A Hole in the Make-up

by Robert Welles Ritchie

A Hole in the Make-up

By Robert Welles Ritchie
Author of “The Spirit Jerkers,” “The Cat and the King,” Etc.

The newspaper staff starts hustling when the order goes forth that “unless they pull a regular old-fashioned scream of a story some time while the Big Boss is in town, the blue envelope for theirs”

YES, I’m in town,” came the high, shrill whine over the phone, “and I think you and I will have a little talk in your office some time this afternoon.

“Eh? Oh, you’ll be there”—a wire drawn note of sarcasm split the querulous falsetto. “Yes, I thought you would. Good-by.”

McFadden, the new managing editor of the Trumpet—every managing editor of the Trumpet is a new one; he never has a chance to get stale—snapped the receiver on the hook, and wheeled about to his desk. His cigar was tipped to a truculent, fighting angle. He squeezed a blue pencil between his fingers until it cracked. His thumb searched for a push button on his desk, somewhere under the litter of inky proofs and discarded edition “dummies.” McFadden swung his chair around to the door in the little cubby hole that was his office, savagely expectant.

Holmes, the city editor, slouched in. Holmes always walked with one shoulder braced against an imaginary wall; so long had he “covered” police stations on the South Side, and braced up doorways in the Courts Building as “station man” and “swing man” on the Record-Chronicle, that his habit of easing himself against a perpendicular rest clung with him in his time of precarious Trumpet prosperity. But Holmes’ brain had no such ease-hunting slant. In the profession he was “a live wire”; no man in the whole city was quite as quick in smelling out a real live story and getting it into type.

McFadden began to bark at him before Holmes was inside the door. “It’s true,” he said. “That tip we got from the New York office! The Old Man’s here, and he’s coming over to rake us some time this afternoon—probably just about the time I’m making up the three o’clock.”

“Well, what about it?” Holmes was a man who steadfastly refused to get excited. They said of him that when the Iroquois fire came along he gave out his assignments to his reporters as if he were sending them to cover a church trustees’ row.

“Listen here, son.” The managing editor had dropped his fighting voice, and he was speaking slowly, seriously, like a man who weighs the ultimate chance of success and failure in a big venture. “The Old Man’s here for just one purpose. He wants the yellow stuff—more—more! He wants this new little pet of his to yelp so hard that the old conservative sheets of this town will have to fall in line or be left at the post. He’s always ringing in the comparison with the Inquirer back in New York—and we suffer every time he does it.”

“Uh-huh.” Holmes started to roll a cigarette, his eyes out on the tangle of wires over near-by roofs.

“That’s what he sent me out from New York for,” McFadden continued, “to shoot the yellow into the Trumpet. I haven’t given him enough of it. Remember that great Michigan Avenue mystery we blew up on ten days ago; it was a Swede scrubwoman, and not ‘a beautiful society débutante.’ Another flimmer like that, and the Old Man’ll send you and me to the boneyard.”

Holmes had no opinion to vouchsafe.

“Well, there you are!” McFadden rasped, the familiar slave-driving roar, which is the accepted speech of the Trumpet shop, returning to displace the confidential note in his voice. “I get the wire currycomb from the Old Man some time soon, and you—why, man, if you don’t pull a reg’lar old-fashioned scream of a story some time while the Big Boss is in town, the blue envelope for yours.”

Just forty-five minutes later the supreme power from New York blew into McFadden’s office unannounced. And the session began right there.

“But I’m telling you, Mr. Wrandolph,” McFadden was saying in his silkiest voice, “Chicago isn’t like New York. They simply won’t do the live stuff—the sensational act here.”

“Bosh!” The young Old Man, owner of a string of papers from ocean to ocean, and of ideas which made those papers startling as a string of Italian fireworks on a saint’s day, smiled sardonically.

