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

Grace watched her with a little shake of her red curls and then turned
back to her soda glass. Once Maggie Moody took hold of a notion! Oh, wellЧ

The "tea shoppe" was pleasantly restful at two o'clock of a mid-week
afternoon. The girl from Noonan's liked it. Too bad birthdays didn't come
oftener. But, if they did, she probably wouldn't think to take advantage of them.
This holiday had been Big Tim's idea. She had forgotten what the day was
when she reported at the office in the morning.
But not Tim. He had been her dead father's friendЧhad all but brought her
up, in the other man's place, after a gang war bullet had rubbed out Sergeant
Culver.
So, this morning, it had been Tim who had remembered the birthday; Tim
who had pressed a crisp ten-dollar bill into her hand and shoved her toward the
door; Tim who had bellowed to puzzled Jerry Riker, at a desk in the comer, that
they'd have no doddering old ladies about the place this day.
Swell, salt-of-the-earth Tim! Even if detective work weren't the grandest
business on earthЧeven if it weren't in the Culver bloodЧthe fact that Tim was
her boss would have made the job.
Jerry, second in command at the agency, felt that way about the grizzled
ex-inspector, too. A guy like TimЧ "Counterfeit!"
The ugly word cut into Grace's aimless thoughts like a steel knife. Her red
head snapped up. The tableau at the candy counter burst upon her with all the
unreality of a group in a waxworks museum.
Maggie Moody's fleshy face was purple. The clerk behind the counter was
frigid. Between them, on the glass slab, lay a blue-and-silver boxЧand a
five-dollar bill.
"What do you mean, counterfeit?" the big woman gasped. "What doЧ"
"I mean counterfeit. The bill's a phony. It's faked. It's no good!"
"But I got it not an hour back from me best boarder!" Maggie snorted. "I'm
tellin' you that Mr, Figgen wouldn't neverЧ"
Grace rose hastily from their table and, abandoning the soda in its early
stages, hurried to her guest's embattled side.
"What seems to be the trouble, Mother Moody ?"
The older woman turned, bristling.
"Tryin' to tell me that Mr. Figgen would pay his board in no-good money,
that's what he is! When I go to pay the young man for his candy, them's the very
words he ups and sasses me with! You can seeЧ"
Grace picked up the disputed bill and held it to the light. She crinkled it
deftly. Her eyes were unsmiling as she turned back again.
"He's right, Mother Moody."
Maggie's face went blank. A gray tinge stole over it. She ran the tip of her
tongue along an underlip suddenly gone flaccid.
"You meanЧ ButЧbut Mr. FiggenЧtwenty years he's beenЧ"
"Have you any more of the board money he paid, in your purse?"
Figgen's landlady nodded vigorously.
"Every cent for the month of November! And Mrs. Reilly's, and both the
Hoffstadters', and old Mrs. Gilliman's. I was plannin' on (takin' them into the
bank as we passed by."
"May I see?"
There was a fat wad of small bills in the plump hand which snapped shut the