The Man with the Lumpy Nose

by Lawrence Lariar

  There was a small flurry of applause from around the table.

  “Bravo!” said Jeff Grundy. “The man talks like our next president!”

  “Down with Tinnover! Up with Dino!” shouted Herb Merritt. “The hell with sissy presidents—we want a man who hates editors!”

  Dino wasn’t smiling when he lit his cigarette. He stared around the table slowly, took a deep drag. “Nuts!” he scowled. “Maybe you were right after all, Hank. These boys are a tribe of pin-brained morons.”

  He shouldered his way through the knot of men and stalked away.

  A page boy jerked his head inside the meeting room. “Homer Bull! Call for Homer Bull!”

  Homer went to the telephone at the main desk. Hank MacAndrews went with him. The call was from McElmore.

  “Hello, Homer. You busy?”

  “I’m sleepy. I was napping.”

  “Listen.” McElmore’s voice was sharp. “One of the boys just brought me something from the office. Got a minute?”

  “One minute.”

  “Stop playing hard to get. Maybe it’s nothing, maybe it’s nothing at all. Sounds like another one of those routine jobs we were talking about, but I got a hunch about this one. It’s a phone call.”

  “What’s her number?”

  “This is serious, maybe, Homer. Fellow phoned in to tell us his life’s been threatened.”

  There was a silence while McElmore waited for Homer to speak. Bull remained silent.

  “You interested, Homer?” McElmore was chagrined.

  “I’m sleepy. Who phoned you—Hitler?” He lodged the phone between his ear and his shoulder and slumped wearily into a chair. “If I could only get you to go to night school and relearn your high school English, McElmore. Start from the beginning, will you?”

  “This is serious, Homer. It all ties up with— Are you listening, you little fat bum?”

  “What was the man’s name?”

  “It’s Chance. A fellow named Earl Chance. Name seems kind of familiar, but I can’t place him.”

  “Can’t place him?” Bull sat up. His eyes searched the lobby. Chance had left the meeting not more than twenty minutes ago. If his life had been threatened, his manner at the speaker’s table belied it. Could this be one of Chance’s tricks for getting publicity? Or perhaps one of the cartoonists at the meeting really was the man who threatened to kill him. These humor boys were full of schizophrenic impulses. They were seething, all of them, with one jealousy or another, one hatred or another. He studied the group now filing out of the meeting room. They were a motley crew, these cartoonists. Was any one of this group a potential murderer? “I can place him for you. Pick me up at the Danton, Dick. Earl Chance walked out of this place just about twenty minutes ago.”

  “Holy mackerel! Where did he go?”

  Homer sighed. “He went out to see a murderer about some cartoons. You ask the damnedest questions. Pry yourself loose from that beer and get up here quickly!”

  Hank MacAndrews said, “What’s with Earl Chance?”

  “I don’t know. Know anybody who might want to kill your handsome editor?”

  Hank whistled. “I know too many people who would do the job. When does he want to be killed?”

  “I’ll ask you again,” said Bull. “But this time, let’s be serious. Which one of the boys would like to kill Chance?”

  “I’ll tell you again—most of the boys hate his guts. Maybe one or two of them hate him enough to take a crack at him. How can you figure the gang you saw inside?”

  “I can’t. They all look alike to me, pale and underfed.” Homer put on his hat, then handed Hank a key. “Go back to my flat. I may have a job for you to do tonight.”

  “Art work?” Hank was tired. He had finished, only this afternoon, seven daily adventures of the famous Dr. Ohm comic strip. He wanted a movie, or the broad sofa in Frieda Dahlstrom’s studio.

  “No work. Read a book or listen to the radio. If I call at all, it’ll be before midnight.”

  CHAPTER 6

  At half past nine Earl Chance crossed Fifth Avenue and walked along Forty-Seventh Street.

