Murder Makes an Entrance by Clarence Budington Kelland

Author:Clarence Budington Kelland [Mills, Roxanne L]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Digital Parchment Press

Chapter Fourteen

"To look at me," Dolly Dove said to John Miller, "you wouldn't think I was much on literature, eh?"

"Well, frankly, no," John said. "I thought your art was culinary."

"While I'm waiting for a leg of lamb to roast," Dolly said, "I read."

"Shakespeare?" John asked.

"Not me," Dolly said scornfully. "Westerns are my meat."

"Leading up to what?" John asked.

"Leading up to," Dolly said, "a man by the name Wilbur Stork."

"And who was Wilbur?"

"Only readers like me remember," Dolly said, "on account of he wrote in magazines you never heard of. Maybe fifteen—twenty years ago. He wrote about a ranch that was called the Diamond K where nobody was employed that wasn't a hero. And where the boss hero was a scalawag with the name of Curleyhead Considine."

"And so?" John asked.

"And so, and in consequence of me being elected by you folks vice-president in charge of skulduggery and finance, I snooped. This Stork author is around seventy-five years old. He's extinct. For those stories he never got more than a hundred dollars apiece. Well, maybe there have been literary critics more literary than I am, but when it comes to material for movies I got experience to guide me."

"Find a place to light," John told her. "I'm up in the air."

"Two thousand dollars," Dolly said, "was like finding the Comstock Lode for this Stork. So, while you were spending your time getting into trouble and running after the wrong girl, I hunted up this Stork and made a dicker with him. Remember your two thousand dollars? . . . Well, you haven't got it any more. With it," she went on, peering at him somewhat askance under her plucked eyebrows, "I make a dicker."

"Now," John said, "you've got me really interested."

"So we now own the motion picture and radio and cheap edition rights to Curleyhead Considine, with this worn-out author getting a fair split of the profits, if any."

"And there," John said, with sinking heart, "goes our capital—bang."

"Could be," Dolly answered uneasily. "But on the contrary possibly not. One thing you kind of forget, Johnnie. I'm a hasbeen but I ain't a never-was. In places and by people I still get treated polite, and I can walk into offices that maybe even Helen 'f Troy would have to wait on a bench outside of. For old time's sake."

"Continue," John said.

"That's all," Dolly answered. "To be continued in our next. Just wanted to break it to you that your two thousand nice dollars have gone down the drain—maybe."

John grinned wryly. "Well," he said philosophically, "they weren't much good to me anyhow."

Dolly changed the subject abruptly. "If," she said, "there were two bundles on the table there, and in one of them was wrapped up Quality Piper, and in the other was this Loretta Kimball—and you were given your choice to take, which would it be?"

"That," said John, "is what is called a hypothetical question."

"I know about them," Dolly asserted. "Invented by a San Francisco shyster. It got, if memory don't flutter, one bird sent to the bug house instead of to the hot seat.

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