The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories
- Автор: Adams Cleve F., Babcock Dwight V.
- Год: 2010
- Язык: английский
- Год: A Vintage Crime/Black Lizard
- ISBN: 978-0-307-45543-7
- Жанр: Криминальные детективы
Электронная книга - «The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories». Краткое содержание книги:
Black Mask was the apotheosis of noir. It was the magazine where the first hardboiled detective story, which was written by Carroll John Daly appeared. It was the slum in which such American literary titans like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler got their start, and it was the home of stories with titles like “Murder Is Bad Luck,” “Ten Carets of Lead,” and “Drop Dead Twice.” Collected here is best of the best, the hardest of the hardboiled, and the darkest of the dark of America’s finest crime fiction. This masterpiece collection represents a high watermark of America’s underbelly. Crime writing gets no better than this.
“Yeah. An’ he might be alive now if you stuck to your post, way you’re supposed to, shamus,” Mike said curtly. “What’s your name?”
“Brundage.” The Ames man was surly. “Don’t be telling me my business. I know what I’m supposed to do and what I ain’t. I been assigned to this corner for two years. Me an’ Tom MacReady always got along jake. He never made no complaint. An’ none of our subscribers got any squawk—”
“MacReady ain’t exactly in a position to complain. Far as your customers are concerned, why should they holler? They’re covered by insurance, aren’t they?” Hansard went over to the window, ripped off the poster, looked at the six-inch hole the glass-cutter had made. “But that isn’t saying there aren’t going to be plenty of beefs about this. There’ve been too many of these glass-cutter jobs in the last two-three weeks. It’ll be the same mob back of all of ’em. Now they’ve gone up against a chair job, everybody’ll get put on the pan about it. Where was you when the fireworks went off?”
Brundage jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “Down on Hester. Kid came up and told me somebody’d heaved a brick at Thomasini’s window. That We Buy Old Gold joint. So I beat it down there. It was a false alarm. So then I hear the shooting and hike back.” He shifted uneasily under Hansard’s cold stare. “I called an ambulance for MacReady.”
“Yeah?” Hansard morosely studied the vacant spaces in Dumont’s display. The robbers had been smart. They hadn’t taken any watches or any of the cheap “slum” that’s used to catch the eye of the passerby. The stuff that was missing was mostly rings, he decided.
“Got a key, Brundage?”
The Ames man produced a ring attached to his belt with a steel chain. “I ain’t s’posed—”
“Suppose my eye!” growled the plainclothesman. “Open up!”
Brundage used a key. Hansard went in first, inspected the alarm box on the wall, saw it hadn’t been tampered with. Then he found a phone, got through to headquarters.
“Extension four-oh-two... Ed Schmidt... Ed? I’m down at Dumont’s. Put through a thirty-one, will you? All cars. Rush. Have ’em contact every hockshop in the city. Notify us of anyone trying to pawn any solitaires worth over — say, fifty bucks. Or any unset stones more than a quarter carat. They’ll probably pry the stones out of the settings... I know, I know. It’s a hundred-to-one shot. Still and all, it’s one of those things we gotta cover, Ed.” He hung up.
Brundage shook his head dubiously. “You ain’t gonna lay the finger on the lads who did this job just by puttin’ the peep on the hockshops. This mob was from out of town.”
“Why do you think so?”
“I seen their car.”
“Where?”
“Couple of blocks down. Green sedan with Jersey pads.”
Hansard swore and reached for the phone again. “Why the hell didn’t you say so when I was talking to headquarters! How did you know it was their car?”
“Well, I don’t — for sure. But it was there when I beat it down on Hester, and it wasn’t there when I got back. Then that old hag selling pretzels down on the corner claims there was two guys and a frill came running over to the sedan and drove away like a bat outa—”
“Hello, Ed? Something to add to that alarm. All cars to notify all men on post. Pick up a green sedan... What make, Brundage?”
“Buick, near as I noticed.”