  He took huge strides. Earl had been an athlete not so long ago. In college, Earl Chance led every sport he entered. But when he turned his talents to the editing of the school magazine the campus held its breath and waited for his first failure. College football heroes do not always make proficient editors. The campus sages were soon disappointed. Earl Chance liked his work on the paper. He was elevated to the job of editor in chief almost immediately. This was because he had a flair for editorial invention. He was always discovering new methods for improving the meager circulation of the college sheet. When college fiction from Earl Chance’s magazine hit a new high, he was offered a job with The Country in his senior year.

  Chance was the wonder-boy at The Country. Who but Earl Chance could have risen from the cheap seats in the reading room to the inner sanctum of the editorial board in a few short years? He became the youngest editor on any national magazine. Elected to the editorship of the humor department, Earl gathered a crew of young cartoonists to his breast, educated them to know his wants and then gave them featured spots in the magazine. It wasn’t long before cartoons from The Country were outstripping Collier’s and The Saturday Evening Post and even The New Yorker.

  There were those who said that the college boy had made his mark because of his bright and shining talent. These were the ranks of Chance’s admirers, for he had few friends. His enemies, of course, spread fancy tales of another nature. Earl Chance, they claimed, was born to rule. They reminded each other that Chance’s father was a silk tycoon. They comforted each other with the theory that Earl Chance must have bought himself into the upper brackets of The Country. They circulated rumors that the wonder boy probably owned a controlling share of the magazine he was editing.

  But these people were wrong. Earl had risen the Horatio Alger way. He was clever. He was talented. He was a worker. But Earl was no Horatio Alger hero. His co-workers never learned to love him. Earl Chance did his job with a cold and serene detachment that set him apart from the crew of roistering socializers throughout the office. His enemies were legion.

  Earl Chance entered the building that housed the editorial offices of The Country and took the elevator to the twenty-fourth floor. The long hall was dimly lit. There was a small light aglow in the reception room.

  When he walked into the reception room, he saw Marcia Prentiss. Marcia was trying hard to be matter-of-fact about this rendezvous.

  Chance took her hand. “So you came, after all?”

  “You didn’t think I would, did you? Well, I was sorry for what I said in the restaurant.”

  “So the little girl isn’t afraid of the big bad editor?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  He smiled. “Then you are afraid?”

  “Do you want the truth?” Her blue eyes met his.

  “No,” he said. “I’d rather not know. Not when you look at me like that. Do all editors appeal to you the way I do?”

  Marcia bit her lip. “You’re making fun of me. I should have explained about Dino.”

  “Dino? Would that be Dino Bragiotto, the cartoonist? He laughed a low laugh. “You sound like a heroine out of a slick paper story. What on earth ever gave you the idea that editors go around assaulting their contributors?”

  Marcia got up. “Perhaps I’d better go now.”

  He held her hand tightly. “Oh, come now—don’t be a little fool. Will you believe me if I tell you that I’m only interested in your work?”

  She studied him quizzically. “Why should you suddenly be interested in my work? I’ve been submitting sketches to your office for a long time.”

  “Isn’t it possible that your work may have improved? Couldn’t it be that I’ve only recently decided to try you in a regular spot?” />
  Suddenly Marcia’s heart was beating fast. She began to believe him. Then a wave of new doubt assailed her. “What about Sue Bates? You’ve never had two woman cartoonists on The Country before.”

  He frowned. “I have no rule about such things. Sue Bates will still draw for me.” He motioned Marcia to a chair. “Please sit down for a few minutes. I have some work inside that I must clear up. I’ll be out soon with a rough draft of the feature cartoon I want you to work on.”

  Alone in the reception room, Marcia hummed a tune. All this seemed too good to be true. It meant the opening of a new world for her. She would be famous soon. Her drawings would appear alongside the work of such famous cartoonists as Sue Bates and Lincoln Winters and Tom Beck. More than that, Dino and she could be married. Right away. After a while they could even own that little cottage up in Woodstock.

