Реклама. ООО «ЛитРес», ИНН: 7719571260.
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The man with the traveling bag and briefcase waited quietly on the service stairs of Mrs. Sybil Thorn’s handsome house on Woodley Road in Washington, D. C. When the coast was clear he crossed the hall to the small room second floor back, and stood listening to the cocktail party going on in the rooms below. If he hadn’t caught a quick glimpse of Congressman Hamilton (Call Me Ham) Vair’s heavy blond figure through the pantry door as the maid discreetly slipped his note into Vair’s hand, he’d have thought he’d come to the wrong place to find the man whose private undercover investigator he’d now been for several months. Normally, you didn’t have to look for Ham Vair, much less listen.
He closed the door of the small room and took off his seedy grey overcoat. The glamorous Mrs. Thorn must have been giving Ham Vair lessons in deportment.—Forget that a dizzy columnist ever called you the youthful and handsome Hot Rod from the Marsh Marigold State. Don’t boom, and don’t burst out laughing, and don’t clap people on the back, she’d probably told him . . . or not these people anyway. He remembered the string of shiny limousines parked on both sides of Woodley Road. Because the party was obviously one more step in the master plan to groom Ham Vair for bigger and better things. It took dough, of course, but Sybil Thorn, twice divorced and as cynically ambitious in her way as Vair was in his, had plenty of that, and friends to kick in more when his campaign got rolling.
.....
He glanced at the pictures of Molly Brent, four years older, that Vair had left on the desk. The girl running through the rain was a graphic statement of the personal and private reasons that had forced Rufus Brent to refuse to come to Washington. His coming in spite of them was the Toolmaker sticking to a bigger lathe. But with the Toolmaker in Washington, and Ham Vair in there cutting the Toolmaker’s throat, the letters in the green stained pouch gave him the one thing he needed and had searched for . . . a character and a name for the slickest shakedown he’d ever dreamed up.
It was a good thing he’d waited. He could have sold Vair out to Rufus Brent for a few paltry thousand any time since the idea first began to grow on him. But the dream that had been born the night of the girl’s accident wasn’t a matter of thousands. It was millions—if he married her . . . or if he got rid of her, and stuck to the old lady. . . . Son-in-law or adopted son, it was millions either way.
.....