Hello, everybody

MARGARET CASE MORGAN

Three men sat around a table in Eddie Randall's room at the Ritz. Most of the surface of the table was occupied by the elbows and emphatic hands of Milton Burke, the moving-picture director, and Eddie Randall himself—a successful writer of that kind of dialogue esteemed, by the world of the cinema, sophisticated. Between them, a rather small, pale young man sat very still, except for an occasional affirmative nod of his head.

"Look here, Roy," Milton Burke was saying, "about this song you've written for Lorraine in the new picture. It's got a line in it—what's that line, Eddie?—oh, yeah, it says 'My life's so unpretentious, I'd like to be licentious.' Well, in the first place Lorraine can't read words like that, and even if we told her what they were, she couldn't pronounce 'em. So you'll have to change it, see?"

The pale young man nodded again. "All right," he said, simply. "How about this? 'My life is such a bore, 1 d like to be a —

"Well," Milton interrupted him, judicially, "I guess we could hardly get away with that. But you see what I mean, Roy, about making the lyric kind of easier? Why, I shouldn't even have to be telling you these things—you ought to know more about the picture business than I do. Here you are, just back from Hollywood, and I've been stuck in this dam' town for six weeks, and likely to be here for three more." He raised his empty glass in a gesture of melancholy toward the window which framed, in black and gold, the angles of a New York sky-line. "What time is it, Eddie?"

Eddie looked at his watch, and poured three more drinks from the bottle of Scotch on the table. "Eleven-forty-five," he said. "\\ hat time did Vanda say she'd call you? '

"Midnight, our time. I told them at my hotel to switch the call over here—you don't mind, Eddie?"

"Not as long as she doesn't reverse the charges," Eddie replied with candor.

Milton waved away his drink. "I don't think I ll have any more until after I ve talked to her. If I talk thick, she'll think I'm out on a bender." He grinned, comfortably. "1 bat's the worst of having a loving wife in California.

"Yes," said Eddie, "it's certainly great to see two people like you and Vanda—especially in the picture business. Here you are, a director and a movie actress, married four years and still crazy about each other. '

"Mrs. Burke," said the little song-writer, sipping his Scotch, "must be a very wonderful woman."

Milton Burke looked at him sharply, but leapt to his feet the next instant as the telephone rang.

"Hollywood calling," the operator told him in that tone of almost complete indifference reserved by telephone operators for long-distance calls of any importance.

Milton signalled to Eddie for his drink and a cigarette, and stretched himself comfortably on the bed, the telephone at his ear.

"Hello. ... Is that you, Vanda, honey?"

Her voice came to him, warm and sweet through the great distance that separated them. "Hello, darling—how are you?"

"I'm fine. How are you? How's the picture?"

"Oh, we'll finish it in a couple of weeks,

I guess. How's your picture?"

"Lousy, thanks. We've got a million re-takes on the exteriors. I guess I ll be here about three weeks longer, honey."

lie waved a violently reproachful hand at Eddie and Roy who, across the room, were engaged in the prolonged laughter which follows the pleasurable undertone of story-telling.

"Milton—" Vanda began, and hesitated. Familiar with the inflections of her voice, he knew now that she was looking thoughtful, her eyes wide and plaintive. "Milton, are you being a good boy, like you promised me? '

He was emphatic. "I certainly am, darling.

I haven't done a thing but work since I hit New York."

"Oh. Well, the operator at your hotel said you'd left word to switch the call somewhere else. Where are you now, Milton?"

"Why, in Eddie Randall's room at the Ritz. We're just having a little conference about the picture. Why all the suspicions, sweetheart?"

"Oh, nothing." A brief pause suggested a sigh fainter than a whisper. "1 just thought 1 heard women laughing."

Milton was amused. "You're crazy, darling! There aren't any women here."

There was another pause; then Vanda's voice became elaborately patient. "All right, dear. But don't tell me I'm crazy, please. I certainly know a woman's laugh when 1 hear it. And I can still hear it, right this minute."

"For Godsake, Vanda," cried her husband. "There aren't any women herel Suppose I called you up. and spent the entire time accusing you of being on a wild party? I don t know where you're telephoning from, but / don t take it for granted right away that it's some place where you shouldn't be." He was silent, while a new idea was born in him. "As long as we're on the subject," he added, "where are you, anyway?"

"Oh, Milton," Vanda's celebrated voice was threatened with tears, "where do you suppose? I'm right at home, of course, all alone and . . . very lonely, darling."

