Nipped in the Bud Read Online Free PDF Page B

of that thing somewhere and get you set in a projection room right away; no trouble at all.”
    Piper said they could count him out, as he’d seen the film several times, and besides he had to get back down to the office and start some wheels turning at Missing Persons. “See you later, Hildegarde. And thanks, Wingfield—I’ll fix your next two parking tickets.” He waved cheerily and was gone.
    Miss Withers found herself being ushered down a wide corridor filled with scurrying people, vaguely suggestive of a disturbed anthill. She was a little worried as to Talley’s welcome, but, as Art Wingfield pointed out, in a television studio she could have been walking a saber-toothed tiger on a leash and nobody would have given a second look. She and the poodle were soon deposited in a small, slanting room where a dozen or so big leather chairs faced a screen, and left briefly alone. Then their guide and mentor was back, with a flat, round tin can about the size of a pie plate. “You want to see the whole thing, ma’am, or just the last reel with all the fireworks?”
    “All or nothing. But first could you tell me just what it’s all about?”
    “The background? Yes, yes, of course.” Wingfield must have trained for his job, she thought, on Benzedrine and jumping beans. “You’re about to see a kinescope, which is a TV program recorded on film. This particular broadcast, the last one Tony Fagan ever made, was a live show—but there was a studio audience and also a recording on film, to be used later on the West Coast.” He mopped his forehead. “Sit tight, Miss Withers. There never was a program like this before, and God grant there never will be another.” Wingfield shuddered, and then signaled the projectionist.
    The room darkened, the screen lightened, and then after a few identifying credits and numbers had flashed past they were suddenly looking at a big, balding man who sat sprawled elaborately at ease with his feet on a desk littered with papers, props, and even a bottle of milk. If this was Tony Fagan, Miss Withers decided, he had a most unusual face, vaguely suggesting a personable gargoyle, with the peaked eyebrows and the wide slit of a mouth. “He’s smiling, but he’s nervous as a cat on hot bricks,” the schoolteacher murmured.
    “Was” corrected Wingfield. “Tony Fagan’s been in a box for eight months, remember. I went to his funeral, and he drew twice the house he ever had at any other personal appearance.”
    “The Gault Foods Show!” came the offensively booming voice of an invisible announcer, and then a fanfare of distant trumpets. Fagan looked up, nodded, and slid his feet off the desk. Then he picked up a small package with the firm’s name prominently displayed. He ostentatiously dropped the box and blew on his fingers with elaborate pantomime. “Cold!” he confided, shivering.
    Over applause from the studio audience, Fagan said easily, “All right, as if you good people out there didn’t know, this is old Mother Fagan’s little boy Tony back again, brought to you tonight through the courtesy of Gault Zero Foods, which are the very best frozen foods, it says here in the script….”
    “He’d learned about an hour before this broadcast that the Gault people had decided not to renew his contract,” Wingfield explained.
    The man on the screen was smiling his wide thin-lipped smile, chatting about one thing and another, smoking a dollar cigar and tossing off quips about current events—current last December. Now and then, as casually as if they had just dropped in for an impromptu audition, he introduced his guest talent—an Italian boy who worked himself into a lather squeezing opera from a mammoth piano accordion, and a little later three lush, dead-panned girls who wore sunbonnets and Gay Nineties bathing suits and harmonized “Silver Dollar.” While they were giving their all, Fagan leaned back in his chair and nodded approvingly, now and then taking a swig from the