The Mystery of the Rogues' Reunion - Marc Brandel [6]
Jupe found himself surrounded by a group of press photographers. For two or three minutes he stood there patiently while their flashes went off in his face. And all the time they kept up that awful chant. “Smile, Baby Fatso.” “Look this way, Baby Fatso.” “One more, Baby Fatso.”
At last they were finished. The tall, smiling figure of Milton Glass pushed his way through them and put his bear-like arm around Jupe’s shoulders.
“Jupiter,” he said cordially. “Jupiter Jones. Come and see the other Wee Rogues.”
At the far end of the building was an enormous, brightly-lit kitchen. Jupe knew it wasn’t really a kitchen, of course. The stove wouldn’t work and the tap in the sink wouldn’t yield any water. Only the long table on which several waiters were busy setting up a buffet lunch was not a part of the whole make-believe world of moviemaking.
Milton Glass led Jupe and the other two Investigators to one end of the table where three young men were standing talking to a very attractive young woman with long dirty hair.
They all stopped talking and looked at Jupe as he approached them. Jupe looked back at them. He wasn’t sure exactly what he had been expecting.
For years he had carried in his mind a clear memory of the other Wee Rogues. But he remembered them as they had been. Bonehead, with his hard-boiled egg of a skull and his stupid grin. Footsie with his scrunched-up face like a little sour apple and his overgrown hands and feet. Bloodhound with his long, lolling tongue and his mournful, down-slanted eyes. Pretty Peggy with her black bangs cut straight across her forehead and her small pointed face.
The four adults he was looking at now were complete strangers to him.
One of them — a good-looking young man in a leather jacket with shoulder-length blond hair that covered his ears — raised his hand in a casual greeting.
“Hi,” he said. “So they roped you in too?”
Jupe nodded, glancing at the cowboy boots the young man was wearing. They looked unusually small for his six-foot height, so he couldn’t be Footsie. He couldn’t be Bloodhound either. The young man next to him still had eyes that slanted slightly downwards from his nose, although there was no sign of his lolling tongue and he no longer looked in the least mournful.
The sharp-looking character with the leather jacket and the hand-tooled boots had to be Bonehead.
Jupe nodded to the other two Rogues, silently identifying them as Footsie and Bloodhound. They had changed as much as Bonehead had.
Footsie’s hands and feet still seemed a little overgrown because he was short and rather thin. But his face had lost the scrunched-up, wrinkled-apple look that had made him stand out as a child actor. His pink cheeks and cheerful eyes reminded Jupe of those friendly guys who worked at the checkout counter at the Rocky Beach supermarket.
Bloodhound reminded Jupe of a young business executive. His brown crew-cut hair, his buttondown shirt, and his well-tailored blazer gave him an efficient, on-the-ball appearance. It was difficult to believe he had ever been the sad-faced kid who had played that dopey Bloodhound.
Jupe turned and looked at the young woman in her smart fawn suit. She still had a heart-shaped face and deep blue eyes with heavy lashes, but he would never have recognized her on the street as Pretty Peggy.
She smiled at him. “I’m glad you could come, Jupe,” she said. “You don’t mind if I call you Jupe, do you?”
“Not a bit.” Jupe felt pleased that she remembered his real name.
“And you call me Peggy. Never mind the Pretty. I’ve been trying to live that down for years. Just Peggy, okay?”
“Okay.” Jupe looked around for Bob and Pete to introduce them to Peggy and the others. They had walked off the kitchen set and were talking to Milton Glass and a thin, white-haired man who was standing beside a TV camera. The white-haired man looked vaguely familiar to