“They find a woman in the river here,” McFadden wailed, “and in her pocket is the address of a cabman down in the stockyards. Pick a girl out of East River back home, and you’ll locate Willie Van Studibilt’s private check book and the locket of a fair-haired tot in her hand bag. Why, Pittsburgh millionaires never come to Chicago to put chorus girls under a pie crust!”

“I think, Mr. McFadden, that I’ll have to look around and find some one with a little more sense of the dramatic.” Mr. Wrandolph’s smile was almost angelic. “You’re going a little stale out here, where the salt air can’t blow on your brow, Mr. McFadden. Now——”

Holmes coughed at the door. He made as if to retire when he saw who was the managing editor’s visitor.

Mr. Wrandolph himself held up a detaining finger. “Don’t go away, Mr. Holmes; you might come in and hear what Mr. McFadden and I were discussing.”

“Well, there’s a pretty good little story——” Holmes stopped and cleared his throat deferentially. “I wanted to tip McFadden off to it.”

“Story? Story?” Mr. Wrandolph chirked up perceptibly. “Well, let’s have it.”

The city editor managed to flash the highbinders’ sign of caution to McFadden before he spoke.

“Man just came in here with the tip that there’s a woman’s body in Silver Lake—out near Brentwood, you know—swell suburb, where the top-notchers play golf and ride to hounds. Says he saw it when he was coming over on the ferry this morning—swell clothes, he says—body lying on a rock about twenty feet below the surface—water so clear he could even see the face and long hair straggling out behind. He didn’t tip the coroner, but trotted right around here to give us the story. Listens good.”

The newspaper magnate had followed Holmes’ syncopated narrative with in creasing attention. At the end he burst forth with towering enthusiasm.

“There’s a story now! There’s what I call a live one—front page with a layout of about five columns of cuts. Interviews with shocked residents—scandal of some rich young son of Brentwood’s aristocracy hinted at—Trumpet’s exclusive discovery of body and all that. Hey, McFadden?”

He turned on the managing editor with shining eyes. McFadden hurriedly tuned up an emergency show of enthusiasm, and reached for his phone.

“We’ll, send our best man down there to dig out the story,” he exclaimed, “and an artist to make the sketches—photographer, too, if it won’t be too dark.”

“What!” There was a treble screech in Mr. Wrandolph’s falsetto. “A diver—that’s what we want. Aren’t there any divers in Chicago? Diver appearing above the surface of the lake, with the fair young woman in his arms—strong hands reaching down from a boat to take his burden from him—there’s your picture!”

Holmes made a discreet retreat to the city room, Mr. Wrandolph trailing him to hang over his desk while he picked out the master word necromancer on his assignment sheet to do the story.

“We want a man who can see the heart interest in this thing, Mr. Holmes,” came the excited pur over the city editor’s shoulder. “We want a word picture—still waters of the lake there on the edge of the golf grounds—move the lake over to the golf grounds if it don’t happen to be too far away; residents of palatial homes all about out on the lake in their motor boats unsuspecting the tragedy under limpid waves—grim copper head of diver reflecting rays of setting sun as it pushes above the water! You get me?”

Holmes nodded his head and called Meacham to the desk. To the dazed reporter the owner of the Trumpet went all over again the burnished points of the story he wanted, pounding emphasis with his lean forefinger against the edge of the city editor’s desk. McFadden came out from his office to say that he had engaged a diver over the telephone. The diver would be at the Northwestern station with his outfit at five o’clock.

“Five o’clock!” Mr. Wrandolph lifted his voice in outraged protest. “Why, it’s only two o’clock now. Why five?”

“First train to Silver Lake is at five, you see, Mr. Wrandolph,” came McFadden’s soothing interjection. “It’s an hour’s run out to the place.”

“Can’t wait for a regular train then,” snapped the owner of newspaper play things. “Dig up a special—engine and flat car, or engine and baggage car—to get out of Northwestern depot in an our. Don’t you know how to get a story, Mr. McFadden?”

