"Shadow - 350301 - Back Pages - Grace Culver - Red Is For Fox" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brown Roswell)

From: The Shadow, Crooks Go Straight, 3/1/35

RED IS FOR FOX
By Roswell Brown


Red is for fox and for Grace Culver, the red-headed detective hound who
is smart enough to trap him!


The girl with red hair sucked up the last of a double chocolate soda through
soggy straws, and grunted regretfully at the hollow sound of air replacing creamy
liquid at the bottom openings of the two stems.
Above the drug store counter, an electric clock pointed to twenty-seven
minutes after twelve. Her sherry-colored eyes watching the thin, crimson
second-indicator slide quickly around the numbered circle. Miss Culver of the
Noonan Detective Agency wondered what to do with the last half of her lunch
hour,
The only trouble with meals at counters, where foaming double chocolates
were mixed before your eyes, was speed. Too much time left over at the end. If
you didn't happen to be in a neighborhood that lent itself to window-shoppingЧ
Grace Culver grinned quickly and snapped her fingers in triumph. Of course!
The Banner offices were only four blocks further downtown.
In the old days, when she had worked on the paper as a "sob sister," she often
had grabbed food from this very counter between a murder scoop and a Famous-
Actress-To-Divorce-Fifth-Husband interview. And she hadn't seen the old gang in
weeksЧBurton and Clancy and the rest. Time for a check-up.
The familiar store-fronts that lined the way to the newspaper's block-square
building whipped past with remarkable speed as the girl's trim figure swung
forward through the sidewalk crowd.
Her pointed little chin was lifted eagerly and her nostrils were quivering
already in anticipation of the smell of the city desk. Printers' ink! She loved it.
The only thing in the world that could have made her toss up her reporter's job
was the one to which she had gone with "Big Tim" Noonan's outfit. Her father
had died in action on the city force, and it had taken five bullets to drop him. The
tracking of malefactors, the swift action of cornering them and the thrill of
bringing them in for justice, were as much in her blood as is speed in that of a
finely-bred race horse.
Burton, the Banner's city editor, had liked her father. Partly because Sergeant
Culver's official activities were pretty sure to be headline copy; partly because he
was amused by the endless gadgets the police officer's mechanical brain was
forever devising in his spare moments.
Trick keyrings, a knife with six blades, a combination bottle-opener-and-
ice-pick. Burton had plenty of souvenirs of his friendship with the father of his
former star reporter, andЧ A sign loomed up in front of Grace:
DAILY BANNER
She swung out of the sidewalk traffic, stepped under the arch where the two
words were cut deep in an oblong granite block, and plunged into the building's
cool interior,