Jay Carroll - Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 4, August 1957 (British Edition)

The second improvement was an answer to the inevitable question — why had he not gone home? Well, he would say he had phoned his wife — they couldn’t check that — and told her he’d be late, as he was meeting a business acquaintance for a drink. To-morrow, first thing, he’d get hold of Ben Tomlin and reproach him with not having turned up for this appointment. Tomlin was never sober after eight o’clock, and had a memory like a sieve — he wouldn’t even try to deny it.

It was in the fourth bar he visited that he switched bourbon to beer. He stood, with a glass in his hand, listening vaguely to the conversation of two very fat men who stood near by.

“Well, I’ve told her before,” said one of the men, “that I won’t have all that yack-yack and gossip going on every day in my house. Like a flock of hens, some of these women. You’d think they’d no homes of their own. So I told her, well, I said, it’s got to stop, see?”

“Ah,” said the other man weightily. “You can tell them.”

“That’s exactly what I’m getting to. I go in last night, see, after supper, and she’s washing up. ‘Have those cackling women been around again?’ I says. ‘No,’ she says. So I say, ‘How is it you’re washing up four cups and four plates and four of everything?’ And then she says...”

There was a crash, as a beer glass fell to the floor. The two fat men turned. The man who had held the glass was looking at them, with an expression of horror. But he wasn’t seeing them. He was seeing, instead, a little picture, no longer remote but very vivid and real — a picture of a kitchen sink, of washed plates, of unwashed cutlery.

Two of everything! His fingerprints would be on that unwashed cutlery! As he turned and stumbled out, the throbbing in his head came back, harder and angrier than ever. Half an hour later, they removed his body from under a sub way train in Queens’ Village Station.

Lance was no Literary man, but when he met glamorous Eloise, author of best-selling romances, he was a gone gander. Just how far gone, Lance had no idea until later.

People love Eloise Michaud — by the millions they love her. Eloise wrote To Bed, To Bed, which sold more copies than Gone With the Wind — more, even, than Furilla’s Rose , Which Ellie Michaud also wrote. The critics throw up their hands and the sophisticated cry corn, and she sells and sells and sells.

She writes as if she truly believes in the triumph of good over evil. Eloise does believe — even, sweetly and firmly, to enforcing virtue by summary execution. But neither readers nor critics know about that. Her characters for all their Diors and Dusenbergs live in the age of chivalry, when knighthood was in flower, and dispense unalloyed and unabashed romance. Millions love it, and her.

Eloise, in turn, loved a guy. She met him at a literary tea, right after he had called a newspaper man Mister and then punched him on the nose.

“You can’t talk about Miss Michaud that way around me, Mister.” Wham!

She asked somebody who he was, and, for a while, nobody could find out, because he had nothing to do with the book business, he was only one of the loving millions.

When she did hear his name, that was about it, all by itself. The only time she had ever voted in her young life, it was for Vito Marcantonio, and that sight unseen and solely because she had never heard a lovelier name.

The honest-to-Christmas name of this cavalier of the cocktails was Lancelot deMarcopolo, pronounced Mar CO Polo. He was in the automobile business, not the business that buys and sells cars, but the business that buys and sells car dealers.

Eloise got herself introduced by a queenly crook of the fingers. She acknowledged him with a regal inclination of her kitten head and demanded the rosebud from his lapel. She took the flower and, holding it with both hands, placed it in the soft concavity between her chin and her lower lip. Over it, she glowed at him.

During their subsequent meetings, which were soon and often, Lance confessed and anatomized his passion for her. He even gave her its (the passion, of course) biography. It had been born of a book-jacket, the one responsible for the only really nice thing ever said about Eloise Michaud in a metropolitan review: “The photo portrait on the back jacket will move as many books as, say, good writing might. To be honest, however, the picture is worth quite the price of the volume. Miss Michaud is the most scrumptious scrivener ever to set pen to the paper of a book-club contract.”

Lance deMarcopolo bought this picture, book attached, for his night table, and found himself reading the thing. It was the first real book he had read all the way through since Raggedy Andy and it entranced him.

“Who,” he once answered a critical friend, “wants to read about people you know, anyway?”

He found complete harmony between book and portrait. Both were open, honest, innocent, good. He was not disenchanted as he came to know her, either. He found what he looked for. Other men had found the same things, but he was the first to believe his own eyes.

Ultimately he asked her to marry him — just what she wanted him to ask — and he did it just the way she wanted him to, in a penthouse, on his knees, with the lamps low, and sweet music murmuring from somewhere. She said yes, and he took her home at a decent hour and removed his hat before kissing her goodnight. Eloise sighed as the door closed after he left, then went and banged the typewriter all night.

They set a date and made a lot of arrangements, which required pretty close timing what with his out-of-town affairs and her lecture tour and press interviews and all. It was his charming conceit to have her begin married life with nothing she had owned before — everything new, everything custom made.

Eloise was charmed — with all that royalty money in the bank she could afford it. Exceptions to the regime of burnished newness were few — the manuscript and notes for her unfinished book, the ancient typewriter on which she had written everything she ever published, some heirloom jewellery.

Then Binghamton reared its head.

She called him, in desperation, at the last possible moment and explained. This was the one lecture she hadn’t been able to cancel or postpone. The only possible way to handle everything in time for the honeymoon plane reservations was for her to go to Binghamton now — and so, would he pick up just those one or two things at her place and get them checked somewhere safe.

She’d leave the door on the latch and put everything where he could see it when he came in. There was a dear, dear man, what would she ever do without him? Lance soothed her and said of course he would do it, or anything else his little princess commanded; all she had to do was just give him tiny little hints, she needn’t even ask. He said they would meet at the airline terminal in the morning, and added a number of other remarks having much to do with a new life in a new world and little to do with this narrative.

As it turned out, his agreement was impulsive and impractical. It was acutely inconvenient for him to do anything of the kind. He realised this as he set down the phone, and experienced one second of horror at his impracticality. This was followed by a towering disdain for himself — What, call yourself in love? Deny your little princess a little favour just for a little inconvenience?

His pendulum swung violently to the other extreme. He jammed his hat on, snapped one order — “Take care of everything, Joe” — at his thunderstruck assistant, and took, not an hour, but the entire day for his princess’ small favour.