“But, sir, our last edition goes down at six o’clock. We can’t get it in time for that, even with a special train, I’m afraid. And if we have a diver fooling around that lake in broad daylight, and don’t make the story in time for the last edition this afternoon, the morning bunch will get tipped off and land the story themselves.”

“Send that train,” came the order peremptorily. “Diver gets there at four—body recovered in an hour—your reporter telephones the story in if he can’t put it on the telegraph wire quick enough, and you make over the last edition and get an extra on the street just as soon as you can. Now, how’s that?”

Mr. Wrandolph turned a beaming smile on his editors. But they did not see it. Holmes already had the Northwestern on the wire, and was clinching the order for the special train to Silver Lake. McFadden called up the diver and added a bonus of fifty dollars if he would have his air pump and his rubber suit down at the Northwestern yards by three o’clock. A photographer came tumbling down from the art rooms with his camera and his plate case dangling from his shoulder. A rapid-fire sketch artist accompanied him. Meacham, the luckless reporter chosen to go out on this assignment of the Old Man’s, was cramming his pocket with copy paper as he frantically thumbed the pages of a railroad guide.

In five minutes the tornado had passed. The little machines of news were racing for the Northwestern station in a taxicab, the Old Man had departed for his hotel, and McFadden and Holmes were exchanging quizzical glances over the top of the city desk.

“I hope the story stands up for us,” Holmes sighed.

“Glory be if it does,” was McFadden’s heartfelt prayer. “Oh, by the way, whereabouts in that Silver Lake did the tipster say the body was?”

Holmes very carefully licked the edge of a cigarette, patted down the tip, stuck it in his mouth, and lit it.

“Now that I come to think about it, he didn’t say,” was the city editor’s reply, delivered with a cloud of blue smoke.

McFadden sat down hard on the edge of the desk.

“Well, for the love of—say, how big is this Silver Lake?”

“Search me, brother,” the city editor murmured. “But I know if Meacham don’t land that body we’re all out on the street.”

Five o’clock came, then six, then seven. All the staff except two rewrite men had departed; there was an emergency mechanical force downstairs by the idle linotypes and matrix ovens. McFadden and Holmes, not daring to leave, were playing pinochle on the city desk. The telephone bell by Holmes’ elbow tinkled. McFadden grabbed the receiver.

“No, Mr. Wrandolph, we haven’t run off a special because we have nothing to put in it yet. What’s that, Mr. Wrandolph? No, we haven’t heard a peep from Meacham yet. Still searching, I guess. How’s that? Oh, surely, I’ll stay until ten o’clock to rush out the edition if-we get the story. Yes, I’ll call you up at the hotel when we get it.”

The pinochle game was renewed. A half hour later the telephone bell rang again. Again McFadden put his ear to the little rubber cup.

“Huh? Yes—yes, what about it? The diver—what? Well, why can’t he dive? Four feet of—say, wait a minute, Meacham.”

McFadden turned a blank face to Holmes.

“Meacham says that Silver Lake’s a bum pond—four feet in the deepest place. The diver can’t dive because he’s got nothing to dive into. Says there isn’t any golf club anywhere around—lake’s half a mile from the nearest swell residence, and there’s four men from a slaughterhouse standing on the shore guying ’em. That’s the kind of a swell sheet of water Silver Lake is. Wait a bit——”

He swung around to the phone again.

“Hey, Meacham! How big d’you say that lake was? Uh-huh, and you haven’t found any body yet? Well, you listen to me. You get a flash light of that diver! I don’t give a damn if he has to sit down on the bottom of the lake to make his head show over the surface, you get him coming up from the bottom of that lake in your picture. Rush the plates on to the office for a fake story of the search for the body in the morning, even if we don’t have a story about finding it.

“And, listen here, Meacham, you find some kind of a body in that lake or—don’t come back!”

It was ten o’clock when the Old Man called up again.