“...a Buick, maybe, Ed. Or any other green sedan with Jersey plates. Two men and a girl in it... Nah, this Ames dope I’m talking to never heard about getting a license number. So long.”
The headquarters man reached out, caught the private guard’s necktie, yanked him close. “How many times you been told to take the plate numbers of any car parks near the Diamond Exchange after closing hours?”
“Leggo,” snarled Brundage, “you’re chokin’ me! I don’t know when that sedan parked there. They’s a lot of Jersey hockers come over to do business before closing hours an’ leave their cars around here while they grab a bite. Anyhow, I told you I was in a hurry to check up on that rock throwin’. If it hadn’t been for that—”
“Yah!” Hansard sent him reeling back against one of the glass cases. “You don’t stay on your post. You don’t check on parked cars. You’d ought to have your watchman’s license revoked. You had sense enough to notify the proprietor, here?”
“I tried to get Dumont on the phone. He wasn’t home.”
“Where’s he live?”
“Over in Brooklyn.”
“Well, try him again. Send him a wire — collect. Ask the phone company to give him a bell every five minutes until they get him. But get him over here.”
“I’ll do the best I can.”
“And soon as you see him, get me a complete checklist of all the ice that was glommed. I want the number of stones in each ring, the carat weights, settings—”
“Sure, I know.”
“You don’t know your rump from a hole in the ground. If you get hold of anything phone it in to headquarters, extension four-oh-two. And don’t be leaving Dumont’s here to run around and see if you can locate somebody who can give you a description of those three. We’ll take care of that without any amateur kibitzing.”
Hansard got out of the store, up to the corner of the alley. He half expected some of the Homicide boys to be down there, but maybe the word hadn’t gotten through that MacReady had died. Or perhaps they’d come and snapped their photographs and were now combing the district for eyewitnesses...
The sharp contrast between the blinding brilliance of the row of windows at the Diamond Exchange and the utter pitch-blackness of the alley made it difficult for him to adjust his eyes quickly. He slipped on something greasy underfoot.
He put his flash on it and his nostrils flared in repugnance. This was where Tom had taken it. He swung the circle of light up and down the cobblestones. Besides MacReady’s blood, there was nothing to see except a couple of those small, white, slotted cards in which rings are displayed. Each card bore the caption — Absolutely Perfect Blue-White — 22-Carat Setting — Latest Style.
A couple of chunks of limestone had been chipped from the building wall by flying lead but there was nothing else.
Chapter Two
The Girl in the Hockshop
Mike strode grimly through the alley, over to Centre Street, up to the block-long white stone building at Number 240.
He went down a freshly scrubbed corridor smelling of antiseptic, turned in at a door marked — DETECTIVE BUREAU — LOST PROPERTY DIVISION.
There was a long counter running across the front of the room, behind it half a dozen small oak desks. There was only one man in the office, a thin, sharp-featured individual with glossy black hair, shaggy eyebrows and an expression of perpetual surprise on his face. He sat in a swivel chair, with his feet up on the lower drawer of his desk. This was Ed Schmidt, Hansard’s working partner. He was drawling into a telephone.
“Yeah, that’s what I said. Report by phone and pronto. That don’t mean you shouldn’t send in the regular descriptive cards on everything that’s been hocked in your shop today. If I don’t get a brown envelope with a bunch of those cards from you in the morning I’ll know you’ve either gone out of business or you’re trying to give us the runaround, Abe. But about those solitaires — it’s important. They’re hot as the electric chair.”
Hansard sat at his desk and gloomily fingered the day’s list of property, lost and stolen. There were wallets reported from the midtown section. Their only chance of recovery lay across the hall in the offices of the pickpocket squad. Another epidemic of lost dogs in the Washington Heights area probably meant that the old “dog racket” was being worked again. And there was the usual assortment of missing handbags, wrist-watches and briefcases — mostly testimonials to their owner’s forgetfulness.