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 phone kept snarling. After a minute I was wide awake and in that state going back to sleep in the muggy, noonday Florida heat was out of the question. I heaved myself on the edge of the bed and shouted at the phone, “All right, I’m coming!”
The apartment was sodden with heat; I’ve been in Tampa a long time but I never got used to the heat.
While I’m padding toward the phone, I might as well tell you who I am.
The name is Lloyd Carter, age forty-four. I’m beginning to add an inner tube around my middle, and I don’t like to be kidded about the way I’m starting to bald on the crown of my head. I live in a run-down apartment on the edge of Tampa’s Ybor City. The bed is lumpy, the furniture old. It’s just a place to sleep. I got in the private detective business twenty-one years ago. I never intended to make it a lifetime career, but I guess now I will.
I’ve never married, which is maybe what put the pickles in my disposition. I had a girl when I was young, in New York, that I might have married, but she ran off with a punk I was trying to nail. He was cornered in Indiana by state police, made a run for it, but a fast freight got in the way of his automobile. She was in the car.
New York wasn’t the same after that, and I came south. I’ve been with Southeastern Detective Service over sixteen years...
I picked up the telephone.
“Lloyd?”
It was the old man’s voice. Henry Fayette, who ram-rodded Southeastern, should have retired a long time ago. He’s seen too much of the seamy side of life streaming through his agency. It’s in his voice. But he never could retire because he’s a spender and is always scratching hard to keep the wolf at arm’s length.
“Lloyd,” his tired voice said, “I want you to come to the office right away.”
I didn’t argue. He’d known how late I’d worked last night. If he hadn’t had to call me, he wouldn’t have.
I went in the bedroom and dressed. Baggy slacks, sweaty sport shirt. And the knife under my left armpit. I’m naked without the knife. My work puts me across the tables now and then from Ybor City characters. The only weapon some of those lads understand is a knife.
I was going to have to get my laundry out today. I wrote a note for the girl, left it on the kitchen table. I opened the icebox, drank a pint of beer, and headed for the office. The heat was terrible. Already beads of sweat were like a film of hot oil all over me.
The agency’s offices are in a sagging brick building that was young when Tampa was young, on the lower end of Franklin Street. I opened the door to Henry Fayette’s office. He was behind his desk, a tall, gaunt, rawboned gray man in a gray tropical suit. He stood up. The girl sitting at the end of his desk watched me cross the office. Without looking directly at her, I sized her up.
She wasn’t exactly plain, but she wasn’t beautiful, either. She was tall and slim, with a nice enough figure and face and rather drab brown hair. Just a girl who could lose herself in a crowd, with a sort of hungry look on her face that might mean she was hungry for food — or love. Her clothes, white linen frock and bag, indicated she had enough money to eat regularly.
The chief introduced us. Her name was Allene Buford.
“Lloyd,” Henry Fayette said with a small, tired gesture of his hand, “Miss Buford wants us to do something about her step-mother and a chap named Buddy Tomlinson. You might repeat the details, Miss Buford, to Lloyd as you told them to me.”
She sat on the edge of her chair, hands in her lap, and gave me the details. Her voice was calm, even, but it was belied by the cold fire deep in her eyes.
It was about the average sordid mess. This Allene Buford’s father had been a fairly wealthy man. Allene’s mother had died ten years ago, and her father had remarried six years later, all of which was normal enough. But the sordid part began when the old man died. In his will, he left provisions for Allene to have an income, not too large. The bulk of his fortune, Emagine Buford, Allene’s step-mother, was to hold until the girl was thirty — seven years from now.
“My father seemed to have some foggy idea that I wouldn’t be capable of handling almost a million dollars until I was at least thirty.”
“And what happens then?” I asked her.
“Emagine is to come into two hundred thousand. I am to have the rest of the money.” Her face tightened, and I leaned back with a sigh, knowing that now we were getting around to the sordid part.
Emagine Buford and her step-daughter had come south for the winter, to St. Petersburg, the resort city across the bay from Tampa. She had joined the throngs, a woman who had outlived her responsibilities. Who had nothing but time, money, and restlessness on her hands. She’d met Buddy Tomlinson. From Allene’s description, he was one of those boys who had perpetual youth, a husky physique that, at forty-five, was still trim, a disarming smile, coal black hair, and one of those little-boy faces.
The fact that she was almost fifteen years Buddy’s senior hadn’t worried Emagine any. “She’s like a school girl,” Allene said, “with her first beau. She’s buying bathing suits and evening gowns and seeing Buddy Tomlinson constantly.”
“And where do I enter? What do you want me to do?” I looked at her over the flame of my lighter as I touched it to a fag.
Allene looked steadily at me. “I want you to mark up Buddy Tomlinson so he’ll never be handsome to any woman again!”
A second or two ticked away. She saw the old man about to speak. “Of course,” she said, “I know you can’t be hired to do that. But I know Buddy’s trying to marry Emagine. He has plenty of chance of success. My money is melting away fast enough in her keeping, and if Buddy marries her, there won’t be anything for me when I’m thirty!”
“Could Tomlinson and Emagine manage that?” I asked the old man.
“You know anything can be managed with enough money and the right lawyers,” he stated flatly.
“But it’s my money!” For the first time a bit of panic showed in Allene’s face. “He was my father; he made the money. Now it’s my money! You can’t let them do that to me!”
“Will you wait outside for a minute, Miss Buford?” Fayette asked. The girl looked at him, then got up and went out of the office.
“Lloyd,” Fayette said when she had closed the door behind her, “I want you to drive over to St. Pete with her. This is a sort of personal thing with me. I’ve known Emagine Buford for a long time. She used to live in Tampa. Then she went north to work, met and married Ollie Buford. Since she’s been back in Florida I’ve visited her a time or two at her place in St. Pete. That’s why the girl came here to us, I guess.
“Emagine’s going through a phase in her second childhood, to my way of thinking, but I don’t want anything to happen to her. I want her to have a chance to wake up. See what kind of man Tomlinson is. See if he’ll scare. Then scare him.”
“I’m flat,” I said.
He grimaced, pulled out his wallet, hesitated, and handed me the lone twenty from the worn leather sheath. “Use my car. It’s parked in back of the building. See Buddy Tomlinson, phone me back, and take the rest of the day off.”
I said thanks. When I left his office, he was punching tiny holes in his desk blotter with the tip of his letter opener...
The girl rode with her head slightly back, catching the breeze that blew in the gray sedan. Her hair rippled. Her lips were parted a little as she looked out over the bay. “Tomlinson has a beach place,” she said. “On Coquina Key. We’ll probably find him there.”
That was about all the talking we did. But I kept looking at her. She wasn’t beautiful. Yet there was — something.