“I understand that,” said Ellery with gravity, “but your attitude seems so different these days, Mac. What’s happened to the Atomic Age Tree Boy? Have you decided, now that you’ve found a mate, that you’re not worth preserving for the Post-Atomic Era? That’s hardly complimentary to Laurel.”
Mac mumbled, “You let me alone... Laurel, no!”
“Laurel yes,” said Laurel. “After all, Mac, you owe it to Ellery. Ellery, about that Tree Boy foolishness...”
“Yes,” said Ellery hopefully. “I’ve been rather looking forward to a solution of that mystery.”
“I finally worried it out of him,” said Laurel. “Mac, you’re fidgeting. Mac was trying to break into the movies. He’d heard that a certain producer was planning a series of Jungle Man pictures to compete with the Tarzan series, and he got the brilliant idea of becoming a jungle man in real life, right here in Hollywood. The Atomic Age silliness was bait for the papers. It worked, too. He got so much publicity that the producer approached him, and he was actually negotiating a secret contract when Daddy Hill died and I began to yell murder. The murder talk, and the newspaper stories involving Mac’s stepfather ― which I suppose Roger planted himself, or had Alfred plant for him ― scared the producer and he called off the negotiations. Crowe was awfully sore at me, weren’t you, darling?”
“Not as sore as I am right now. For Pete’s sake, Laur, do you have to expose my moral underwear to the whole world?”
“I’m only a very small part of it, Mac,” grinned Ellery. “So that’s why you tried to hire me to solve the case. You thought if I could clear it up pronto, you could still have the deal with the movie producer.”
“I did, too,” said young Macgowan forlornly. “He came back at me only last week, asking questions about my draft status. I offered him the services of my grandfather, who’d have loved to be a jungle man, but the ungrateful guy told me to go to hell. And here I am, en route. Confidentially, Queen, does Korea smell as bad as they say it does?”
Laurel and Crowe were married by a Superior Court judge in Santa Monica, with Ellery and Lieutenant Keats as witnesses, and the wedding supper was ingested and imbibed at a drive-in near Oxnard, the newly weds thereafter scooting off in Laurel’s Austin in the general direction of San Luis Obispo, Paso Robles, Santa Cruz, and San Francisco. Driving back south on the Coast Highway, Ellery and Keats speculated as to their destination.
“I’d say Monterey,” said Keats emotionally. “That’s where I spent my honeymoon.”