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.
When he’d finished with them, Ben motioned me off to one side. “You got any ideas on this thing, Lloyd?”
“No, I’m off it. I was supposed to warn Buddy Tomlinson off Emagine Buford. Now Buddy doesn’t need it.”
“You think the gal is holding anything back?” He cut a side glance at the car where Allene was still sitting stiffly.
“If she’s holding out on you, she’s holding out on me, too.”
Ben sighed and mopped his face. “May be one of them long drawn cases. I got to trace this Buddy Tomlinson backward, find out who he was, where he’s been keeping himself, in whose company, and so on. I might find a motive somewhere along the line.
“Funny kind of kill. You didn’t get a good look in there, did you, Lloyd?”
I hadn’t. But I didn’t say anything. I just stood passive and let Ben get it off his chest. I knew that in talking it in his confidential whisper, he was setting the details in his mind.
“Nothing in the whole bungalow had been hurt — except Tomlinson. You saw the wound in his face, Lloyd. He was shot in close. The side of his right palm was mutilated. Looked like somebody was threatening him with a gun. He made a grab for it and the shooting started.”
“What does that give you?”
“Nothing much. It must mean he was shot with a revolver. Don’t need to tell a man like you that an automatic won’t fire with pressure on the killing end of it. Ejector won’t work, gun won’t cock, gun jams up. We’re hunting the slug. From Tomlinson’s cheek looks like a thirty-eight. So maybe when I find out where he’s been keeping himself, who he’s been seeing, I might find out somebody who owns a revolver like that.”
“You need me for anything else, Ben?”
“I guess not.”
“Then I’m going back to Tampa. I’ll drop the girl in St. Pete. She’ll probably want to talk with her step-mother.”
“She won’t have much privacy.” Ben grinned. “There’s a phone in Tomlinson’s bungalow and I’m gonna have city Homicide look in on Mrs. Emagine Buford.” He mopped his face some more. “Hell to work in this heat. I’ll see you around, Lloyd.”
I got in the car and drove off. The last I saw of the scene, Baxter Osgood and Phyllis Darnell were still standing on Osgood’s flagstone terrace, watching Ben Aiken waddle his way into the Tomlinson bungalow. Somehow, they looked scared.
I drove Allene to the Morro Hotel, in the northeast section of St. Pete. The drive along Tampa Bay was wide, beautiful, lined with fine houses and hotels. A few boats were out sailing on the bay, the small, white triangles of their sails tilted over in the light breeze.
The Morro was built like an old Spanish castle. When I braked before it, I saw a black car at the curb. Allene saw it, caught her lip between her teeth. She turned her face to me as she got out of the car. “I’d like to see you again sometime,” she said.
I looked at her for a minute. “I’ll phone you this weekend.”
She closed the car door, went running up the wide, palm-lined walk. She was staying here at the Morro with her step-mother, but I didn’t know the phone number and I decided I didn’t like to thumb through the phone books. It was just as well. I was twenty years her senior.
I drove back to Tampa and went to the office. The old man wasn’t there and I mumbled talk with the girl behind the reception desk until he came in. He went into his private office and I told Fayette everything that had happened. His chiseled, rawboned face looked gaunt. He sank behind his desk. “What’d you find out about Tomlinson?”
“Nothing, except that now he’s just a dead pretty boy. It ain’t our case. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
I caught a bus and rode up through the squalor of lower Nebraska to my apartment. I bought a twenty-five-pound block of ice at the ice house on the corner, carried it up to my apartment. I put the ice in a dishpan, set the dishpan on a center table in the bedroom. I plugged in the electric fan and set it behind the pan, so that the air was blowing over the ice, over the bed.
I sat down on the edge of the bed. The air was cool and good for a second or two, until I got used to it. I reached under my left armpit and pulled out the knife. It was long, keen, and gleaming with a six-and-a-quarter-inch blade. I knew what was bothering me, now.
A living, breathing, feeling man had been killed.
I slung the knife. It flashed, struck the doorjamb, stood out from the wood, quivering.
I flopped over on the bed and went to sleep.
It was a hell of a hot day.
Chapter Two
Knife for Hire
I didn’t sleep long. I woke with a mouthful of cotton, sweat drenching me, a heat-thickened pulse pounding in my head. I ran my tongue around my gums, realized that somebody was knocking on the door. As I went to answer, I plucked the knife from the door jamb, put it back in its sheath under my armpit. I looked at my watch. It was 4:40 in the afternoon.
When I opened the door, Phyllis Darnell had her hand raised to knock again. She’d changed from the white play suit, wearing now a yellow silk dress that really set off her complexion, lazy black eyes, and midnight hair.
“Oh!” she said, as if the opening of the door had startled her. She made vague gestures in the air with her hands. If it hadn’t been for that way she had of using her hands, she’d have been a very beautiful woman.
“You wanted to see me?”
“Yes, Mr. Carter. Are you busy?”
“It depends. I guess you want to hire a detective?”
“Why do you say that?”
“Well, my looks didn’t bring you here, did they?”
Ice flaked in her eyes. “No, your looks didn’t bring me here. Are you going to ask me in or not?”
“Why not?” I held the door wide. When she came in and I’d closed the door, I said, “You care for beer?”
“No.”
“Well, excuse me a moment. Make yourself at home.”
She followed me out to the kitchen. I opened the icebox, counted the bottles of beer. The girl who’d come in to clean while I’d been out had been thirsty again. I opened a bottle of beer, killed half of it, said, “I’m listening.”
“I really don’t know how to begin, Mr. Carter. I really don’t!” She wrung her hands, real fright coming to life in her eyes. “It’s very awkward.”
“I’ve heard awkward things before. Sit down. Iced tea?”
She shook her head, then nodded. “Yes, I’ll have a glass of tea.”
I put water on to boil.
“How’d you find me, Mrs. Darnell?”
“I asked that sheriff. From the way he talked to you when he arrived at Buddy Tomlinson’s bungalow, I knew you were a detective. He told me where you worked, where you lived. You weren’t in your office, neither was your boss, and the girl at the reception desk.”
“Okay, okay. I guess you wanted to talk to me about Tomlinson?”
“I yes — no. I mean, in a way I did.” She glanced about the kitchen as if seeking a way out, a way to stall. “I see the water is simmering, Mr. Carter.”
So it was. I took the battered aluminum pot off the flame, dropped in a tea bag, chipped ice and put it in a glass, and poured the tea over it. I set out cream, sugar, and scratched in the back corner of the icebox for the lone, wilted lemon there. Slicing the lemon, I said, “Why don’t you just tell me straight off? Why beat around the bush? Buddy Tomlinson has been murdered and it’s put you on the spot somehow. You want me to remove you from said spot. All right, what is it?”