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.
I swung down the street until I came to an all-night drug store, summoned a taxi, and took another look at the apartment house where Maude Enders lived. One look was enough. There was a light in the girl’s apartment, and a closed car before the door.
She had been summoned, this girl of mystery, this perfectly formed woman who was absolutely unconscious of any charm, who dwelt in a mental world, who thought swiftly and cleverly.
I spoke to the taxi driver and had him drive me around the block, stop at an alley and turn out the lights. From the alley I could see the light in the girl’s apartment.
Three minutes and the light snapped out.
The girl with the mole came out of the front door, leaning on the arm of a man who was bundled up in a heavy overcoat, and entered the car. I didn’t have to be a prophet to know that the girl was being taken to account, that she was a prisoner right then — a prisoner of the man on whose arm she was leaning, that she was being summoned to the headquarters of the crime trust.
I had almost overlooked that bet. A moment or two more and it would have been too late. I had intended to look up this Schwartz and have it out with him, but this was a better lead. It might result in almost anything.
The closed car moved off and I followed, followed in a way that made it virtually impossible to detect the car in which I was traveling, and in which a twenty-dollar bill had placed me in the driver’s seat with the uniformed chauffeur as a passenger.
I cut across in back of the car, swung around a block, headed behind it again, ran a block ahead and let it pass, followed for a ways, ducked through alleys, always watching the tail-light wherever possible, detouring where I was fairly sure of my ground — and then I lost it.
The car had turned off, where? I swung around the four sides of the block, saw a tail-light down a side street, swept past and knew that I had located my quarry.
It was a flat in the better residential district, and the front was black, gloomy, respectable as became a flat-building at that hour of the night. I left the car a block away and began to cross back-yards. Somewhere a dog barked, but he was chained. Exclusive residential districts do not cater to tenants with dogs. Rapidly I adjusted the white whiskers, the steel-rimmed glasses, the wig, the touch of complexion paste which was a part of my disguise as an old man, a pasty-faced, white-haired old blusterer. It had been a good disguise, but the agents of the crime trust had penetrated it. I wore it so that they wouldn’t think I knew they had discovered the secret of that disguise. I would let them think Ed Jenkins was a bit of a fool... until it suited my purpose to let them think otherwise.
A man guarded the back of the flat, a man who took his job none too seriously. I stooped and filled the little leather pouch — which I always carried as a pocketbook — with fine sand from the back of the yard, a sandy loam which packed hard and fast, and made a formidable weapon out of my purse.
Ten minutes of careful stalking, fifteen, and then he saw me. His hand raced to his hip, there was a swish through the air, and then he went bye-bye, without a sound, the skin hardly bruised.
I stepped over him and took one of the back windows. The kitchen was deserted. A long hallway showed a faint light. A man sat with his back to the wall, a gun in either hand, nodding, breathing heavily, regularly. I stepped past him and paused before a door from which came the sound of voices.
Without knocking I opened the door and stepped into the room. It was furnished as an office, and a huge desk occupied the center of the floor. Upon this desk was a small, portable reading lamp, and the circle of its rays showed the white face of the woman with the mole, the thin, rat-like features of the man who had accompanied her, and whom I recognized as one of the most prominent of the criminal lawyers in the city, and showed, also, the huge bulk of the man who was sitting behind that desk.
It was that man in whom I was interested.
He was big, flabby, his skin dead white, his lips fat and spongy, and his face hung in folds about his chin, but there was a soft sheen to the skin, a smoothness of texture. His eyes caught the reflection of the reading lamp and seemed to shoot it forth in a glittering collection of icy rays. There was never so cold and remorseless an expression upon the face of any living mortal I had seen as was contained in the eyes of this heavy man behind the desk.
He was speaking, and he finished his talk before he shifted his glance toward the door. His voice was soft, gentle, an even monotone, and there was no expression in it. It was his eyes which gave the expression, a cold, deadly intensity of purpose.
“Yet you delayed the signal. In some manner he escaped, and he left by neither the front nor the rear.”
The girl chose her words carefully, and there was a slight break in her voice, the faintest inkling of hysterical panic which she was fighting to control.
“Perhaps... perhaps he was... hiding on an upper floor.”
“Not unless he had been warned,” came the colorless tones of the man’s voice. “And if he was warned, who warned him?”
The slight noise I had made in opening the door had been overlooked. Temporarily it had slipped the mind of this man with the eyes of ice. So engrossed was he in probing the mind of the girl that he had forgotten to raise his eyes. Had he done so he would probably have taken me for one of his guards. The light threw a sharp glare on the desk, but the rest of the room was in gloom.
I advanced to the table.
The girl was weakening. I could see her head droop slightly. What her face told I knew not, but that sag of her head and neck told me much.
With an effort, scowling his impatience, the man with the eyes of ice tore his gaze from the girl and raised his glance.
“Well?” he said, and his tone was as colorless as ever, notwithstanding the impatience which gleamed from his eyes.
“Well,” I answered, “very well, thank you. In fact I am quite well, and I dropped in to say good evening.”
I was watching him like a hawk, looking for that telltale start, that swift tightening of his facial muscles which would show that I had jarred his self-control; but there was nothing. His face remained as passive as though it had been so much pink putty. His eyes were so hard and flinty one would have expected no change there. His voice remained well modulated.
“Ah, yes, Mr. Jenkins, himself. Come in and draw up a chair, Jenkins. We were discussing you.”
I walked on in, my eyes on his hands. The rat-faced criminal lawyer had plunged his hand into a side pocket of his coat, but I had no fear of him. He wouldn’t have the nerve to shoot until the last minute, and I didn’t intend to let them get the lead. I was going to play my own cards for a while.
“I dropped in to tell you that you’re all wrong. I waited outside this girl’s apartment for a second, just to see if there was to be any telephoning or signaling, and I heard the curtain roller go up and down three times. That meant a machine in front, and a machine in front probably meant a guard in the rear. That’s all there was to that.
“However, I wanted to get in touch with you, and when I saw you were going to have this girl down here so you could throw a scare into her, I decided to trail along and have a little conversation on my own hook.”
The big man at the desk brushed his hand slightly as though he was waving the girl with the mole entirely to one side, and his eyes never left my face.
“Jenkins, I offered you once before, and I offer you again, a place with me, a place where you can make much money, have men beneath you to do the dangerous work, and can really find some market for the brains you have.”
I nodded easily.
“Just after you made that offer before you double-crossed me by holding out some papers on me.”