Cold Poison Read Online Free PDF Page B

hopefully to answer it, and then with some disappointment informed her that Mr. Cushak’s office was on the line and would she please be in his office for a conference at two sharp?
    “Tell them I’ll be there,” promised the schoolteacher. “But I’ll make no guarantees as to sharpness.” For as yet in this mad affair there had been so little on which to whet the edge of her mind….
    Talley the poodle was by this time getting restive and sniffing suggestively around the door. Tip Brown obligingly decided that he could use some outdoor action sketches and borrowed the delighted dog for a romp on the studio lawns, so Miss Withers was left alone with her thoughts, of which—as the old saying goes—she had a complete set. She must, of course, feel her way carefully on this unaccustomed, thin ice; she must try to find out what made these people tick, and for that reason she had probed a bit at Mr. Brown. He had been open enough—almost too open.
    She was naturally burning also with a desire to know what was now going on in that coral-pink house up on Mulholland; police and coroners and medical examiners would be performing their grim but necessary rites. She’d have given almost anything for a front seat—because, although in her time she had seen more than a few dead bodies, she had never before seen anything like Larry Reed’s remains and never wanted to again.
    Around noontime the cluttered walls of the little office began to close in upon her. She went outside on a tour of exploration, got herself thoroughly lost among the looming sound stages and outdoor standing sets, and finally located the studio commissary, where she had a modest sandwich and a cup of tea in the midst of all the tinsel glamour of stars and starlets in make-up, dress-extras in evening clothes with smudged handkerchiefs around their collars, executives and agents and office people, most of whom seemed quite normal and pleasant and everydayish at close range.
    She noted that Alan Ladd was not quite as tall but certainly quite as handsome as she had previously imagined, that Abbott and Costello lunched quietly without throwing any dishes at each other, that Piper Laurie was a pixie and Esther Williams a sexy madonna. There were many other faces at the tables whom she recognized vaguely, having been an inveterate movie-goer for years; they were faces out of the past, once famous, once spotlighted, and now still working at the only job they knew. This was the present, and she had a present-day problem, a monkey on her shoulder.
    Who had killed Larry Reed, and why?
    There were afternoon papers on sale at the cashier’s desk when she paid her modest check, but nothing in the headlines as yet about Reed. There would hardly have been time, she realized. These papers must have gone to press long before her call to the police, notifying them of the body in the lonely house on Mulholland.
    When she finally found her way back to her office she discovered it empty; evidently Tip Brown had taken Talley with him somewhere for lunch. Miss Withers hoped that the dog would remember his manners and not beg for a second raw hamburger; she had been trying vainly for years to get him to understand that grown dogs eat but once a day. Outside in the hall the cartons packed with Larry Reed’s belongings still stood; she poked absently through the fitter and found nothing that could be in the least considered a clue, though already a bit of looting had begun. She noticed the absence of an imported briar pipe, a bottle of mineral oil, and a big box of expensive antihistamine tablets that she had seen previously. Perhaps the news of Larry’s passing had got around and somebody had thought that they needed a souvenir to remember him by; most certainly somebody else had hated him enough to assist him in prematurely shuffling off this mortal coil. For she was increasingly certain that this was murder, and an odd murder.
    Sitting alone at the desk, she fell to aimless