"Shadow - 341201 - Back Pages - Grace Culver - Double Chocolate" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brown Roswell)

From: The Shadow, The Unseen Killer, 12/1/34

Double Chocolate
by Roswell Brown


Gangster guns killed Grace Culver's father, but they could not kill the
detective spirit which was a part of the Culver blood.



"And the double chocolate soda goes where?" the blonde waitress
demanded, shifting her weight from one foot to the other with a swinging
movement of the hips. She balanced a trayful of soda and shortcake expertly, her
china blue eyes staring off into the distance.
Grace Culver had been making a snake out of the paper wrapper from
her soda straw. She looked up quickly, with a gleam in her eyes as they fixed on
the double chocolate. But she answered the question another way.
"Mrs. Moody wanted the shortcake, Stella."
"Oh, yeahЧI remember now." Dishes clanked on the glass top of Ye
Blue Bird Tea Shoppe's front table.
and the swinging hips undulated indifferently in the direction of the kitchen
once more. Maggie Moody regarded her shortcake with a two-hundred- pound
sigh of satisfaction.
"Sure, it's a good thing not to be so weighty you got to be worrying over
what you put in your stomach all the time," she observed. "When Terrance Moody
was aliveЧthree hundred and four," they buried him at, and a better man never
breathedЧ"
Grace, plunging her straws into the creamy liquid before her, listened
vaguely. Her sherry-colored eyes were fixed on the tall, cool glass with a gaze of
real affection. Double chocolate! It was the high spot of her birthday spree.
Slowly, luxuriously, she began to sip. It was nice to have the day off from
her job at Tim Noonan's detective agency. It was nice to be repaying her
landlady's many motherly kindnesses with a holiday treat of lunch and a movie
matinee. But best of allЧthe flavor of chocolate slipped down her throat, cool,
rich, savory.
"Чno patience with these skinny women," the ample widow of Terrance
Moody was continuing. "You, nowЧ you're different. You're the kind that's born
slim, and you eat your head off and still you stay that way. But when vain birds
that won't so much as look sideways at a piece of candy for fear thatЧ"
The rich Irish voice broke off suddenly. Maggie Moody had an idea.
"Say, dearie, speakin' of candy? Why don't I buy us some at the counter
there, for eatin' in the movie? After
all, it's your birthday and I've given you not so much asЧ"
"And after all, this is my party, too," Grace objected. "I'd already planned
to get us aЧ"
But her guest was paying no attention. A box of chocolatesЧblue, with a
silver ribbonЧhad caught her determined eye from the display case along-side
the door. She was making for it like a homing pigeonЧmore accurately, like a
homing hippopotamus.