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

So that was Andre!
In keeping with the front of the place, the lounge room was cheaply
pretentious. Gilt mirrors adorned the little cubbyholes of dressing rooms which
lined one wall. Gaudy paintings hung everywhere. Red plush and wrought iron
were featured in the furniture.
Beneath a hideous reproduction of Venus Rising From The Waves, a
telephone was fastened to a jointed wall bracket. At the moment, the main room
and the four small dressing rooms were empty.
The instrument's dial whirred beneath a gloved finger. In the silence, a
far-away buzzing filled the girl's cars. Then a clock.
"Hello."
"Listen, Tim," she spoke softly, her lips close against the mouthpiece--"It's
Grace. Can you hear me?"
"Shoot!" the terse voice at the other end commanded.
"I'm in Andre's. I think I have something. It isn't definite, but--you. know--the
hunch is going strong."
Tim said, "Want us?"
Not yet. Better off alone. But if I'm not back at the office by eleven-thirty,
you and Jerry--"
The door behind her opened quickly and a puffing little woman in rusty black
scuttled through it. She paused before one mirror, adjusting her unfashionable
hat. Her beady eyes regarded the girl at the telephone curiously.
Grace Culver laughed boisterously, as if she were delivering the catch line of
a joke to a friend at the other end of the line.
"So I says to him, eat your mashed potatoes good and hot! I says, make it
good and emphatic! Order 'em as hot as they do 'em in Kokomo!"
Tim's puzzled grunt reached her
"Say--what's the--"
"As hot as they do 'em in Kokomo," she repeated firmly. Then, laughing again
as the curious little woman turned to stare at her, she hung up.
It took the dumpy, deliberate creature before the glass an agonizing time to
set her hat on her limp gray hair at an angle that suited her fancy.
Grace pretended to be busy at the washbowl, washing her hands, drying them,
washing again.
At last, with a satisfied snort, her companion passed through the swinging
doors once more. And they scarcely had closed behind her when the girl from
Noonan's was in one of the cramped little cubicles that passed for dressing rooms.
The black coat jerked quickly from her wiry shoulders, and with one
movement of her deft hands she had pulled the lining out of it. It came easily,
without a rip, that lining--because the side of it which had been flat against the
coat was a pink-and-orange uniform.
Three minutes later a perfectly turned-out waitress, complete to frizzes of red
hair beneath her neat cap and badly applied dots of rouge, was standing in the
cubicle.
She bore little resemblance to the girl in black who had crumpled crackers
into a bowl of Andre's chowder. Only the red hair, the false pearl pendant and the
bar-pin of cheap brilliants were the same.
The swinging doors opened again, creaked, closed. The ladies' room was
empty. One more waitress, banging an empty tray against her knee as she walked,
was headed for the kitchens.