"Shadow - 350601 - Back Pages - Grace Culver - Kitchen Trap" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brown Roswell)

From: The Shadow, Murder Every Hour, 6/1/35

Kitchen Trap
by Roswell Brown


Grace Culver could handle a gun - but when it came to kitchen tactics, she
was a whiz with frying pan and rolling-pin!
Something was wrong. Very wrong! It was written all over "Big Tim"
Noonan's rugged face, as he walked slowly into the office of his own detective
agency and closed the door behind him. His gray eyes were bleak. The lines
slanting down from the corners of his mouth had deepened to two gashes in his
leathery skin.
At her desk in the corner, his red-headed secretary glanced up quickly. At
another desk, nearer the window, his young assistant pushed back a mess of
finger-print data with a low whistle.
Both of them shot the same question, in almost the same breath, at the tall
man in the doorway. "Tim-what---"
"Say, where's the funeral?"
Without answering, Noonan jerked the battered fedora from his gray head,
jammed it on its customary hook, hung up his overcoat beside it. His movements
were stiff, mechanical. He swung across the office slowly, his big frame moving
more heavily than was its habit. He sank into the swivel chair at his own desk
with a soft grunt. Staring at the stack of mail on his blotter, he replied to their questions.
His voice was gruffly monotonous.
"The funeral," he said, "will be from headquarters, I guess. Pete Brophy. They
fished him out of the East River this morning. Lead poisoning!"
Red-haired Grace Culver gasped audibly as her chief spoke the name. A quick
hiss of breath in sharp contrast to Noonan's dull rumble.
Brophy! She could remember the times the veteran Federal dick had come to
town on official business, back in her own childhood.
Her police sergeant father had been alive, then. He and Big Tim, his
inseparable pal, had welcomed Pete's visits. Pete was a swell guy. Pete was the
real goods. Pete Brophy was dead. Easy to understand the look on Tim's face--the
dull eyes and the deepened lines. It was the end of a twenty-year friendship. Tim
Noonan was the kind who valued his friends.
"Who--do they know--"
Tim's grizzled head shook slowly.
"No clues. Nothing. Harbor patrol boat found him early this morning. Six
slugs in his back. Been dead since midnight or a little after."
Grace watched her fingers tense slowly on the keyboard of her typewriter. Her
eyes were misted. Pete Brophy!
"Tim--there must be something!"
Tim grunted again.
"Sure! Suspicions! He was working on a political-extortion assignment. Big
ring here in town, shaking down men in public life all over the East. Clever and
tough, and they left no traces. It was a job for an old hawk like Brophy."
"There's the motive, then," Grace interjected. "Pete knew too much. When
headquarters puts the bee on whoever was tied up with the racket--"
Tim's mirthless chuckle interrupted her.