Cold Poison by Stuart Palmer Read Free Book Online

“by an amateur who was trying to draw like a professional who was trying to draw like an amateur, which gets us exactly nowhere.”
    “Except that we know by the stationery and everything that it must have been done by somebody right here in the studio,” said Mr. Cushak sadly. “One of our own people has gone bad—”
    “Like the rotten apple that must be nipped in the bud,” put in Miss Withers a bit wickedly. Again she stared at the three marked victims; if the books were right, one of them was the murderer of Larry Reed. None of them looked at all like a murderer; of course, she knew to her sorrow that murderers rarely did. Lombroso and his criminal types had long been discredited; the murderer often looked like and was the nice person next door who borrowed your lawn mower and lent you an egg or a cup of sugar when you were short. For once the schoolteacher had no intuition, no hunch, no touch of extrasensory perception to guide her. Yet she was much inclined to the belief that two of these people in the office were honestly scared for their very lives and that one was a very fine actor and a deep-dyed villain.
    “I suggest,” she said quietly, “that for the next few days each one of you takes exceptional precautions; we are in the midst of something ugly and dangerous. And if any one of you should happen to remember anything about anyone named Lucy—” She nodded good-by at them and made her way out and back to her own office, where she found Tip Brown pinning up new drawings on the story board facing her desk. Talley erupted from his favorite spot in the corner and greeted her as if she had been away for a year; almost equally enthusiastic was Tip, whose face was boyishly alight.
    “Hi!” he said. “I think I got it. This story was originally developed too straight-line. It’s gotta have a zany, Milt Gross touch—and your Talley dog suggests it. He had lunch with me, by the way. I hope it was all right.”
    “I hope so, too,” she said. “One raw hamburger?”
    “Two,” he admitted. “And the beastie sat up and begged for more, so I bought him an ice-cream cone for dessert.”
    “Talleyrand has gone Hollywood,” said the schoolteacher, shaking her head. “He’ll have to reduce—”
    “Anyway, he’s type-casting for this part—if ever. You see, we’ve got to wring out all the boffs and yaks we can from the situations where the circus poodle tries to ham it up and get into every act in the show and outclown the clowns and out-fly the acrobats. I’ve got a swell idea for a sequence where he tries to take over and peddle toy gas balloons to the audience, only he gets hold of too many and they lift him right up to the top of the big top—”
    “Splendid,” said Miss Withers absently. “But—”
    “And for a climax,” continued Tip Brown, “we pull a switcheroo. The rich old lady in sequence one, she doesn’t die after all, she gets better. There’s publicity in the circus ads about the poodle and back in the big house on Fifth Avenue the parrot recognizes him—he’s the type of parrot who always reads the morning paper, natch—and he flies out the window and comes over to the circus hell-bent to bring the good news and say hello to an old friend and tell the poodle that he can come home again, the relatives have been thrown out on their respective behinds. Only the pup doesn’t go for it. Suddenly he realizes that he likes the circus better than the plush spot in the big house, and he doesn’t want to go back. He’s now a featured performer and the ringmaster has to treat him with respect. He’ll stay there—and, he mentions, there happens to be an opening for a barker in the side show—”
    “I was thinking,” began Miss Withers hopefully, “about—”
    “So we dissolve to the parrot outside the side show, yelling ‘Hurry, hurry, hurry—get your tickets for the prime attraction of the midway …” or whatever it is. The parrot got into the act too, see? Happy