Cynthia Manson (ed) (23 page)

Well, he didn’t bat an eye, just
nodded his head. “Yep, that’s the way it was,” he said, not even saying he was
sorry. “I figured you knew something when you bought the missing bear. Nobody
throws away eighteen dollars for nothing.” Deborah just stared up at him, not
understanding how a human being could do such a thing to her. She took my hand
for comfort, keeping me between her and Shorty Porter.

“Well, that’s
my
bear,” I
said. “I bought it for Deborah; she had her heart set on it.” He wasn’t a bit
moved. “She loved that bear. Porter. You broke her heart.”

“I’m sorry about that, Miz Sophie,”
he said, “I really didn’t want to hurt anybody. I didn’t know about Debbie when
I stole the bear.”

“Well, the least you could do is
give it back. If you do, I might consider, just
consider,
not setting
the law on you.” I didn’t really want to put a man with eight children in jail
and, up till now, he’d been a pretty good citizen, but I wasn’t about to show
him that. “So you just go get it,
Mr.
Porter. Right now, and hop to it.”

“Okay, Miz Sophie, but it ain’t
here. We’ll have to drive over.” He stuck his head in the shop and told Ed
Mahaffey that he had to go someplace, be back soon, and we got in his pickup
truck.

I wasn’t paying attention to where
we were going and when he stopped, my heart stopped too. Petrina was lying on
the couch in the living room, clutching the moon bear to her skinny little
chest. Irma was just standing there wondering what had brought us. “It’s about
the teddy bear.” Levi Porter apologized. “It belongs to Debbie. I have to take
it back.”

We went over to the couch. “You
see.” he explained to me, “on opening night, Petrina fell in love with the
bear. I wanted to get it for her, but I didn’t have any money left. So I took
it. figuring it wasn’t really stealing; everything there was for Petrina
anyway. If I’d knowed about Debbie. I would’ve worked out something else,
maybe.”

He leaned over the couch and gently,
very gently, took the moon bear out of Petrina’s hands. “I’m sorry, honey,” he
told the thin little girl, “it’s really Debbie’s. I’ll get you a different bear
soon.” The sad little girl let the bear slip slowly out of her hands, not
resisting, but not really letting go either. She said nothing, so used to hurt,
so used to disappointment, so used to having everything slip away from her, but
her soft dark eyes filled with tears as Shorty took the bear. I could have
sworn that the moon bear’s purple glass eyes looked full of pain, too.

Shorty put the bear gently into
Debbie’s arms and she cradled the bear closely to her. She put her face next to
the bear’s and kissed him and whispered something to him that I didn’t catch,
my hearing not being what it used to be. Then she went over to the couch and
put the bear back into Petrina’s hands. “He likes you better,” she said. “He
wants to stay with you. He loves you.”

We stood there for a moment, all of
us, silent. Petrina clutched the bear to her, tightly, lovingly, and almost
smiled. Irma started crying and I might’ve too, a little. Shorty picked Deborah
up and kissed her like she was his own. “You’re blessed.” he said to me. “From
heaven.”

He drove us home, and on the way
back I asked Debbie what she said to the bear. “I was just telling him his
name.” she said innocently, “and he said it was exactly right.”

“What is his name?” I asked.

“Oh, that was
my
name for
him, Grandma. Petrina told him
her
name: he has a different name now,”
and that’s all she would say about it.

I invited Shorty in but he couldn’t
stay: had to get back to the garage. If he took too long—well, there were
plenty of good mechanics out of work. He promised he’d get Deborah another gift
for Christmas, but he couldn’t do it in time for tonight. I told him not to
worry; I’d work out something.

When we got home. I got started
making cookies with chocolate sprinkles, the kind Deborah likes. She helped me.
After a while, when the first batch of cookies was baking, her cheeks powdered
with flour and her pretty face turned away, she said, quietly, “It’s all right
not to get a present for Christmas. As long as you know somebody
wanted
to
give it to you and spent all her money to get it.”