  When Marcia thought of Dino, she stopped whistling. This news—would it really please Dino? Dino might resent her sudden success. After all, he was a seasoned cartoonist when she had left her job at Ashe’s. She was only a kid who gave up drawing pots and pans for a try at magazine cartooning. Perhaps it came too soon, all this success. Dino would be jealous of her success. She remembered what happened to Mina and Joe Burnside. Joe divorced Mina when she outdid him in the world of art.

  All this worried Marcia. She drew a little notebook from her handbag and began to doodle her stock cartoon characters. When Marcia doodled, she forgot everything, she heard nothing; she saw nothing but the small black point of her pencil and the sheet of paper beneath her hand.

  She didn’t hear the elevator humming in the dark reaches of the building. She didn’t hear the traffic noises from the street below. She didn’t hear a church tower bell bong ten times.

  Marcia didn’t hear him approach the reception room, nor did she see him when he clicked the light off in the room.

  In sudden alarm, she rose from her seat and faced the door, and for an awful instant she saw the intruder’s bulky figure at the light switch. He was a big man, tall and ugly-looking. He found her after that. But Marcia fainted before his hand reached her mouth. Marcia was lucky, for if she hadn’t fainted, the man might have killed her.

  As it was, he dropped her on the settee, opened the door into the editorial offices, walked behind Earl Chance’s chair and stabbed him to death with a knife.

  “What did you think of it, Jeff?” asked John Hedge.

  They had left the club meeting and were walking along Broadway, slowly and silently. The traffic roared around them, screaming uptown and down, puffing and grinding in the busy streets. A policeman’s whistle shrilled. A taxi honked impatiently behind a truck.

  “It stank,” said Grundy, “worse than Bowery beer or a sketching trip.”

  “You don’t think he was sincere?”

  Jeff Grundy spat over the curbing and then laughed in his muffled way. “Sincere? I’d believe it from any other mouth in this city but Earl Chance’s. I felt like throwing eggs, it was that bad!”

  John Hedge knew how Grundy felt. There were few men in the cartooning business who liked Earl Chance and these few were the elite in the trade, the small clique of artists who had endeared themselves to the editor of The Country. Sue Bates, for instance, would be a Chance worshiper. But that was only natural—everybody knew (or thought they knew) how Sue had reached print.

  Then, of course, there was Lincoln Winters. Lincoln would be a great admirer of Earl Chance, too. So would Bimmer, and Chancy and Morris and the few others whose art work satisfied the most pernickety editor of the greatest weekly magazine in the world.

  Envy burned in Hedge’s heart, but the flame of disdain burned even brighter. After all, he was a member of another caste in cartooning. He, and many others, earned a livelihood working for all the other magazines, from Collier’s and The New Yorker and The Saturday Evening Post to the dozens of other small journals from Maine to Missoula. He held the actual art work of Chance’s group in low esteem. They were only the ultra-art-slaveys, the paid hirelings of a boss editor, and they must draw each line with a trembling hand lest their master like them not. Not so with John Hedge, Jeff Grundy, Sim Simonson, and Tim Alfonte, and all their brother artists who drew funny pictures. They were the real comic artists of this generation.

  John Hedge put an arm around Grundy’s shoulder and brought him to a halt in the door of a tavern.

  “Here we are at The Quill, Jeff. What do you say to a few mugs of gug? All on me.”

  Grundy’s smile was slow. “A good idea. After a certain amount of beer no speech on earth can bother me.”

  They entered The Quill, a popular rendezvous of artists and writers, and sipped beers, ate pretzels and analyzed the great editor’s personality. The beer warmed them to the task. They probed Earl Chance’s past. Beer and gripes went well together.

  Twenty minutes later Grundy put down his pretzel, suddenly. Dino Bragiotto was entering the place.

  “Let’s lam out of here,” said Grundy. “I don’t feel like listening to Dino’s grumbling.”

  They waved to Dino. He eyed them from under a scowl, muttered something unintelligible and walked to the rear of the place.

  “He wants to be alone,” said Hedge with a Garboesque accent.

  “So do I,” said Grundy. “And I’m leaving. Lincoln Winters and Ned Rush just came in. I can’t stand that over-stuffed ass.”

