"Shadow - 360215 - Back Pages - Grace Culver - Hit The Baby" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brown Roswell)

and still handsome in their ruined frame. She flicked an addressed, stamped
envelope between careless fingers.
"I take ze walk to ze vil-lage and post my lettaire. You let me in again, yes,
no? Bien!"
She swept past him, conscious of the boring of bright orbs into her retreating
back. Heart pounding, she passed the caretaker's white cottage and rounded a
bend in the road that led down a short hill and so into rural Maysville.
Then, leaping like a cat, she was across a shallow ditch and screened by
roadside underbrush.
Slowly, moving with infinite care, she wormed back undercover toward the
rear corner of that unimpressive bungalow in the shadow of the studio fence. Its
windows, dead ahead of her, looked blank. But if her hunch wasn't a million
miles off, that dwelling wasn't empty.
Voodoo? Curse-devils, killing for a witch-doctor's vengeance? Not by a long
shot! Not after what Dixie had spilled about Waxy Lubin!
So a one-time star had been content for six years with a gatekeeper's job, had
he?--and no suits for damages against Dictator, either. And at the same time, the
East's ace make-up man had retired, refusing to go to Hollywood?
Hadn't the "voodoo devils" left the Dictator lot unhaunted, as long as nobody
tried to make a picture there? And hadn't Barit Tyson been in possession of the
only set of keys to the buildings inside, until by Eisman's order they were turned
over to unlucky Dinty Boyd?
Grace flashed across the narrow strip of lawn that separated the rear of
Tyson's bungalow from the tangled thicket overgrowing the slope below. Flat
against the white wall, she edged toward the screen door that marked the kitchen
entrance.
Inside, as the knob of the wire panel materialized under her groping fingers,
she heard the guttural mutter of voices. Two men were talking.
They hunched over the kitchen table, like ghouls dabbling in gore as they ran
their fingers through the little pile that glittered between them atop a square black
box. Face pressed to the wire, the girl from Noonan's waited.
Both of the thugs were gang-stamped. One, she recognized as a gun named
"Butch" Pember, with his face on file at police headquarters. The other was a
stranger, with the shrewd look of a fence about him.
That pile on the box -which, Grace saw now, was a collapsed camera-sparkled
like a haul from a jeweler's vault. Stolen jewels! So that was what Tyson had been
hiding away, unmolested, in various safe places around the old studio!
This looked like the end of a good many trails of unsolved Manhattan gem
thefts.
"Gee, but that young punk came near to settin' us in the hogpen yesterday!"
Butch confided. "Seems he got sent down to Stage 1 to rubber over the old
equipment. First thing his eye lands on is this old color camera Tyson had the
Chinese stones put away in,"
"Yeh? That's maybe why I got the hurry-up call to come out here and move
the stuff?"
"Sure! Tyson just spotted this Daley goin' into the stage, Jake. Time he got
there with a knife from the prop room, the kid was streakin' back to Ziegler with
his find as happy as a pup with a bone. Boy, oh, boy, if they'd ever got that box
opened up they'd 'a' seen plenty of color, all right!"
Grimly, the girl from Noonan's remembered young Bill Daley's dead eyes