Read Cold Poison for Free Online Page B

in my valentine? I think I’d rather die first.”
    “The whole purpose of this meeting,” the schoolteacher reminded her, “is to see that you don’t die. Very well, we’ll respect your privacy for the time being at least. And we’ll have to skip the mysterious Lucy character for the nonce—though it would be most interesting to know if anyone of that name works here at the studio or ever did work here.” She looked inquiringly at Mr. Cushak.
    “I have already checked,” he admitted. “She doesn’t and she didn’t. We had a Lurine and a Lacybelle and a Laverne, but no Lucy.”
    “Really,” Miss Withers nodded thoughtfully. “Then it would appear that ‘Lucy’ is the nom de plume of somebody else, perhaps even concealing the identity of a man, and that someone who knows you all and knows enough about you to stick a pin into a tender place has a most determined grudge. So who could it be?”
    “Nobody!” said Jules Karas, spouting blue cigar smoke. “Poppycock. I still think that somehow it is only a very bad joke.”
    “A bad joke—with me stumbling on Larry Reed’s body in his house up on Mulholland? I think not. Somebody has painted a target on you four people—and has already hit one bull’s-eye.”
    They seemed to shrink suddenly in upon themselves, but nobody said anything. The maiden schoolteacher looked severely at them. “Just how often,” she asked quietly, “have you four people worked together intimately?”
    “But they haven’t!” spoke up Ralph Cushak from behind his mahogany desk. “This is a big studio, Miss Withers, with lots of different cartoon projects going all the time. These four people may have had accidental contacts around the lot, and they certainly know one another to speak to, but to my knowledge they have never been assigned to the same story or worked together in the same office. Of course, Mr. Karas here is in charge of all our music, assisted by such composers and musicians as he needs on a part-time basis. Mr. Bayles paints the backgrounds for many of our pictures, especially those involving underwater scenes or woodland stuff. But Reed works—I mean, worked—only on the Bird series, the Peter Penguin stuff, and Miss Poole here is animator on the Willy Wombat and Charley Chipmunk series, though now and then like all our people she sits in on a conference concerning one of the other characters. But these four people have had no regular contact; there is nothing whatever to link them together. The’ whole thing, if you ask me, is quite mad.”
    “Almost too mad,” said Miss Withers slowly. “Just why should a supposed homicidal maniac train his sights on these four? It’s a sort of methodical nor-nor-west madness—the misquotation is from Hamlet, in case you’re interested—and there’s a link somewhere if we can only find it.” She pointed to the brown envelope addressed to Larry Reed. “This drawing, and this printing—would you people say that they are the work of one of the regular studio artists?”
    The thing was passed around again. They were of various opinions. The printing itself was sketchy and impersonal, of the type used by almost everyone in the place. Then when you came to the drawing of the murdered, strangled bird—
    “Was it drawn by a competent studio artist, or not?” Miss Withers demanded.
    Nobody could immediately answer that. Of course, every desk in the place was equipped with a tracing board designed to make it easy to reproduce the original gels —the master drawings—with whatever minor changes of action were immediately indicated. Anyone in the place could, given time and access to one of the desks, have taken one of the myriad gelatin prints of Peter Penguin which overflowed the studio, tilted it horizontally and then traced it, adding his own ghoulish touches. This particular drawing, they agreed, was a trifle crude—but perhaps purposely so.
    “Then it must have been done,” the schoolteacher decided wisely,