  They finished their drinks, paid their check, and left The Quill through the side entrance. Lincoln and Rush strode to the bar and each ordered a Whiskey Sour.

  At this moment Dino Bragiotto had just finished his second Old-Fashioned. Dino was very fond of Old-Fashioneds. He knew that after the fourth he would begin to forget all about what Raleigh Peters had told him a few minutes ago. And after the fifth he would forget almost everything and his mind would swim away dizzily into a world of laughter and crazy music and people who looked like caricatures of themselves. After the fifth Old-Fashioned, Dino knew he would be where he wanted to be, on a high mountain looking down at the little people who were squirming their lives away. He would laugh at himself, then, and at Marcia Prentiss and Earl Chance and Picasso and Daumier and the political affairs of the world.

  He clapped his glass down hard and enjoyed the noise. When the waiter arrived Dino ordered his third drink.

  In five minutes he would be drunk. And he would like it.

  CHAPTER 7

  Sue Bates sat in a café across the street from The Country building. She looked out at a little neon sign. The word cigarette in the sign had five t’s, five i’s, and many, many g’s and r’s. Sue laughed aloud at the sign. “Lucky Strike Cigiiiigggaarrrretttttes!” she sang. “A helluva way to advertise the weeds. Waiter! Another one of these drinkees!”

  The waiter brought a drink. He said, “You asked me to watch across the street for a blonde dame, right?”

  She got up so suddenly that the chair tipped over and struck a cuspidor. “You’ve seen her?”

  He nodded dumbly. “I don’t know who you’re talking about, lady. But I saw a blonde walk into that building over there a little while ago.”

  “Kind of short?”

  “Could be. She wasn’t a tall dame.”

  “Good lookin’?”

  The waiter swallowed his laugh. This dame was getting on his nerves. First she asked him to watch for a blonde. Now, after he had spotted the blonde, she wanted details. “I left my glasses home, lady. I couldn’t see from here whether she looked like Joan Blondell or Patsy Kelly.”

  Sue Bates paid her check and ran into the street. But it was too late. The girl had disappeared. For a moment the impulse to pursue this blonde carried her toward the curbing. She checked herself with a sudden shrug, scowled over at the lobby of The Country building and turned away toward the East. Let her go to him, she thought, and bit her lip until it hurt.

  She walked quickly, steadily
toward Second Avenue. At the traffic light she paused, staring for a long time in the direction of Beekman Place, a fuddled bleary mass of nothingness. “I’m drunk,” she told herself. “Got to pull myself together. Go up and see Emma, maybe. Go up and speak to Emma. Take my mind off him.”

  She hailed a cab and was whirled to Beekman Place. The doormen and the elevator boys knew her. They were very helpful. She didn’t know that they were winking at each other. She wobbled ever so gently into the elevator. She wobbled out.

  Mrs. Emma Dunkel, Earl Chance’s brawny housekeeper, stood in the doorway watching Sue approach from the elevator. Emma was on her way out. She quickly removed her hat and stepped back into the house before Sue reached the door. She knew what the wobble meant, waited for the doorbell to ring, then opened the door and embraced the younger woman.

  “Why, Sue darling! We’ve missed you. Where have you been all this time?”

  Sue wriggled out of her grasp. “You’re a liar, Emma. You’re just saying that to be nice to me. I’m drunk!”

  “Pooh!” said Emma, with great spirit and affection. She seized Sue’s arm and hauled her playfully into the huge living room. “You just take a soft seat, young lady, I know what’s wrong with you.”

  She poured a Scotch and soda for her guest and smiled down at her sweetly. “Where have you been keeping yourself, honey?”

  Sue sniffed at the liquor, then suddenly brushed it off the serving table. “I don’t drink Scotch anymore! You old fool! You know damned well I don’t drink Scotch; haven’t touched it since—”

  Emma calmly wiped up the mess. “I forgot, honey. You’re such a stranger around here, how am I supposed to know that you don’t touch Scotch? Here—some Bourbon—is Bourbon all right?”