Cold Poison by Stuart Palmer Read Free Book Online Page B

tricks.”
    “Wait a minute!” Tip’s face was strange. “I—I begin to get it. You’ve been talking about Larry in the past tense for the last half-hour. He’s dead , isn’t he?”
    “You don’t seem especially surprised at that, young man.”
    But he wasn’t listening. “Something’s happened to Larry, and you know all about it—that’s why you’ve been asking all these questions!”
    “Yes. He was murdered by somebody in this studio. Statistics show that murder happens every twenty minutes in these United States. I ask you now, have you any idea who it could be?”
    Tip Brown seemed perceptibly to withdraw within himself, like an alarmed turtle. He was suddenly all carapace, unreachable. “No,” he said hollowly. “No, no ideas at all.” Quickly he pinned up the rest of his sketches and then said that he guessed he would call it a day. He went out of the office with a vague farewell gesture which indicated to the schoolteacher that he would see her around sometime but preferably not soon.
    That young man, she thought, knows more than he is telling—and he has told more than he meant to tell.
    Miss Withers sat alone—except for the somnolent Talley in his corner—for a long, long time in the little office which had so much to tell her if walls could only speak, which they never seemed to do. Finally she switched on the light under the glass of the drawing board, inserted a gelatin of the bird and a sheet of paper over it, and started experimenting. After a few minutes she decided that with these aids even she could produce a fairly recognizable sketch of Peter Penguin; certainly very nearly as good as the one on the poison-pen valentine. She fell into a light brown study, from which she was aroused by Talley’s enthusiastic welcome of a visitor. The girl she knew as Janet Poole was standing in the doorway, looking uncertain and lost.
    “May I see you for a moment?” Jan asked. “I—I just thought of something.”
    Janet came in and sat down, crossing a rather remarkable pair of legs. But she found it hard to talk.
    “Well?” said the schoolteacher.
    “A while ago in Mr. Cushak’s office you asked if there was anything to link the three of us—I mean the four of us, if you count Larry Reed….”
    “Speak up, young lady. What is it?”
    The girl carefully pleated her tweed skirt. “It couldn’t, of course, have had anything to do with what happened to Larry, I’m sure of that. But I’ve been thinking it over, and I guess I ought to tell you. You see—when I first came to the studio a couple of years ago I—I went out sometimes with Larry. I went out with Rollo Bayles, too—and even once or twice with Mr. Karas, who may be old but has some young ideas. All the bachelors around the place give a new girl the rush, you know.”
    “I wouldn’t know, never having been in that happy situation. But you are trying to say that you played the field, eh?”
    “A girl has to do something with her evenings,” said Janet defensively. “I was living in a boardinghouse and bored to tears.”
    “Say no more, my dear. It’s my life story in a nutshell. But do go on.”
    “There was never anything actually romantic,” Jan protested almost too quickly. “Mr. Karas was very gallant and continental and awfully sweet, really. He taught me a lot about food and wines and he kissed my hand. That’s all he ever kissed—I expected more and was all ready to say no, but it stopped there; I’m sure that he’s really in love with that lost wife of his. Rollo Bayles—well, Rollo is a lonely, confused sort of guy; I think he’s never got over a sort of guilt complex about leaving the priesthood, though heaven knows he was no more fitted for it than I am to be a—a steam fitter. But he’s a jazz fan and we used to go out to a little place on Ventura Boulevard and sit there and nurse our beers and listen to Pete Daily and the other hot five-man combos….”
    “I have heard them on the radio,”