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:
Slabbe said: “How come that Nola let Lorenz have the plane reservation?”
“Because Lorenz said he wouldn’t reveal Ruby’s whereabouts till he was safely out of town. He was a conniving criminal type who thought John might, once he’d got his information, call in the police and try to get back the price he’d paid Lorenz. When Lorenz said that he’d wire John the minute he arrived in New York, John said he’d see that Lorenz got there as soon as possible and gave him the plane reservation.”
Serena Yates’ smooth eyes opened as wide as possible, but the pupils were small and black and perfectly motionless. “Yes,” she said and her tinkling voice was metallic. “Bill was talking to me on the telephone. He said that the plane had just taken off, that Lorenz had telegraphed Ruby at the Carleton Arms, what could we do? Then he cried, ‘My God, the plane cracked up! It’s a mass of flame! No one has a chance!’ ”
Her teeth gleamed. “Lorenz was dead. John Nola was in his study. He was the one who should have been on that plane. What did it matter about Lorenz? He’d sent a telegram. Ruby would appear. Why couldn’t it have been John? Why, I asked myself – why couldn’t it still be John?”
Her coffee cup grated on the saucer. Her bloodless lips were not those of a white-haired old lady. “I shouted at Bill, ‘Go to her hotel! Stop her from reading that telegram! Do anything! I’ll reason with John Nola!’ ”
Slabbe said: “Teel got into Ruby’s suite and accepted the telegram when it was sent up. She walked in on him before he could get away, though, and he slugged her. You slugged Nola – only harder.”
“With a poker,” she said. “Just once. He was in his big chair at the fireplace. I picked up the poker. I hit him with twenty years of hatred. He was supposed to be dead in the plane – he was dead then!”
“Just get rid of him now, was all you had to do,” Slabbe said. “Hurst comes in here.”
“Yes. I needed help. Alan worshipped me. I called him. He said if John was supposed to have been burned up – then burn him up. And if Max Lorenz’s body was going to be identified as John’s, then why not have John’s identified as Lorenz’s?”
“Lorenz had been driving a car,” Slabbe nodded. “A chauffeur would think of that. Lorenz’s car must be at the airport. Hurst went there, but the ignition key wasn’t in it. He monkeyed with the distributor wires and got it going, came back to the house, put Nola’s body in. That night he fired the car and rolled it into Bleeker’s Canyon. But there was Jake George, too.”
“Alan thought of him at once, but he couldn’t be in two places at the same time. He called a man named Ike Veech to kidnap Jake George and bring him here. He called Veech again today after we saw you at Fudge Burke’s and told him to pick you up and see if you were making any progress.”
Slabbe said: “You were afraid that Jake George was a chiseler who might try to blackmail Teel and Ione after they married. But Jake was OK, just a peeper trying to get along, but honest. You couldn’t let him go after pulling shennigans on him.” Slabbe’s voice was thin. “For that, you don’t bother me a bit, lady.”
She looked away.
Slabbe moved his sore shoulder ponderously. “Your original plan was to burn Nola’s body in Lorenz’s Chevvy and have it identified as Lorenz. You didn’t intend Jake George’s body to turn up until after the investigation of the burned body was old and cold. The two catches were that we knew how to identify Lorenz from a bullet in his thigh – and so knew it couldn’t have been him who burned in the Chevvy – and Ruby Reed spotted Bill Teel.”
Slabbe squinted somberly. “With us nosing around about the burned body and Ruby in a spot to tip the cart, you and Hurst cooked a new deal. You figured that we thought Lorenz was still alive. So why not foster that illusion? Kill Ruby and blame it on Lorenz.
“Of course if we were to go on believing the burned guy was Jake George, then Hurst had to make sure Jake’s body wouldn’t turn up or at least wouldn’t be identifiable as Jake when it did get found. I’d deliberately let it out to Hurst that we figured the body in the Chevvy was Jake’s and then put a couple of my people out to watch Hurst’s move. He came up here tonight to beat Jake’s face in with a rock.”
Slabbe found his chewing gum, used it moodily for a second. “John Nola taking that plane right at the time he’d talked to Lorenz wasn’t kosher. Nola’s main ambition right then was to expose Teel; he would have said to hell with whatever his trip was for. Then I remembered that Susie had said Nola had called her just about the time the plane took off. It was worth a workout and it paid. Nola couldn’t have been on the plane. Who was then? Who would send that telegram to Ruby? Max Lorenz, of course. So he was the one on the plane. Then where was John Nola? Why not him in the burned Chevvy? And who would have killed him to stop him from exposing Teel and hurting little Ione? I didn’t have to guess, lady.”
Slabbe shook his grizzled head. He marveled: “When you let Hurst tell most of the truth about Teel, you counted on the fact that no dumb cop would imagine anything so goofy as that this had all started rolling because a screwy old woman had raised her daughter dizzy enough to go bats because her boyfriend had once married a tramp.”
Serena Yates clenched her coffee cup as if to throw it. She didn’t. One by one, her fingers lost their strength and the black fire in her eyes consumed itself. She tried to set the cup down. It fell and broke. She stared at the pieces. Her face worked. “May I go upstairs to the bathroom?” she said.
“Uh-uh,” Slabbe refused. “After Carlin hears it, you can do it – kill yourself, you mean, don’t you?”
She stood up and without haste held the white lace at her throat free with one hand and removed a small revolver from her bosom with the other.
“Yes, kill myself,” she said. “Not you, too, I hope.”
Slabbe didn’t move. “Nope, not me, lady.”
He watched her climb the open staircase, her gun steady. She stood at the top, gripping the rustic banister.
“The bedroom doors are made of seasoned logs,” she said. “The locks are bolts which cannot be shot loose. There are no ladders available, so you won’t be able to reach the second floor from outside.”
For just a second her eyes, black as ever but no longer smooth, looked off at something that wasn’t in the cabin. Then she opened a bedroom door.
“And there are large emergency lamps filled with kerosene in each bedroom,” she said. She closed the door.
Slabbe tried what there was. It wasn’t much. Even when Carlin and Abe Morse came it wasn’t much. Abe dashed for the nearest village for what fire apparatus was on hand, but that wasn’t much either.
Slabbe stood beside Carlin outside, watching the licking brilliance at a second-story window. He wondered if, for a second, he saw a vacant face at the window, but there was too much smoke to be sure.
A CANDLE FOR THE BAG LADY
Lawrence Block
He was a thin young man in a blue pinstripe suit. His shirt was white with a button-down collar. His glasses had oval lenses in brown tortoiseshell frames. His hair was a dark brown, short but not severely so, neatly combed, parted on the right. I saw him come in and watched him ask a question at the bar. Billie was working afternoons that week. I watched as he nodded at the young man, then swung his sleepy eyes over in my direction. I lowered my own eyes and looked at a cup of coffee laced with bourbon while the fellow walked over to my table.