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.
“The redhead who came rushing into your uncle’s hotel room tonight said that was her name.”
Mary was quiet a moment. “When you asked me why I didn’t go to the police about my uncle,” she said, “I didn’t tell you the exact truth — at least not all of it. Maybe I should.”
“It’s about time.”
“When I telephoned Uncle David the day I got to New Orleans, the first thing he said when he heard my voice was: ‘Nell, darling!’ He said it in a way Uncle David has assured me he never spoke to women. He was pretty much of a Puritan. When he didn’t turn up, I thought perhaps this Nell was mixed up in it somewhere, and if I went to the police and they found him — and her — he might not be in the humor for lending me money. I thought it was better to find him privately.”
“I think it’s time we found her,” I said.
“Do you believe Uncle David’s with her?”
I looked at her squarely. “I believe your Uncle David is dead. I believe he has been dead for a month.”
The morning papers were on the street by now. I read that I was wanted on suspicion of murder. From what Lieutenant Pete Murphy had told the reporters, there didn’t seem to be much suspicion; Pete was sure. Cops were ordered to shoot if necessary. It gave me a sort of weak feeling in the stomach.
The paper also listed the names and addresses of everybody mixed in the affair. Nell Parker was staying in a small apartment hotel in the French Quarter. We went there.
It was one of these old places with a courtyard. Fog was coming in from the river and you could smell the river and once or twice hear a ship’s horn moaning. There was a kind of gray light mixed in with the fog, but you still had to feel your way along. Inside the house it was almost as bad; a hall down each floor that was almost as wide as the rooms on either side and just a small globe at the end. The whole building had a damp cold smell.
“How’ll you know which room is hers?” Mary was whispering, though I had told her not to.
“I’m guessing there’ll be somebody awake in her room, and talking.” So I went from door to door, listening. It was on the second floor at the back I heard the voices.
A man was saying, “—never meant to let myself in for murder! They’ll pin it on me sure! We’ve got to get away from here!”
A woman said something I couldn’t understand.
Then the man said, “We’ve got enough. We’ve got insurance.”
I didn’t know what to do. If I went for the cops and this man and woman got away, I was a sure thing for the electric chair. And once the cops got their hands on me, they weren’t likely to look farther; it would take a long time to convince them, probably too long. But I didn’t have a gun.
I decided to take the chance this fellow wouldn’t shoot. I motioned to Mary to stand back, raised my hand, and knocked on the door.
The voices in the room stopped as though I had hit them with a hammer. There wasn’t a sound at all. Way down the river somewhere a foghorn tooted.
I knocked on the door again.
There was about ten seconds of quiet and I thought, “Maybe they are taking it on the lam out the window,” then I heard the clacking sound a woman’s mules make and the door was unlocked and opened. The redhead from the hotel stood there, wearing a negligée. I moved with the door as it opened and got inside before she could stop me.
Except for the redhead, the room seemed empty. But on the far side there was a closed French window onto a balcony. I thought I saw something move there, a little gleam of light on metal. I kept wondering if the man was going to shoot, and I had the weak sensation you get as you start down the highest drop on a roller coaster.
The redhead said, “What the devil do you want?”
“I’m looking for your husband.”
She took a long breath. It made her breasts stand tight against the silk negligée. “For who?”
Arthur Andrews supposedly had been killed at the race track the time I first saw McCracken. But I felt sure now he was alive. I looked at the window.
“For Mr. Arthur Andrews,” I said. The light glint outside moved and I said quick, loud: “I know he didn’t kill that man at the hotel. I just want him to help me prove it.”
Her face got very pale, but set. She had green eyes like those of a cat. “Didn’t you kill him?”
“No,” I said.
“Then who did?”
I’ll admit it was part guess work, but I had to give her and Andrews something because I needed them. The whole thing had to come clean before the cops would believe me. And I didn’t know who was on the balcony. I knew part of it but not all. I didn’t know I was practically trying to commit suicide.
I said, “The real McCracken’s lawyer killed him. That Mr. Linden Blumberry.”
On the balcony the light beam moved fast. A man yelled and I dived sideways. There was a hole in the glass window with lines spider-webbing out from it and the sound of the gun came smashing through.
I was rolling sideways, trying to get out of range, when the second shot blasted. The bullet ripped into the floor by my face. Then I got both hands on a straight chair and flung it. It was a big chair, but when you’re scared as I was, you’re stronger than you think.
The window went out with a crash. And there was another sound that wasn’t part of the window breaking; that kind of screeching noise a nail makes when it’s pulled out of wood, and the crackle of iron.
A man screamed. He really screamed. Then there was a kind of soggy bump and the scream stopped with it.
I stood up and was surprised my knees would hold me, and even more surprised that my stomach didn’t give way and let my shoulders settle down on my knees. But somehow I got over to the balcony. There was a man standing there looking down where the rail was gone. As I came up the man turned around. It was David McCracken. At least, he was the fellow I had thought was McCracken; the fellow who told Mary his name was Smith. His name actually was Arthur Andrews.
I looked down to where there was something dark in the courtyard. “Who’s that?”
“I don’t know. When you knocked, I ducked out here and he was here. I’d never seen him before. When he tried to shoot you I grabbed him. We were wrestling and... and...” He swallowed.
We went down and looked at him. It was Linden Blumberry, the lawyer. He wasn’t dead, but he wasn’t going to get up soon. His back was broken.
Mary was ready to go back to medical school and I had said I would take her to the train. We started a couple of hours early so as to have time for a drink or two. Mary was sipping a martini and I was drinking gin with her, a Kinney fifty-fifty, which is a smooth mixture of rum, grapefruit juice, the white of an egg, and gin.
Mary said, “Now tell me how you knew that Mr. Blumberry, Uncle Dave’s lawyer, had killed that man.”
I said I hated to admit it, but it was part guess work. “But I did have some things to go on. When he found me in the room with the corpse, he said the man hadn’t been dead more than ten minutes. But he hadn’t even touched the body, except to stumble against it. He’d hardly glanced at it — and it had stopped bleeding. In that light he couldn’t even tell if the blood was dry or not. I wondered from the first how he could be so sure.”
“And you guessed from that?”
“With what you told me. You said you saw Blumberry coming down the hotel stairway. In other words, he had already been upstairs, and was walking down again. Yet he claimed to have come up only once, in the elevator. All I needed was a motive. The cops have got that straight now.”
“Explain it,” she said.
“It was some kind of South American government bond which had been defaulted years ago and was considered worthless. I don’t understand much about these things, but it seems this government was trying to get some fresh American cash and, to make a good impression, they were going to redeem those old bonds. Your uncle had nearly a hundred thousand dollars in them. The redemption had been kept under cover and Blumberry was trying to buy them from your uncle for five thousand, buying them under another name and selling your uncle on the idea he’d found a sucker. The trouble was, your uncle was supposed to go to Boston to close the deal. And he couldn’t go because he was dead. And Andrews couldn’t go because he’d be recognized as a fake.”