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 way she whitened beneath her deep tan gave her the appearance of wearing a heavy coat of dark powder. Her hands were trembling. “I... I really don’t know what to say. I really don’t.”
I set the tea before her, sat down across the table, and finished my beer. Then I just sat there, not speaking, not moving.
When the silence began to eat away her nerves, she said shrilly, “I lied this morning! I’m married — but I’m not a divorcée. And I had every reason in the world for wanting to kill Buddy Tomlinson!”
She began to cry softly. She took out a wispy handkerchief, made dabs at her eyes.
“I really hate to say this. I really do. You see, Mr. Carter, I have a husband in Augusta, Maine. But we’re not divorced, and never intend to be. I really don’t know how I’m going to explain this to you. Oh, I’ve been a fool! I can hardly explain it to myself.
“I love my husband deeply and I am sure I mean more to him than life itself. I won’t try to excuse myself. But every year I take a vacation, to Florida, the West Coast, South America, or Cuba. My poor, trusting husband! His business keeps him tied to his desk, but he insists that I might as well escape a few weeks of northern winter every year. It’s on these trips that I present myself as an unmarried woman or a divorcée. That way one interests a better class of men than if one admitted being a married woman. Somehow that way it always seemed in my mind to cheapen my husband less.”
She was looking down at her hands, momentarily quiet in her lap, waiting for me to speak. To condemn her, maybe. I opened another cold beer and didn’t say anything.
“Drink your tea,” I said.
It wasn’t very good tea, but she drank it gratefully. I finished my beer and said, “Buddy Tomlinson was one of those men?”
She nodded mutely.
“You certainly made a mistake about classifying men in his case!”
She shuddered under the sentence as if it was a blow of my hand, but she continued to look silently down.
“How’d you meet Tomlinson?”
“Through Baxter Osgood. They seemed to be close friends. Baxter Osgood owns a small beer garden on Coquina Beach. I was there one night — he introduced me to Buddy.”
“And you were promptly swept off your feet.”
“You aren’t a woman. You didn’t know Buddy Tomlinson,” she said in a stricken voice. “Now he’s dead, and the letters have disappeared.”
“You made the mistake of writing him some mush notes?”
Her face flooded red. “He was in Bradenton for a week. He begged me to write him every day. He was so sweet, so boyish.” Her voice thickened with a violent anger; her hands played on the table top. “Something I said must have caused him to suspect that I wasn’t really divorced.”
“Can you recall what you might have said?”
“I— No. One night — just before he went down to Bradenton — we drank quite a bit. I was drunk when he took me to my hotel. I must have talked of my life in Augusta.”
“Afterwards he wanted money for the letters?”
She nodded again, swallowing in such a way her throat constricted with the action. “I gave him almost five hundred dollars — but he didn’t give me the letters back. I knew then that I was in a deadly game, that my life in Augusta depended on what I did. I hoped to wheedle the letters out of him. Now he’s dead. Can’t you see what might be the results if those letters come to light? My husband’s life ruined, a possible murder charge against me. Mr. Carter, you must help me. I can’t afford to be drawn openly into this kind of mess.”
I opened a third beer. She was in a jam, all right. If those letters had been worth five hundred before Buddy Tomlinson’s death, now they were worth every nickel she could lay her hands on, and somebody evidently knew that. If the police had discovered the letters, they’d have taken her in for questioning by this time. I said, “Any idea who Tomlinson might have boasted to? Who might have known about those letters?”
“No — unless it’s Baxter Osgood. I don’t think he makes all his money out of that beer garden he owns. I think there was something more between him and Buddy than mere friendship.”
“Business deals?”
“Perhaps.”
“All right,” I said, “I’ll do what I can to help you. But get one thing straight. This is murder. Contrary to what the public thinks, private dicks don’t like to get mixed in murder. If we have to wade through murder the cost is high.”
“I know,” Phyllis Darnell said. “I’ll pay.”
“I’m not worrying. After all, I’ll have the letters, won’t I?”
I ushered her out, showered, and went over to Mac’s garage, where my coupe had been laid up with a ring job. Greasy, limp from the heat, Mac had just finished the job. He wiped his hands on a piece of waste and told me the old crate was ready to roll. I made arrangements to see him on the fifteenth and drove down to the office.
The old man was locking his private office, getting ready to leave for the day. I told him to unlock again, explained the case.
He unlocked the door, walked across his office saying, “A murder case? I don’t like it, Lloyd. I never liked a murder case.”
“I know.”
“The official boys have everything to work on a murder case, labs, organization, everything. A private agency small as ours ain’t equipped for it.”
“I know.”
I opened his desk drawer, took out the .38 police special that always nestled there. I pulled out a corner of my shirttail, tucked the gun in my waistband, and tucked the shirt back in over the gun. You’d never know it was there. A box of loads was in the corner of the drawer. I dropped a handful of them in my pocket.
The old man was already on the phone, talking long-distance.
I sat down and smoked until he finished.
He pushed back the phone, shadows over his rawboned, gaunt face.
“Ben Aiken’s glad we’re going to cooperate,” Fayette said.
“That’s good. He give you much?”
Henry Fayette nodded, his frown deep and sour. He jabbed at his desk blotter with his letter opener. “This Buddy Tomlinson was quite a guy. Convicted once in Miami on a larceny charge. Charged once with blackmail in Baltimore, Maryland, but got off for lack of evidence. Nabbed once in Brownsville, Texas, for being mixed in the marijuana racket, but beat that rap too. Miami had his whole previous record.
“Tomlinson came to St. Petersburg almost a year ago in company with an unknown woman who can’t be located. There’s nothing on the St. Pete blotter against him except a charge of driving intoxicated, for which he was fined.
“He was killed between twelve midnight and one o’clock last night, which means that he lay in his bungalow during that time without being found. The murder gun has not been located, but Aiken has got him an important witness. Guy by the name of Baxter B. Osgood. He the one you met over there?”
I nodded. “Osgood owns a beer garden on the beach. He lives in the bungalow next to Tomlinson’s. An athletic, freckled, blond guy. He could be plenty mean, I guess.”
The old man traced a pattern on the desk blotter with the opener. “Osgood says he was awakened last night about twelve thirty. Says he dreamed a backfire woke him, now realizes it must have been the shot in Buddy Tomlinson’s bungalow. Osgood says his bedroom window faces the Tomlinson house, and that from that window he saw a woman leaving Tomlinson’s bungalow. There was a bright moon. You know that moon at the beach, turning night into day. Osgood recognized the woman by the red swagger coat she was wearing, and her hat. The hat had a couple of tall feathers sticking up out of it.”
Fayette flung the opener on the desk; his face was gray. “Dammit, I told you she was an old friend of mine.” Accusation flamed on the old man’s face, then he shook his head as if clearing it. “I’m upset. I can’t blame you. I got no reason to blame you, Lloyd.”