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.
He was a tall, thin, hawk-nosed man and he looked as if he was accustomed to having his own way. He certainly had control of himself. He took a half step back from the corpse and his mouth, which wasn’t much more than a white slit in his face to start with, got tighter and whiter. He reached in the inside pocket of his expensive gray topcoat and took out a .25 automatic. The gun was about as big as a pack of cigarettes, but it was big enough. With his left hand he reached back of him and closed the door into the hall.
“Drop that knife,” he said. And when I did, “Where’s David McCracken?”
I just stood there. There wasn’t much else I could do. “I don’t know,” I said.
The newcomer stared hard at me.
“This is his room, isn’t it? Where is he?”
“It’s his room all right, but he’s not here. I don’t know where he is.”
“Was he here when you killed this man?” His eyes flickered down to the body and back at me again, hard and black. “That’s impossible. This man hasn’t been dead more than ten minutes.” He had a deep voice but it was sharp and hard and very distinct. Except for one of these Boston accents, he would have made a swell race announcer. He said, “What are you doing in McCracken’s room?”
“I was looking for him.”
“And this man?” He gestured at the corpse without taking his eyes off me. That fishy stare was getting me.
“I found him here.”
“Who is he? What is his connection with Mr. McCracken? And who are you?”
I was getting over the shock of looking into the gun muzzle and felt sure the man wasn’t going to shoot. I said, “I’m a detective, of sorts. The guy on the floor I don’t know. Do you?”
We faced one another for about four seconds, the tall man trying to make up his mind about something. I had already made up my mind; I wished to God I had never heard of David McCracken.
The man said, his mind made up, “Back over to that phone in the corner and tell whoever answers that you have killed a man in room five-twelve and to send the police.”
“Wait a minute!” I said. “You’re jumping the bell. I didn’t kill him. I never saw the guy before.”
He said, “Phone,” and meant it.
The switchboard girl answered and I said, “Put Sam on the line.”
The tall man snapped, “You can talk to whoever answers!”
“To hell with you.” I was certain now he wasn’t going to shoot. I said, “Sam, I’m up in McCracken’s room. The door was unlocked; that’s how I got in. And there was somebody ahead of me. A guy with a knife stuck in his back.”
Sam made muffled moaning sounds like a man who has bet next week’s pay on the favorite and watched him run last.
“And now there’s somebody else up here, some nut with a gun who thinks I did the killing... No, I never saw either of ’em before. You better phone Lieutenant Murphy.”
I hung up and the tall man and I stood there looking at one another. With his left hand he reached in his pocket and got out an ivory-tipped cigarette and a gold lighter and lit up. He never took his eyes off me and he never moved the gun.
Someone knocked on the door. I thought it was the house dick. The tall man said, “Come in,” but the door was already opening, a woman coming through, saying, “Art, darling, I’ve—” and then she stumbled over the body.
She screamed. It wasn’t a loud cry. It was choked, like a man trying to yell after a horse has kicked him in the belly. Her eyes got too big for their sockets and I thought they were going to spill over. Her face got so white the make-up looked like smeared blood. She staggered back against the wall.
The tall man snapped at her, “Whom were you looking for?” You could be certain he said “whom” because that’s the way he pronounced words.
The woman didn’t say anything. She just stared at the corpse as though she was going to be sick.
“You were looking for Mr. McCracken?”
She looked up at him, and then at me. She was breathing hard. She was still frightened, but her face wasn’t so twisted with fear anymore and I began to notice that she was good-looking, very good-looking indeed, if you like redheads, and I do. Blondes, brunettes, and redheads. She was a little tall for me, slender, but full where she should be. She had a kind of bright, show-off beauty, and my guess was she’d been a chorus girl.
“Yes,” she said after a while. “David McCracken.”
“You’re lying!” the tall man snapped. He sounded damn sure of himself.
And about that time the house dick came in, and a few minutes later Lieutenant Murphy and a whole flock of boys from Headquarters.
Now the fun would begin. Fun for everyone but me.
The tall man pointed at me and told them, “I knocked on the door and entered and found this man with the bloody knife in his hand.”
Murphy is a big man with pink cheeks and pale, heavy-lidded eyes, and a brother-in-law who is a politician, or else he never would have got on the force, no less be a lieutenant. When he looked at me I knew he was still remembering a sure thing I had given him a couple of weeks back. The sure thing had run fourth. (That’s the hell of being connected with the track; persons keep after you to put them onto something, and if you don’t they hate you for a cheapskate, and if you do — and it comes in — they forget you; and if it doesn’t come home, they say you touted them wrong intentionally. Hell, if I could find one really sure thing a season, I wouldn’t be working for a living.)
I said, “Now look, Pete. I never saw this guy on the floor before in my life. I didn’t kill him. Why don’t you ask this tall bird what he’s doing here and what he’s carrying a gun for?”
The tall man said his name was Linden Blumberry and he was from Boston. “I am Mr. David McCracken’s lawyer and the administrator of his estate. For several weeks I have been trying to persuade Mr. McCracken to come to Boston to complete the sale of some bonds of his for which I have obtained an offer. For some strange reason he has refused to come there. So I came to him.”
“Carrying a gun?” I said.
He looked down a thin nose at me before he decided to answer. “And a certified check for five thousand dollars to complete the sale. Of course I carried a gun.”
I told Murphy about McCracken’s niece, and how I had come up to his room and knocked on the door, which was ajar, I said, and which swung open when I knocked; and from there I went on with the exact truth.
Murphy snorted and the fingerprint man said, from the next room, “Only one set of prints on this knife, I think, Lieutenant. I can make sure after I get it down to Headquarters.” And that set would be mine!
The M.E. said the dead man had been killed sometime within the last forty minutes, and Murphy looked at me and nodded his head.
The redheaded girl said her name was Nell Parker, and she had known McCracken in New York, had written to him occasionally. She had come south for the winter, arriving in New Orleans that very day, and had called on McCracken.
Both she and Mr. Linden Blumberry said they had never seen the dead man before.
Murphy had the hotel manager and Sam, the night clerk, in the room by now. Sam looked worried. “I didn’t give anybody the key to Mr. McCracken’s room,” he kept saying. “I don’t know how the door could have been opened.”
“You didn’t have any idea that Sandy Rice was coming up here?” Murphy asked.
“No, sir. There’ve been lots of persons phoning and asking about Mr. McCracken lately, but I just told them he wasn’t in. I would have told this gentleman,” he nodded toward Linden Blumberry, “when he asked for Mr. McCracken’s room number, but he walked off before I could explain.”