around. I guess I'd call him kind of tougher than Tommy, really. Though I don't know. It's a close thing. So I wouldn't be in your shoes for something. Still, have it your own way.'

With another of those bally sneers of his, he pushed off, and I was left alone in the world.

Alone, that is to say, except for the blister Murphy, who now came heading in my direction at the rate of knots. His eyes were gleaming with a nasty light - glittering, in fact - or you might say glinting - and he was licking his lips.

He looked like a boy whose dreams have come true, and who has found the blue bird.

Chapter 20

E
yeing
this Murphy, as he halted before me and stood measuring his distance,
I
found it extraordinarily difficult to believe that he could ever have been the idol of American Motherhood. American Motherhood, I felt, must be an ass. The boy did not appear to me to possess a single lovable quality. He looked like something out of a gangster film. Not at all the sort of chap you would take to your club.

I backed a step. In fact, I backed several steps. And after I had finished backing about the eighth, the ground became more yielding under my feet, and I found that I was standing on grass. There is a regulation in Beverley Hills, you may or may not know, which compels the householder to shove his residence a certain distance away from the road and put a neat lawn in front of it, and at this crisis in my affairs I was dashed glad that this was so. It seemed only too evident that in the near future I was going to be called upon to do a good bit of falling, and anything that might tend to make this falling softer was so much gained.

Up to this point, I should mention, the proceedings had been conducted in silence, broken only by stertorous and menacing breathing on the part of the thug Murphy and a faint chattering of teeth from me. It now occurred to me that a little chit-chat might serve to ease the tension. This frequently happens. Get a conversation going, I mean to say, and before you know where you are you have discovered mutual tastes and are fraternizing.

Barmy Fotheringay-Phipps told me once that he was confronted on a certain occasion by a steely-eyed bloke who wanted two pounds six and eleven for goods supplied, and he managed to get him on to the subject of runners and betting for that afternoon's meeting at Hurst

Park, and ten minutes later he, the bloke, was standing him, Barmy, a pint of mild and bitter at a near-by hostelry, and he, Barmy, was touching him, the bloke, for five bob to be repaid without fail on the following Wednesday.

Well, I wasn't expecting quite such a happy issue as that, of course, for I'm not the silver-tongued orator Barmy is and never have been, but I thought it possible that some good might come of opening a conversation, so I backed another step and managed to dig up a kindly smile.

'Well, my little man,' I said, modelling my style on that of B. K. Burwash. 'What is it, my little man?'

I detected no softening in his demeanour. He continued to breathe heavily. There ensued a bit of conversational vacuum.

'I can't stop long,' I said, breaking a silence which threatened to become embarrassing. 'I have an engagement. Nice, meeting you.'

And, so saying, I endeavoured to edge round him. But he proved to be just as difficult a chap to edge round as Mr. Brinkmeyer. Dissimilar in physique, they both had that quality of seeming to block every avenue. When I edged to the right, he shifted to the left, and when I shifted to the left, he edged to the right, and there we were aziz again.

I tried once more.

'Are you fond of flowers? Would you like a nosegay?'

Apparently no. As I extended the nosegay, he knocked it out of my hand, and the sickening violence with which he did so added to my qualms. I stooped and picked it up, and had another shot.

'Do you want my autograph, my little man?' I said.

The moment the words were out of my mouth I realized that I had said the wrong thing. The last topic, of course, that I should have brought up was that of autographs. Altogether too painful and suggestive. There had been a time, no doubt, when this lad before me had had to write

them for the fans till he got corns on the fingers, and since the advent on the silver screen of little Joey Cooley, the demand had been nil. In mentioning autographs, therefore, I was simply awakening sad memories of vanished glory - in a word, dropping salt into the exposed wound.

If I had not spotted this for myself, his reaction would have told me I had made a floater.

'Autograph
I
' he said, in an unpleasant, low, growling voice that seemed to proceed from the left corner of his mouth. His eyes glinted tigerishly, and once more I sought in vain for an explanation of how he had ever come to be regarded with esteem by the mothers of America.

He began to speak. He spoke well and fluently - as it turned out, much too fluently, for it was the fact that he postponed direct action in favour of this harangue that dished his plans and aims.

You've probably noticed how often the same thing happens in detective stories. There's always a bit, I mean to say, where the villain has got the hero tied up in a chair or lashed to a bed and is about to slip it across him with the blunt instrument. But instead of smacking into it, the poor ass will persist in talking. You feel like saying: 'Act, man, actl Don't waste valuable time taunting the chap', because you know that, if he does, somebody is sure to come along and break up the twosome. But he always does it, and it always lays him a stymie.

It was so on the present occasion. A cooler head than Tommy Murphy's would have seen that the right thing to do was to get down to fundamentals straight away. But no, he chose to stand there with his chin out, telling me what he proposed to accomplish when once he was ready to begin.

He said, still in that hoarse, unpleasant voice that seemed to suggest that he had ingrowing tonsils: 'Autograph, huh?' He said:

'Autograph, huh?' He said:

'Don't you worry about autographs.' He said:

'That'll be all about autographs from you. Do you know what I'm going to do to you? I'm going to soak you good, in case anyone should ask you. Do you know what I'm going to do to you? I'm going to knock the stuffing clean out of you. I'm going to lay you out like a pickerel on ice. I'm going to fix you so's there ain't nobody's going to sit and say "Oh, isn't he cute?" because you won't have any face left to be cute with. Do you know what I'm going to do to you? I'm going —'

Here he broke off - not because he had finished, for he had evidently plenty more to say, but because the ground on which we were standing suddenly sort of exploded.

Concealed here and there about these Beverley Hills lawns, you see, are little metal thingummies with holes in them, by means of which they are watered. One twiddle of a tap and the whole thing becomes a fountain. And this was what had happened now. Unseen by us, some hidden Japanese hand had turned on the juice, and there we were, right in the thick of it.

Well, it wasn't so bad for me. Owing to my policy of steadily backing, I had reached a spot which, for the nonce, was comparatively dry. But the excrescence Murphy chanced to be standing immediately over one of the thingummies, with the result that he copped it right in the eyeball. Ironically enough, after what he had been saying, it soaked him good.