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:
In the theater, SRO is good news. It means a sellout performance, standing room only. But once you get out of the theater district it means single room occupancy, and the designation is invariably applied to a hotel or apartment house which has seen better days.
Mary Alice Redfield’s home for the last six or seven years of her life had started out as an old Rent Law tenement, built around the turn of the century, six stories tall, faced in red-brown brick, with four apartments to the floor. Now all of those little apartments had been carved into single rooms as if they were election districts gerrymandered by a maniac. There was a communal bathroom on each floor and you didn’t need a map to find it.
The manager was a Mrs Larkin. Her blue eyes had lost most of their color and half her hair had gone from black to gray but she was still pert. If she’s reincarnated as a bird she’ll be a house wren.
She said, “Oh, poor Mary. We’re none of us safe, are we, with the streets full of monsters? I was born in this neighborhood and I’ll die in it, but please God that’ll be of natural causes. Poor Mary. There’s some said she should have been locked up, but Jesus, she got along. She lived her life. And she had her check coming in every month and paid her rent on time. She had her own money, you know. She wasn’t living off the public like some I could name but won’t.”
“I know.”
“Do you want to see her room? I rented it twice since then. The first one was a young man and he didn’t stay. He looked all right but when he left me I was just as glad. He said he was a sailor off a ship and when he left he said he’d got on with another ship and was on his way to Hong Kong or some such place, but I’ve had no end of sailors and he didn’t walk like a sailor so I don’t know what he was after doing. Then I could have rented it twelve times but didn’t because I won’t rent to colored or Spanish. I’ve nothing against them but I won’t have them in the house. The owner says to me, Mrs Larkin he says, my instructions are to rent to anybody regardless of race or creed or color, but if you was to use your own judgment I wouldn’t have to know about it. In other words he don’t want them either but he’s after covering himself.”
“I suppose he has to.”
“Oh, with all the laws, but I’ve had no trouble.” She laid a forefinger alongside her nose. It’s a gesture you don’t see too much these days. “Then I rented poor Mary’s room two weeks ago to a very nice woman, a widow. She likes her beer, she does, but why shouldn’t she have it? I keep my eye on her and she’s making no trouble, and if she wants an old jar now and then whose business is it but her own?” She fixed her blue-gray eyes on me. “You like your drink,” she said.
“Is it on my breath?”
“No, but I can see it in your face. Larkin liked his drink and there’s some say it killed him but he liked it and a man has a right to live what life he wants. And he was never a hard man when he drank, never cursed or fought or beat a woman as some I could name but won’t. Mrs Shepard’s out now. That’s the one took poor Mary’s room, and I’ll show it to you if you want.”
So I saw the room. It was kept neat.
“She keeps it tidier than poor Mary,” Mrs Larkin said. “Now Mary wasn’t dirty, you understand, but she had all her belongings. Her shopping bags and other things that she kept in her room. She made a mare’s nest of the place, and all the years she lived here, you see, it wasn’t tidy. I would keep her bed made but she didn’t want me touching her things and so I let it be cluttered as she wanted it. She paid her rent on time and made no trouble otherwise. She had money, you know.”
“Yes, I know.”
“She left some to a woman on the fourth floor. A much younger woman, she’d only moved here three months before Mary was killed, and if she exchanged a word with Mary I couldn’t swear to it, but Mary left her almost a thousand dollars. Now Mrs Klein across the hall lived here since before Mary ever moved in and the two old things always had a good word for each other, and all Mrs Klein has is the welfare and she could have made good use of a couple of dollars, but Mary left her money instead to Miss Strom.” She raised her eyebrows to show bewilderment. “Now Mrs Klein said nothing, and I don’t even know if she’s had the thought that Mary might have mentioned her in her will, but Miss Strom said she didn’t know what to make of it. She just couldn’t understand it at all, and what I told her was you can’t figure out a woman like poor Mary who never had both her feet on the pavement. Troubled as she was, daft as she was, who’s to say what she might have had on her mind?”
“Could I see Miss Strom?”
“That would be for her to say, but she’s not home from work yet. She works part-time in the afternoons. She’s a close one, not that she hasn’t the right to be, and she’s never said what it is that she does. But she’s a decent sort. This is a decent house.”
“I’m sure it is.”
“It’s single rooms and they don’t cost much so you know you’re not at the Ritz Hotel, but there’s decent people here and I keep it as clean as a person can. When there’s not but one toilet on the floor it’s a struggle. But it’s decent.”
“Yes.”
“Poor Mary. Why’d anyone kill her? Was it sex, do you know? Not that you could imagine anyone wanting her, the old thing, but try to figure out a madman and you’ll go mad your own self. Was she molested?”
“No.”
“Just killed, then. Oh, God save us all. I gave her a home for almost seven years. Which it was no more than my job to do, not making it out to be charity on my part. But I had her here all that time and of course I never knew her, you couldn’t get to know a poor old soul like that, but I got used to her. Do you know what I mean?”
“I think so.”
“I got used to having her about. I might say Hello and Good morning and Isn’t it a nice day and not get a look in reply, but even on those days she was someone familiar to say something to. And she’s gone now and we’re all of us older, aren’t we?”
“We are.”
“The poor old thing. How could anyone do it, will you tell me that? How could anyone murder her?”
I don’t think she expected an answer. Just as well. I didn’t have one.
After dinner I returned for a few minutes of conversation with Genevieve Strom. She had no idea why Miss Redfield had left her the money. She’d received $880 and she was glad to get it because she could use it, but the whole thing puzzled her. “I hardly knew her,” she said more than once. “I keep thinking I ought to do something special with the money, but what?”
I made the bars that night but drinking didn’t have the urgency it had possessed the night before. I was able to keep it in proportion and to know that I’d wake up the next morning with my memory intact. In the course of things I dropped over to the newsstand a little past midnight and talked with Eddie Halloran. He was looking good and I said as much. I remembered him when he’d gone to work for Sid three years ago. He’d been drawn then, and shaky, and his eyes always moved off to the side of whatever he was looking at. Now there was confidence in his stance and he looked years younger. It hadn’t all come back to him and maybe some of it was lost forever. I guess the booze had him pretty good before he kicked it once and for all.