Read Nipped in the Bud for Free Online

bottle on his desk. “A milk addict, wasn’t he?” observed Miss Withers.
    Art Wingfield snorted. “Panther milk,” he told her. “Nobody suspected it then, but Fagan had spiked the bottle with a pint of bourbon. Cute kid, Fagan.”
    The program rambled along in a breezy, informal sort of way, and it was hard for the schoolteacher to realize that for all its cheery glibness, its carefully calculated lightness, the Dark Angel was already beating his wings overhead. Now an earnest, ferret-faced little man who whistled duets with a bedraggled canary had his crowded moment and withdrew in confusion, with Fagan holding his nose and crying for “the hook.”
    “That was poor Joe Fernando,” Wingfield explained. “Always trying the amateur shows, and always getting laughed off. Takes himself seriously, too.” He lighted a cigarette from the end of the one half-burned in his mouth. “Anything went on Fagan’s show—his stuff was out of Henry Morgan by Arthur Godfrey with a dash of the old Major Bowes routine, but it went over.”
    Next the three lovelies returned, dressed in wispy French bathing suits, to render a slightly purified version of that Dixie college classic, “Cold as a Fish in a Frozen Pool,” after which the studio orchestra continued the theme with variations while the cameras swung to a brisk young woman miraculously preparing dinner for four out of different Gault Food packages, the only part of the program so far which Miss Withers enjoyed. Even Talley, who had been snoozing comfortably in his chair, perked up his ears and then subsided as his nose told him that the steak and pheasant and lobster and so on were only phantoms after all.
    The first commercial over, they were back with Tony Fagan again as he told a couple of long and fairly funny stories about what happened to him on the way to the studio tonight. “Those papers on the desk in front of him were supposed to be a script,” Wingfield explained. “But Fagan was his own producer and director, and he always ad-libbed most of his stuff anyway, switching it all around. Nobody ever knew what was coming next.”
    A big flashing-eyed brunette appeared, in a dress whose plunging neckline had turned into a high dive. While she rendered a comedy number, “I Come Here to Be Kissed With,” in what she fondly imagined was a Pennsylvania Dutch accent, Fagan nodded encouragement and then toasted her in panther milk.
    “Thallie Gordon,” Wingfield said. “A regular on the show.” Miss Withers thought the girl had a voice like a rusty hinge, and said as much. “Voice?” the young man came back. “Who cares about her voice?”
    Miss Gordon obliged with “Careless Hands” as an encore, and the schoolteacher sighed. “By any chance does she do imitations, too?”
    “You guessed it. In just a minute she does impressions of Dinah Shore and Merman and, of course, one of Hildegarde—”
    Miss Withers sat up straight, and then realized that of course he meant the other one, the girl with the gloves and the handkerchief and the Milwaukee French accent. With the impressions finally over, the camera returned to Tony Fagan, who took a last hearty pull at the emptying milk bottle and said, “It is time for a brief word about our sponsors, bless their black, money-mad little hearts.”
    “He always panned his sponsors,” Wingfield explained. “It was supposed to be all in fun, but he’d lost several good contracts that way before. This time he’d been out of work a good while, M.C.ing around the hinterland in supper clubs, and he’d sworn to be good. But just listen.”
    “… because Gault Zero Foods are really deep-freeze frozen, folks, cold as a well-digger’s armpit, locking in all the nice fresh vitamins and calories. Why, I don’t suppose there’s anything in the world colder than Gault Foods unless it’s the heart of their first vice-president in charge of paper clips and advertising, who happens to be Junior Gault himself. You must