My heart was so full I couldn’t say
anything for a while. Then I lifted her onto my lap and hugged her to my heart.
“Oh, Debbie my love, you’ll understand when you’re older, but you’ve just
gotten the best Christmas present of all: the chance to make a little child
happy.”

I held her away and looked into her
wise, innocent eyes and wondered if, maybe, she already understood that.

That was why the Benson jewel
robbery was solved—because Aram Melekian was too much for Mr. Quilter’s temper.

His almost invisible eyebrows
soared, and the scalp of his close-cropped head twitched angrily. “Damme!” said
Mr. Quilter. and in that mild and archaic oath there was more compressed fury
than in paragraphs of uncensored profanity. “So you, sir, are the untrammeled
creative artist, and I am a drudging, hampering hack!”

Aram Melekian tilted his hat a
trifle more jauntily. “That’s the size of it, brother. And if you hamper this
untrammeled opus any more. Metropolis Pictures is going to be suing its
youngest genius for breach of contract.”

Mr. Quilter rose to his full lean
height. “I’ve seen them come and go,” he announced; “and there hasn’t been a
one of them, sir, who failed to learn something from me. What is so creative
about pouring out the full vigor of your young life? The creative task is mine,
molding that vigor, shaping it to some end.”

“Go play with your blue pencil,”
Melekian suggested. “I’ve got a dream coming on.”

“Because I have never produced anything
myself, you young men jeer at me. You never see that your successful screen
plays are more my effort than your inspiration.” Mr. Quilter’s thin frame was
aquiver.

“Then what do you need us for?”

“What—Damme, sir, what indeed? Ha!”
said Mr. Quilter loudly. “I’ll show you. I’ll pick the first man off the street
that has life and a story in him. What more do you contribute? And through me
he’ll turn out a job that will sell. If I do this, sir, then will you consent
to the revisions I’ve asked of you?”

“Go lay an egg,” said Aram Melekian.
“And I’ve no doubt you will.”

Mr. Quilter stalked out of the
studio with high dreams. He saw the horny-handed son of toil out of whom he had
coaxed a masterpiece signing a contract with F. X. He saw a discomfited
Armenian genius in the background busily devouring his own words. He saw
himself freed of his own sense of frustration, proving at last that his was the
significant part of writing.

He felt a bumping shock and the
squealing of brakes. The next thing he saw was the asphalt paving.

Mr. Quilter rose to his feet
undecided whether to curse the driver for knocking him down or bless him for
stopping so miraculously short of danger. The young man in the brown suit was
so disarmingly concerned that the latter choice was inevitable.

“I’m awfully sorry,” the young man
blurted. “Are you hurt? It’s this bad wing of mine. I guess.” His left arm was
in a sling.

“Nothing at all, sir. My fault. I
was preoccupied...”

They stood awkwardly for a moment,
each striving for a phrase that was not mere politeness. Then they both spoke
at once.

“You came out of that studio,” the
young man said. “Do you” (his tone was awed) “do you
work
there?”

And Mr. Quilter had spotted a sheaf
of eight and a half by eleven paper protruding from the young man’s pocket.
“Are you a writer, sir? Is that a manuscript?”

The young man shuffled and came near
blushing. “Naw. I’m not a writer. I’m a policeman. But I’m going to be a
writer. This is a story I was trying to tell about what happened to me— But are
you a writer? In
there
?”

Mr. Quilter’s eyes were aglow under
their invisible brows. “I, sir,” he announced proudly, “am what makes writers
tick. Are you interested?”

He was also, he might have added,
what makes
detectives
tick. But he did not know that yet.

The Christmas trees were lighting up
in front yards and in windows as Officer Tom Smith turned his rickety Model A
onto the side street where Mr. Quilter lived. Hollywood is full of these quiet
streets, where ordinary people live and move and have their being, and are
happy or unhappy as chance wills, but both in a normal and unspectacular way.
This is really Hollywood— the Hollywood that patronizes the twenty-cent
fourth-run houses and crowds the stores on the Boulevard on Dollar Day.

To Mr. Quilter, saturated at the
studio with the other Hollywood, this was always a relief. Kids were playing
ball in the evening sun, radios were tuning in to Amos and Andy, and from the
small houses came either the smell of cooking or the clatter of dish-washing.

