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

"Boyd was shot, then?"
Eisman nodded until his fat jowls shook. Then the movement checked. He
had thought of something else.
"But not by a bullet, no! It was a blow-gun arrow, poisoned like-like
sometimes they use in voodoo tribes! Mr. Noonan, I ain't a superstitious
man-but--"
"Never mind the zombie stuff. Miss Culver here told me that witch-curse yarn
the papers dug up. Blow-guns take a pair of real lungs, like an automatic takes a
real trigger finger. Let's see the sound stage."
Eisman led the way out of the bungalow. But as his squatty bulk plodded
forward, miserable words piped over a thickset shoulder to his followers' ears.
"Only that Dore wouldn't budge a step from Broadway, never had I come back
to this place! A square mile of safe million-dollar stages in Hollywood, and why
should I? But no! I had to have Lulu Dore in my picture! I had to mess into them
same jinx breaks like seven years ago! Ten times the salary I was paying that
black devil, and it would have been cheap!"
Stage 5, the faded paint above its dingy entrance indicated. But it was the
only one in the long row that had even been unpadlocked. It was Stage 1, as far as
the "Love Locked Out" company was concerned.
The atmosphere of desertion hung heavily over Dictator's Maysville lot.
Overgrown weeds had replaced its one-time grass. Windows of locked buildings
were screened with dusty cobwebs. Late afternoon sunlight and the little knot of
shirt-sleeved workers and uniformed police guards on Stage 5 did little to liven
up the barnlike enclosure.
"Where'd you find Boyd?" Big Tim queried.
Eisman led him around a section of erected canvas scenery that seemed to
represent one end of a banquet hall. Dead ahead, the blank brick wall of the
enclosed stage was pocked with doors that stood like a row of shadows on guard.
"RightЧhere!"
The movie mogul stopped on a spot not a dozen feet from one closed door.
Instinctively, the trio from the agency glanced down. There was a blue chalk
mark on the hard, bare floor to show where the murdered "gaffer" had fallen. Big
Tim turned. Behind the painted canvas set, and a good two yards nearer the
rafters, a skeleton iron runway like a fire escape flanked the heavy pipes from
which large, unlighted multiple-arc lamps, of the type known as "ash cans" were
swung.
"That's where the blow-gun artist stood? Up there on the catwalk?"
"Must have, the angle the arrow hit," Eisman nodded, his froggy eyes
blinking.
"Tim."
The interruption came from the redhead at the grizzled agency chief's elbow.
"Tim, Boyd was shot in the back, according to Mr. Eisman. Doesn't that add
up?"
Noonan frowned.
"Huh? Sure it adds. The guy on the catwalk was no spook and couldn't risk
being seen. So he waited till Boyd was headed away from him before-- Hey! Now
I get you!"
He lunged forward eagerly, gray eyes ablaze. Four scant yards lay between
that blue-chalked X and a door in the thick brick wall. And on the steel panel, in
painted letters that had been white six years ago, were the words: ELECTRICAL