Cold Poison Read Free Page A

entire human race, restrained himself with difficulty from climbing into the visitor’s lap and licking his face; he compromised by sitting down and offering a hopeful paw. Cushak shook it, murmuring an automatic “How do you do?” and then his face slowly lighted up with inspiration.
    “I have it!” he said.
    “You have what?” queried the schoolteacher blankly.
    “An idea! This makes everything easy. A poodle—we’ll hire him and you can come along as chaperone.” Cushak went on to explain that for some years the studio had been fooling around with the idea of a feature-length cartoon which would have a poodle as its hero; the project had been shelved but it could be ostensibly taken out of moth balls and put back into production, with Talley as the model for the artists to work from.
    “A live model?” gasped Miss Withers. “For cartoons?”
    Mr. Cushak explained that it was common practice in the business; that in the past they had had kangaroos and raccoons and even a baby alligator on the lot for the artists to sketch. “Nobody in the studio,” he said firmly, “will think anything of it. The dog is a natural comedian, anyway. You’ll both be there at nine?”
    “Wild horses,” decided the schoolteacher, “couldn’t keep us away.”
    “Good, good.” So it was settled with a handshake.
    It wasn’t Miss Withers admitted to herself after the man had taken himself away in his shining Cadillac, exactly the sort of case she would have chosen. But at least it was one where her services had been requested and would presumably be paid for—a very pleasant novelty in her career as a sleuth. And she felt that she was coming up with one of her famous hunches. “It would be rather a feather in our caps, wouldn’t it,” she asked the adoring poodle a little later, “if we could walk into Mr. Cushak’s office at the studio bright and early tomorrow morning with this case all neatly tied up in a bag? We shall set the alarm for seven.”
    At nine o’clock next morning Miss Hildegarde Withers appeared at the main entrance of Miracle-Paradox Studios complete with leashed poodle and also an unleashed headache, a headache beyond all aspirin. She went through the necessary formalities at the gate—getting inside the studio was about as difficult as getting into Fort Knox—and then the private policeman behind the wicket found her pass and she was guided by a cute blue-uniformed messenger girl past looming sound-stages, past bungalows and office buildings and standing sets all beautiful in front and plaster and chicken wire behind, until finally they came to the back corner lot and the street called Cartoon Alley. She was led up to Mr. Cushak’s office in a smallish modernistic two-story building and plunked down in a reception room decorated with brightly colored pictures of animals wearing pants—prominent among them was the engaging bird known as Peter Penguin….
    The schoolteacher cooled her heels and whiled away the time by watching Mr. Cushak’s secretary, a lush, slightly overblown girl with midnight hair and a most plunging neckline, who juggled the phone and the interoffice communicator deftly and at the same time managed to open the morning mail and write half a dozen letters. Now and then she went out to the coffee-vending machine in the hall, as if she needed it. There were dark shadows around her eyes.
    “Burning the candle at both ends and in the middle, too,” thought the schoolteacher.
    And then a buzzer sounded, and she was told that she might go on into the Presence. It was something like an audience with the Pope, she gathered, except that, of course, you didn’t actually have to wear a veil and a black dress. She tiptoed gingerly inside and found Mr. Cushak smiling his usual thin smile. “Fine, fine,” he said. “You’re here.”
    There was no denying that, so she didn’t try. But she took a deep breath. “Mr. Cushak, there’s something—”
    “Oh, yes,” he interrupted.