“Yes, Mr. Wrandolph, Meacham says they’re going over the lake,” was McFadden’s cheering bulletin. “Says a motor boat has her searchlight directed on the scene of the diving—yes, wealthy man volunteered to assist with his motor boat. Yes, he’s sent flash lights of the diver on the way to the office already. We’ll get up a story for the noon edition to-morrow to go around the pictures. Don’t wait for anything more to-night? All right, Mr. Wrandolph.”

Thereupon McFadden set one of the rewrite men to work.

“Dream out a story to carry the pictures,” was his order. “Put a lot of the mystery stuff in it, play up the weird scene of the Trumpet’s diving boat, and all that; but, say—go easy on describing what kind of a lake it is. And, say—don’t make it too positive that there’s any body in the lake. Probably your story won’t get printed at all, but put your soul into it.”

With those cheerful directions McFadden left the office. Holmes also went. There was nobody to give countenance to the hapless young man who was to put his soul into a trick box of modern journalism’s conjuring.

McFadden beat the clock by twenty minutes the next morning; he was in his chair an hour before the first edition was scheduled for the press. He saw the rewrite man’s story set up under a snappy head, which he wrote himself; he followed the cuts of the diver, sitting on the lake’s bottom so that his head might sprout like an onion above the surface, from the art room to the forms, and finally to the stereotypers. Everything was ready to shoot out the big story from the presses, unless the thousand-armed god Chance, who rules the metropolitan afternoon newspaper, should sneeze and “pi” the make-up.

Mr. Wrandolph trotted in just twenty minutes before edition time. He went straight to the city desk, where Holmes and McFadden awaited the shock of his coming.

“Well—body found yet?” he queried briskly.

“Not yet, Mr. Wrandolph,” McFadden answered, “but we’re running a good live story of the search in the first edition, and we can easily claim the story as exclusive even if no body shows up.”

“Heard from your reporter?” The Old Man’s words were hardly spoken when the telephone bell sounded. Holmes had the receiver to his ear in an instant.

“Yes, Meacham——”

Mr. Wrandolph snatched the receiver from his hand and clapped his mouth to the transmitter.

“This is Mr. Wrandolph; you may give what you have to me.”

For half a minute there was not a ripple of emotion on the bland face of the newspaper king. Then a little pucker appeared about the corners of his eyes, and his mouth twitched as if a smile was piling up high pressure behind his lips.

“You’ve been over every foot, you say? Uh-huh, and there’s not a chance of your having overlooked any spot? And what did you say you found? Oh, so that is what it was. Well, you may report at the office now.”

Mr. Wrandolph hung up the receiver.

“Mr. McFadden, I guess you may kill that Silver Lake story from the front page,” he said, in his suavest tone. “If it leaves a big hole in the make-up, why, throw in that knock on the police you were holding over for a later edition; knocks on the police are always good display stories. And, Mr. McFadden, you might slip that diver an extra fifty to keep his mouth shut.”

Mr. Wrandolph went back to his hotel. Two hours later Meacham came in. Holmes had him by the lapels of his coat before he was three feet from the office door, and was dragging him into McFadden’s cubby-hole.

“Now tell us,” said he, when the startled reporter had regained his breath. “It’s some wheeze on the Old Man—we know that.”

“Why, didn’t he tell you?” The reporter’s eyes were gazellelike.

“Of course he didn’t,” McFadden snorted, shaking Meacham until his hat went askew. “What d’you suppose?”

“Well, listen,” Meacham gurgled. “I bribed the diver to get into his rig and squat in four feet of water for his picture. You’ve got that, and a dandy picture it must be. And then he climbed out and helped me and the photographer to drag the lake.”

“Drag it!” This from Holmes. “You were ordered to make the diver dive all over the lake.”

“Listen, please.” Meacham was now fanning for wind. “The lake was four boat’s lengths long and four across, and the water was from two inches to four feet deep. So we dragged it—with a rake. Oh, yes, we dragged it all right. And at four o’clock this morning we found a body.”

The two editors by common impulse brought their faces within six inches of Meacham’s.

“What kind of a body?” whispered McFadden.

“A molly cat’s,” answered the reporter.