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

But her heart wasn't in the typical exchange of sarcasms with her
good-looking young office mate. She was thinking about Pete Brophy. Tim's
friend. Her dead father's friend.
Andre's was the only hint. It was true that a place like that didn't seem the
right setting for important extortion. But neither was it right for Pete's hangout.
He wouldn't have liked its tawdry noisiness. Home atmosphere was what the
homeless Federal agent had coveted.
So--there must have been some reason for his hanging around the restaurant.
And it might not be so much of an accident that the last time he had been seen
alive he had been nodding farewell to Officer Flannigan from a table in the same
place. "I'm going to find out why," she said again.
And that was the reason a taxi drew up to an Eighth Street intersection at the
hour when the neighborhood restaurants were swinging into their best dinner
business.
A girl stepped out of the cab.
Her curly red hair was almost covered by a hat unmistakably "Bargain
Basement." She was overpainted, but not eye-striking. Overgarnished with cheap
jewelry, but not too conspicuous.
The big pearl swinging on a chain around her neck, and the glittering barpin
on her breast were too obviously false to merit a second glance. The slightly
bulky black coat was so nondescript that it might have been on any of the women
in the hurrying sidewalk crowd.
She paid off her driver in small silver, thrusting the money at him in a hand
covered by a cheap, darned glove. There was nothing about her that the man at
the wheel could have remembered five minutes after his cab had left the curb.
She was a copy of two dozen girls who had passed him before he had cruised a
block.
But there was one small difference: The eyes of the girl he had just deposited.
They were like sparkling sherry, behind the protection of their cheaply obvious
make-up. Keen, bright, eager.
They scanned the long, irregularly lighted block quickly, searching for
something. Then a smile twitched the corners of the painted mouth, The thumb
and third finger of one gloved hand snapped together in triumph as she plunged
into the stream of passers-by.
Ahead, midway of the block, a neon sign was blinking on and off. "Andre's,"
it spelled. Then darkness. Then, "Andre's" again.
The place was crowded, garishly-lighted, noisy with the clatter of plates and
the chatter of voices. Apparently unaware of the hideous color clash of sea-green
tile and what the management seemed to consider modern murals, the patrons
were attacking their passably good food with gusto.
At a corner table, the redhead was busy with a bowl of clam chowder. Her
spoon stirring aimlessly through a floating island of cracker crumbs, she
presented a vacant, slightly stupid stare to the crowded restaurant.
A usual-looking, nondescript mob was passing through the revolving glass
door that bisected the big room's front wall.
Clerks, stenographers, girls from the burlesque house around the corner,
swung under the sign which read "Andre's--6 a. m. to Midnight." Taxi drivers,
nursemaids, neighborhood residents eating out. Nothing very tough. Nothing very
fancy.
It wasn't the sort of place for big-timers. But even the sixty-cent dinner,