And the Christmas trees, he knew,
had been decorated not for the benefit of the photographers from the fan
magazines, but because the children liked them and they looked warm and
friendly from the street.

“Gosh, Mr. Quilter,” Tom Smith was
saying, “this is sure a swell break for me. You know, I’m a good copper. But to
be honest I don’t know as I’m very bright. And that’s why I want to write,
because maybe that way I can train myself to be and then I won’t be a plain
patrolman all my life. And besides, this writing, it kind of itches-like inside
you.”

“
Cacoëthes scribencli.”
observed Mr. Quilter, not unkindly. “You see, sir, you have hit, in your
fumbling way. on one of the classic expressions for your condition.”

“Now that’s what I mean. You know
what I mean even when I don’t say it. Between us, Mr. Quilter...”

Mr. Quilter, his long thin legs
outdistancing even the policeman’s, led the way into his bungalow and on down
the hall to a room which at first glance contained nothing but thousands of
books. Mr. Quilter waved at them. “Here, sir, is assembled every helpful fact
that mortal need know. But I cannot breathe life into these dry bones. Books
are not written from books. But I can provide bones, and correctly articulated,
for the life which you, sir— But here is a chair. And a reading lamp. Now, sir,
let me hear your story.”

Tom Smith shifted uncomfortably on
the chair. “The trouble is,” he confessed. “it hasn’t got an ending.”

Mr. Quilter beamed. “When I have
heard it, I shall demonstrate to you. sir, the one ending it inevitably must
have.”

“I sure hope you will, because it’s
got to have and I promised her it would have and— You know Beverly Benson?”

“Why. yes. I entered the industry at
the beginning of talkies. She was still somewhat in evidence. But why... ?”

“I was only a kid when she made
Sable
Sin
and
Orchids at Breakfast
and all the rest, and I thought she was
something pretty marvelous. There was a girl in our high school was supposed to
look like her. and I used to think, Gee, if I could ever see the real Beverly
Benson!’ And last night I did.”

“Hm. And this story, sir. is the
result?”

“Yeah. And this too.” He smiled
wryly and indicated his wounded arm. “But I better read you the story.” He
cleared his throat loudly. “
The Red and Green Mystery
,” he declaimed.
“By Arden Van Arden.”

“A pseudonym, sir?”

“Well, I sort of thought... Tom
Smith—that doesn’t sound like a writer.”

“Arden Van Arden. sir, doesn’t sound
like anything. But go on.”

And Officer Tom Smith began his
narrative:

THE RED AND GREEN MYSTERY

by ARDEN VAN ARDEN

It was a screwy party for the police
to bust in on. Not that it was a raid or anything like that. God knows I’ve run
into some bughouse parties that way, but I’m assigned to the jewelry squad now
under Lieutenant Michaels, and when this call came in he took three other guys
and me and we shot out to the big house in Laurel Canyon.

I wasn’t paying much attention to
where we were going and I wouldn’t have known the place anyway, but I knew
her
,
all right. She was standing in the doorway waiting for us. For just a minute it
stumped me who she was, but then I knew. It was the eyes mostly. She’d changed
a lot since
Sable Sin
, but you still couldn’t miss the Beverly Benson
eyes. The rest of her had got older (not older exactly either—you might maybe
say richer) but the eyes were still the same. She had red hair. They didn’t
have technicolor when she was in pictures and I hadn’t even known what color
her hair was. It struck me funny seeing her like that—the way I’d been nuts
about her when I was a kid and not even knowing what color her hair was.

She had on a funny dress—a
little-girl kind of thing with a short skirt with flounces, I guess you call
them. It looked familiar, but I couldn’t make it. Not until I saw the mask that
was lying in the hall, and then I knew. She was dressed like Minnie Mouse. It
turned out later they all were—not like Minnie Mouse, but like all the
characters in the cartoons. It was that kind of a party— a Disney Christmas
party. There were studio drawings all over the walls, and there were little
figures of extinct animals and winged ponies holding the lights on the
Christmas tree.