The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction
- Автор: Якубовски Максим, Беллем Роберт
- Год: 2014
- Язык: английский
- Год: Constable & Robinson
- ISBN: 9781472111807
- Жанр: Крутые детективы
Электронная книга - «The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction». Краткое содержание книги:
Her black hair was scarcely disarranged. Her long shapely legs were not twisted awkwardly, but it was not a posed tableau: her skirt was swirled higher than a photographer would have arranged it.
For a second Slabbe’s heavy face might have shown a bit more gray granite than usual, then he was again chewing gum stolidly, “I guess I don’t get to keep that date with you, baby,” he murmured.
“Who done it?” Carlin cursed softly, dark eyes everywhere. He bit his lips, barked at the people in the wash of light from the open door, “OK, I sound like a hayseed, but who saw it, or something?”
There was no immediate answer. Prentice and Ione Nola and Miss Yates and Bill Teel stood close to each other, elbows touching. Behind them servants fidgeted and whispered. Alan Hurst stepped toward the old lady in black taffeta, breathing heavily. “You don’t have to stay here, Miss Yates,” he said.
“Cut it!” Carlin snapped.
Hurst’s wide shoulders swung back viciously. Then his hazel eyes widened and he put a hand against the house to support himself. Miss Yates’ black eyes snapped to him. Her tinkling voice ordered: “Take Alan inside, Joseph – it’s his heart again,” and a butler sidled around her and took Hurst’s elbow.
Miss Yates transferred her glance to Teel’s haggard face. He looked older than she did. “What happened, William?” she said. “What’s wrong with your arm?”
Carlin rammed a cigar under his long nose. “I’ll handle this, thank you. Yeah, what is wrong with your arm, bo?”
Teel took his brown eyes off Ruby, sent them straight ahead to look at something a thousand miles away, and said without any inflection whatever: “I was standing in front of the door with her, waiting for Alan to bring the car around. Someone shot at us. I got hit in the arm.”
“Bill!” Ione Nola squealed and pawed at him.
“Shuddup!” Carlin bit. “He’ll live.” He looked at Teel’s tired mouth and empty eyes and his lips peeled back a trifle wolfishly. “For a while, anyhow. Hear me, son? This is a very, very old gag, maybe.”
Black taffeta rustled. The tinkling voice sounded like icicles breaking against one another. “I presume you represent the police,” Miss Yates said to Carlin. “It’s fortunate that you should be on hand at this time, unfortunate that you know only a single technique; intimidation.”
Prentice Nola scratched his beard. “Tell him, Aunt Serena,” he leered.
Carlin struggled with a mouthful of marbles.
Slabbe touched his gray hat deferentially. “Sorry, ma’am. If you people would just say where you were and if you heard the shots, and so on, you could go inside.”
“Thank you, Mr Slabbe,” Miss Yates said. “Bill was with Miss Reed, of course, as he’s admitted. Prentice, you may be sure, was no farther from a brandy decanter than necessary.”
“Merci, darling,” Prentice mocked. “I was indeed imbibing in my room on the second floor. I heard the shots and looked over my balcony railing, saw Ruby sprawled here and came down.”
Miss Yates said: “Ione, where were you?”
The pint-sized ash-blonde turned her head from Teel long enough to say, “Dressing,” and turned back again. Her little-girl’s fingers touched Teel’s gray cheek.
“I was also in my room,” Miss Yates said. “I heard the shots and also looked over my balcony railing and saw what had happened and came down. May I offer a suggestion?”
“Yes’m,” Slabbe said.
“Then I suggest you scour this vicinity for a medium-sized man who limps on his left leg.”
Carlin’s cigar gave a downward tilt as his mouth opened. “What?”
Miss Yates said coolly: “I can’t say if Prentice was using his eyes when he was on his balcony, but I was. And I saw such a man run east over the lawn.”
Slabbe looked quickly at Prentice, whose jaw was twitching and whose eyes were ugly on the old woman.
Slabbe shifted back to Teel. “We know about you, son,” he said quietly. “Did you see who it was? Was it Max Lorenz? It’s OK. We know you know him.”
Teel’s mouth opened three times for one word. When it came, it was: “Yes.”
Slabbe caught Carlin’s eye, jerked his head toward the door. Carlin scowled, said generally: “OK, you can go inside.”
“Oh, my book!” Ione Nola cried. She pointed at a slender volume that was lying near Ruby’s outstretched hand. “I loaned it to her. Bill gave it to me. I thought if she and Prentice were in love, she’d be thrilled to read—”
“Be quiet, Ione,” Miss Yates ordered. “Go inside.”
Slabbe stooped and picked up the book. It fell open at a well-marked page.
One eye on Ione, he read:
Carlin raged. “What the – that’s enough! Cut that out!”
Slabbe paid him no attention. He was watching Ione’s starry eyes. She said: “Isn’t it marvelous, Bill?” to Teel. “That’s the way I feel for you and—”
“Ione! Inside!” The tinkling voice was sharp. Miss Yates caught the girl’s elbow, turned her to the door. Teel started to follow, his shoulders sagging.
“Not you,” Carlin snapped at him. “You stick here, I know all about you, boy. I don’t know why you’d knock this dish off, but you could have. Two shots for her and one for yourself and heave the rod into the shrubs over there and say you saw Lorenz do it. You and me got a session coming up.”
Slabbe took three steps backwards, saw that Carlin wasn’t paying attention, turned and plodded toward the street. He went to the Carleton Arms Hotel and cornered the houseman, Barney McPhail.
“You’re stuck for a hotel bill, chum,” he told the well-dressed, dapper handshaker. “Miss Ruby Reed. Dead. Shot. No more wolves will bother her. Who did?”
McPhail flicked the starboard end of a black waxed mustache delicately, pale eyes expressionless. “She registered here, 507, Saturday afternoon from New York City. So far as 1 know, she didn’t have any visitors or calls. I can check.”
“Suppose you do,” Slabbe encouraged.
McPhail did. Miss Reed had had no phone calls or visitors that anyone remembered, and such things were generally remembered in a lush thirty-five-story inn like the Carleton Arms.
“How’d she get the shiner?” Slabbe asked.
Barney McPhail did not look embarrassed, having learned poise in his day, but he squirmed just a little. “I hope nothing’s going to come of that, Slabbe,” he murmured. “It wouldn’t exactly be the job, but it would hurt my stock around here. A guy got into her suite and slugged her – she said.”
“You don’t buy it?” Slabbe asked.
“We-ell, I don’t know. It could have happened, but she’s a type – was, huh? – that would sue, or threaten to, and she didn’t. She was willing to let it pass, said she wouldn’t even have mentioned it if another guest hadn’t heard her scream and reported it.”
“What was the story, Barney?”
McPhail’s neat shoulders moved a deprecating quarter inch. “She was on her way into her suite Monday afternoon about five. She opened the door and a guy’s fist smashed her. She screamed, didn’t see the guy clear. He ran. Another guest coming from his room saw the guy’s back, called for help. I went up. Nothing missing from the Reed kid’s room. She said let it go. Should I argue?”