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were bouncing before his eyes.
    His telephone rang. ‘Mr. Queen?’ said the Second Secretary. ‘Mr. Butcher has had to go to the projection room to catch the day’s rushes, but he wants you to call your agent and have him phone Mr. Butcher back to talk salary and contract. Is that all right?’
    â€˜Is what all right?’ said Ellery. ‘I mean – certainly.’
    Salary. Contract. Lew. Paula. The old man of the mountains. Napoleon brandy. Gatling-gun Butch. The wild Royles and Stuarts. Crowd phobia. Chocolate Mountains. High pressure. Super-spectacle. Rushes … My God, thought Ellery, is it too late?
    He closed his eyes. It was too late.

CHAPTER 3
    MR. QUEEN SEES STARS
    After two days of trying to pin somebody into a chair within four walls, Ellery felt like a man groping with his bare hands in a goldfish bowl.
    The Boy Wonder was holding all-day conferences behind locked doors making final preparations for his widely publicized production of Growth of the Soil. The earth, it seemed, had swallowed Lew Bascom. And every effort of Ellery’s to meet the male Royles and the female Stuarts was foiled in the one case by a nasal British voice belonging to a majordomo named Louderback and in the other by an almost incomprehensible French accent on the lips of a lady named Clotilde, neither of whom seemed aware that time was marching on and on and on.
    Once, it was close. Ellery was prowling the alleys of the Magna lot with Alan Clark, who was vainly trying to restore his equilibrium, when they turned the corner of ‘A’ Street and 1st and spied a tall girl in black satin slacks and a disreputable man’s slouch hat matching pennies at the boot-black stand near the main gate with Roderick, the coloured man who polished the shoes of the Magna extras.
    â€˜There’s Bonnie now,’ said the agent. ‘The blonde babe. Ain’t she somepin’? Knock you down. Bonnie!’ he shouted. ‘I want you to meet –’
    The star hastily dropped a handful of pennies, rubbed Roderick’s humped back for luck, and vaulted into a scarlet Cord roadster.
    â€˜Wait!’ roared Ellery, beside himself. ‘Damn it all –’
    But the last he saw of Bonnie Stuart that day was a blinding smile over one slim shoulder as she shot the Cord round the corner of 1st and ‘B’ Streets on two wheels.
    â€˜That’s the last straw,’ stormed Ellery, hurling his Panama to the pavement. ‘I’m through!’
    â€˜Ever try to catch a playful fly? That’s Bonnie.’
    â€˜But why wouldn’t she –’
    â€˜Look. Go see Paula Paris,’ said the agent diplomatically. ‘Sam Vix says he made an appointment for you for today. She’ll tell you more about those doodlebugs than they know themselves.’
    â€˜Fifteen hundred a week,’ mumbled Ellery.
    â€˜It’s as far as Butcher would go,’ apologized Clark. ‘I tried to get him to raise the ante –’
    â€˜I’m not complaining about the salary, you fool! Here I’ve accumulated since yesterday almost six hundred dollars on the Magna books, and I haven’t accomplished a blasted thing!’
    â€˜See Paula,’ soothed Clark, patting Ellery’s back. ‘She’s always good for what ails you.’
    So, muttering, Ellery drove up into the Hollywood hills.
    He found the house almost by intuition; something told him it would be a sane, homey sort of place, and it was – white frame in a placid Colonial style surrounded by a picket fence. It stood out among the pseudo-Spanish stucco atrocities like a wimpled nun among painted wenches.
    A girl at the secretary in the parlour smiled: ‘Miss Paris is expecting you, Mr. Queen. Go right in.’ Ellery went pursued by the stares of the crowded room. They were a motley cross-section of Hollywood’s floating population – extras down on their luck, salesmen, domestics,