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

Ahead, leading sharply upward into blacker darkness, a flight of bare,
uncarpeted stairs loomed like the bones of a wrecked accordion. At their foot,
the redhead hesitated only for an instant. Then, breath quickening, she started up.
The stairs--evidently a little-used back flight ended abruptly at an unpainted
door. Grace leaned against it, her ear to the dull wood, listening. No sound came
from whatever lay beyond. Nothing.
Slowly the iron latch lifted under the increasing pressure of her thumb.
Sliding away from her with a soft sigh, the door opened. ;
It formed, she discovered, one end of a fairly long corridor. At the far end, an
uncurtained window let in a faint glow from the street. Doors lined both of the
sidewalls. All of them were closed.
From somewhere, so indistinct that at first she thought it must be coming
from the floor above, a hum of voices reached her unexpectedly. Low, like the
buzzing of bees.
Slowly, hugging the scant shadow, she eased her body into the empty
passageway. At the first door on her right she paused, listening. It took only a
minute to convince her that the room beyond it was deserted.
But the closed panel seemed none the less sinister for that. Its brass numbers
winked at her, dull and evil.
Was it in one of these chambers that Brophy--
Twenty-one!
A picture from twenty minutes before flashed instantly back to her brain.
Sniffle and the man with the killer's eyes, passing in the crowded restaurant.
'Twenty-five, Rocky." And "Rocky" nodding, a queer grin of understanding
flicking his thin mouth.
Heart pounding, feet careful on the muffling strip of turkey-red carpeting,
Grace moved forward. Past the door marked 23. The voices were louder, now.
Grace stopped again at the panel on which the brass number designated
Room 25.
Despite their carefully lowered tones, she could make out the difference
between the two voices which were arguing as she leaned lightly against the
closed door. Deep voices. One of them, she felt sure, belonged to Sniffle
Grogan.
"So Whitey says, according to his dope from inside, the cops don't even have
no good guess who done it. They know Brophy was settin' to break some
blackmail mob. They figger that mob's got anyway a swell reason. But who?
Where? They ain't got a notion!"
"How sure is Whitey?"
"He ain't never been wrong for us yet, has he?"
Grace was shivering as she crouched beside the closed panel. Brophy! That
hunch had been straight! It had been here--here, in this dimly lighted maze of
halls above the crowded restaurant, that--
"You guys and your rods!"
The new voice was a woman's. Shrewish and unpleasant, it whined through
the thin wooden barrier. The girl from Noonan's felt her breath catch in
astonishment.
"There was other ways of fixing him. Why the river? Why New York?
Somebody's going to be just smart enough to trace it back this way. You'll see. I
told you-- "
Three men spoke at once--seemingly the only other occupants of the room.