"Kenneth Robeson - Doc Savage 173 - Once Over Lightly" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robeson Kenneth)

supposed was my calmness, and her throat would tremble. But it trembled a little less after each look.

When she had herself nailed down again—proving she wasn't scared enough to lose her head, at
least—she conducted mining operations in the purse. It wasn't a little blue lady-gun this time. It was an
envelope. In the envelope was a key.

“Uncle Waldo gave me this to keep for him,” she said, displaying the key. “It's the key to the hotel safe
deposit box downstairs.”

I didn't know that the zany hostelry supplied their guests with private boxes, but it did not seem a bad
idea, and some hotels did it. After hesitating, Glacia got around to explaining why she was showing me
the key. “Will you go downstairs with me and we'll look in the box,” she asked.

“Glacia,” I said. “Why did you hire me in the first place?”

She looked hurt, and sounded a little like a kitten mewing for its milk as she said, “You're such a
competent person, Mote. You—you're the kind of advisor I need. Stable. And not afraid.”

“You want advice?”

“Yes.”

“Then take the local law along when you go down to investigate Uncle Waldo's box.”

Still like a kitten—with its tail stepped on—she yowled, “That's ridiculous! I'll do nothing of the sort!
Why should I?”

“Murder is a tiger that doesn't care who it scratches,” I said, probably stupidly. “You start searching a
murdered man's safe-deposit box, and you're likely to get scratched plenty.”

“It's mine, too. Some of my jewelry is in the box,” Glacia said.

She didn't say it cunningly, so I supposed it was true. Anyway, she wasn't going to take a policeman
along, and if I didn't go, she would eventually work up the courage to go by herself. So we went
downstairs, me wondering if she really had any jewelry in the box, and how she would lie out of it if there
wasn't.

They let her have the box without an argument, but she did have to sign a slip. I got a look at the
slip—the box was in her name as well as Uncle Waldo's. That made it partly all right, or enough all right
that they wouldn't jail us immediately. Let's hope.

Sure enough, Glacia dug out a piece of jewelry. An amulet studded with rhinestones and worth all of
thirty cents, probably, on the Woolworth market. But I knew it was hers, because she had worn it as a
high school kid.

Glacia became sentimental over the gaudy. “Uncle Waldo gave this to my mother,” she said in a small
voice. “He was very touched when he learned I had it.”

Suddenly I decided that Waldo Loring had been her uncle. This decision came as a surprise to me. I'd
been under the impression that I had given in to the notion that he was her uncle, but evidently I hadn't