"Oh, yeah?" Milton had now succumbed to his resentment—the resentment of a man who, since he has been accused of doing the things he should not do, feels that he might as well have had the pleasure of doing them. "Well," he said, "I have to hang up now. But I'll call you back—at home—in five minutes."

... The effect of this simple statement upon Mrs. Milton Burke in California was electric. Almost her first gesture was to remove herself from the knees of the gentleman whom she had lately festooned (during the telephone conversation with her husband) and her second was to finish a glass of the brown and bitter liquid accepted in Hollywood as champagne. Then she began, a little unsteadily, to put on her evening wrap.

"My God," she kept repeating, over and over, he's going to call me at home in five minutes. I've got to get home in five minutes. Desperately, she clasped a hand to her brow. "Where's my bag? Where the lu ll is my bag?"

Her companion, a motion picture actor of personal beauty above the average and a mental equipment so frail as to be almost impressive, now adopted the pose of thought, lie had been looking forward to long, delightful hours of the skilful conquest in which he excelled, and with a view to which, exclusively, his house in the hills above Hollywood had been designed. Now that the mood of the evening had been marred, he was bored.

"It's about seven miles to your house." he said, at last. "I don't think you'll be able to make it in five minutes."

She took a few futile stops toward the door. "I might telephone the servants to say I'd just gone out—but that looks phoney. And if I have the call switched here, all Hollywood will know where I've been." She turned on him suddenly. "Listen, you sap. You've never done anything but look pretty all your life . . . now you get me home in five minutes, you understand? I don't care if it's fifty miles."

She pulled him out of the door, and into bis car. Her voice was brittle with panic. "Now," she said, "step on it, hoy. '

■ ... In New York. Milton Burke drank three whiskies rapidly, and started to put in his call to Hollywood. Eddie Randall came over and took the receiver out of his hand.

"I guess you've forgotten, old man, he said, quietly. "No more long-distance calls from this room."

Milton stared at him. "What do you mean, no more long-distance calls from this room?'

"Just what I said, that's all. You're always coming in here and calling up Russia or some place, and then you go back to your hotel, or to California or the West Indies, and I get stuck with the bill." He walked over to the table and poured himself another drink. "I don't say, mind you," he added, waving the glass around, "that you do it on purpose, 't oil just have a habit of forgetting those things, that's all."

Milton Burke rose slowly to his feet, his voice thickening with anger. "Are you insinuating—"

"Fm not insinuating anything at all. I m simply saying, very directly, that I won t pay the bills you forget to pay, any longer. And what's more, now that I come to think of it, I'd like to have that seven hundred and fifty dollars I loaned you last year." The words came candidly from Eddie's lips, only slightly blurred by the whisky he had drunk.

Milton came and stood close to Eddie. He was a little the shorter of the two, and he had to look up at him. "Is that so? Well, who got you into the picture business? Who got you your first job? It was me, wasn't it? And didn't I go to them, last year, when they didn't want to renew your contract and practically beg them with tears in my eyes to do it, because you were a friend of mine? Why," he said, scornfully, "you don't think you're holding your job because you can write, do you? You're holding it because I told 'em what to do, and they had to do it."

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Eddie was languid. "Yeah? Well, maybe I can do the same for you this year."

Roy went over and sat quietly at the piano, out of the way. Afterward, he could never remember whether it was Milton who hit Eddie first, or the other way around. He was never certain which man it was who tripped on the rug, fell, and hit his head against the radiator. He recalled, when he thought about it later, only his own astonishment when he looked down and saw both men unconscious on the floor. It occurred to him that they looked more peaceful than he had ever seen either of them look before.

He wondered whether he ought to throw water on them; and, mechanically, had started toward the bathroom when the telephone rang.

"Hollywood calling," the operator told him. Her voice was presently succeeded by Vanda's.

"Hello," she said, "is that you, Eddie? Is my husband there? He said he was going to call me. . .

Roy lit a cigarette. "No," he told her. He looked at the two men on the floor. "Milton and Eddie had to go put for a minute, Vanda. This is Roy."

"Oh." She hesitated. "Oh, hello, Roy."

There was a pause while Roy crushed his cigarette slowly into an ash-tray. Then he said. "Listen, baby, I've got something to say to you. I'm coming out to the Coast again next week, so you behave yourself tillI get there, see? No two-timing. . . . Yes, of course I love you, darling." He paused, and into his voice came that note of doubt natural to a man who is suspicious of the woman whom he knows well enough to suspect.

"Say," lie added, "were you, on the level, home tonight when you telephoned the old man?" . . .