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.
“You mean the woman Baxter Osgood recognized leaving the Tomlinson bungalow is Emagine Buford?”
Fayette nodded. In his quiet, flat voice he said, “Ben Aiken’s jailed her — charged her with first-degree murder.”
I whistled softly. It didn’t help the old man’s feelings any.
It was pretty late in the day to do anything much, but Fayette insisted on driving over to St. Pete, to talk to Emagine Buford. We took my coupe. The thing I wanted out of this case was those letters of Phyllis Darnell’s. That’s what we’d get paid for. But the letters were somewhere in the pattern of Buddy Tomlinson’s death, and I knew we were going to have to sift through that pattern to find them. I didn’t like a damn thing about the case.
It’s only half an hour’s drive from Tampa to St. Pete by way of Gandy Bridge, and it was still daylight when we got in the Sunshine City, though the sun had dropped in the Gulf, leaving behind it vast streamers of crimson and gold in the western sky.
We wasted fifteen minutes talking over the case with the St. Pete men. Then we went back to Emagine Buford’s cell.
She had been crying, and her face was swollen, but even so you could see that she had been a raving beauty in her day. As Allene had said of her step-mother, Emagine was well preserved, slim, with a small, unlined face, and hair dyed to a nice shade just darker than auburn. She didn’t look a day over a young forty.
She managed a smile when the old man entered her cell. “It’s unfortunate that you have to visit me here, Henry.”
Fayette said, “We want to help you. This is Lloyd Carter. Mrs. Buford, Lloyd.”
We each said it was a pleasure, and Emagine sank on the edge of her cot. She looked at the old man with hope and trust. They talked for two minutes. She wasn’t able to tell us a thing more than the county men had. She had been home asleep, she claimed, when Buddy Tomlinson had been murdered. She hadn’t seen him since the night before his death. She spoke of him with a mixed tenderness and hot, new-born hatred.
The old man told her that we’d do our best, and we left her.
That was that, for my money. Outside headquarters, Fayette mopped his face with a big red bandanna and said we might as well eat.
We went to eat.
It was just after 8:30 when I got back to my apartment house in Tampa. The place had no garages; so if you owned a car, you left it at the curb. I locked the coupe, and walked in the apartment house. I was halfway up the flight of stairs when the door opened in the lower hall and my landlady’s nasal drawl came to me. “Is that you, Mr. Carter?”
I bent over the stair railing, looking down the hall. She was standing in her doorway. “There’s a woman in your apartment,” she said. “Said she had to see you. I let her in to wait.”
She slammed her door.
I went on up the stairs, down the hall, and opened my apartment door. Allene Buford stood up when I entered.
She’d turned on the small lamp over near the corner, and the soft light silhouetted her. I remembered her as I’d first seen her in the old man’s office earlier in the day: not plain, but not beautiful either. Now, with the light behind her like that, a light not bright enough to glare at her or to show up the room in which she was standing, she almost made the grade. She was almost beautiful.
“Are you mad at me, Lloyd?”
“For coming here? I don’t think so.”
“I’m glad,” she said in her calm, colorless voice. She took a turn up and down the room. I closed the door and stood watching her. “I couldn’t stand it in the empty hotel room any longer,” she said. “I thought I hated her, Lloyd, but she was so pitiful when the police came and took her.”
She came over closer to me. “Emagine and I never got along, but when she was gone I sat in the room there in the Morro for a while, remembering the fights we’d had. The things I’d said to her. I couldn’t stand the room any longer. I called one of the St. Petersburg detectives. He didn’t know you, but had a buddy who did. So I got your address and drove over.”
A moment of silence passed.
“Lloyd, will you take me some place?”
“Where would you like to go?”
“Any place there’s some music, a glass of wine, something to eat.”
She caught my arm. “Lloyd, they won’t send her to the electric chair, will they?”
“I don’t know.”
“But what if she didn’t do it?”
“It looks pretty much like she did. Murder is a funny thing. Sometimes cops flounder around a lot on a murder case, because they haven’t got direction. But once they get direction, once they know what they’re looking for and who it’s to be used against, they usually dig up evidence.”
I sensed a shudder rippling over her.
“Let’s go have that glass of wine.”
We went down, got in the coupe, and drove over to Club Habana, a small, quiet place with Cuban music, fair wines, and fairly good food.
I sipped a beer, danced with her, watched her eat her dinner. She ate the spicy Cuban food as if she’d been too nervous and distraught to eat before. Now that she’d let down, she’d discovered she was famished. But that other hunger, that longing in her eyes — it was still there when she’d reached her coffee. It had been there always, I guessed, lonely, without an anchor.
We danced a few more times. We talked for a while. She told me about her home town, her girlhood. “I was walled off,” she laughed, “by high walls of greenbacks.” She reached over and clutched my hand. “I feel much better now, Lloyd. I think I’d better go back to St. Pete. But tomorrow — couldn’t we do something then?”
“I dunno, I—”
“Show me Florida, Lloyd! Not the Florida the tourist sees, but the backways, the way the swamp people live, the farms, and villages.”
“Sometime,” I said.
She didn’t take her hand off mine. She leaned toward me, her mouth parted a little, the soft, blue light of the Cabana glinting faintly on the tips of her teeth. I could see a pulse beating in her throat and the almost invisible sheen of perspiration on her forehead. Very softly the band was playing a tender Cuban love song.
I kissed her softly on the lips. She leaned back, said quietly, “Thank you, Lloyd.” Then she gathered her handbag, stood up, and we left the place.
She said she’d take a taxi to St. Pete, and I deposited her in one, and drove on back to my apartment.
The heat was still like a blanket, even though the night was a bit older. I had a cold beer in the kitchen. Cold beer was the only thing I’d ever found to help against the heat, but even that was a losing contest. The beer didn’t keep you cool long enough.
I wondered if I’d ever get used to Tampa heat.
I went in the bedroom. The ice I’d put in the pan on the center table that afternoon had long since melted, but the fan was still running, sending a stream of sluggish hot air over my face. I didn’t lie down. I simply sat on the edge of the bed, trying to get my thoughts straight. I couldn’t go to sleep; so I got up and went back down to the coupe.
I started the motor, let it idle for a minute. Then I pointed the nose toward St. Pete and Coquina Key.
It was a little after 11:00 when I rolled down the boulevard on the island. A huge moon bathed Coquina Key in silver light. White surf broke against the beach, and out in the water, moon rays lay in a great elongated splash, a pool all their own. Stars were out by the millions in a sky that was pure black velvet.
I braked in the business section of the Key. It was pretty grubby, most of the buildings of frame wooden construction, a cluster of boat houses down at the inlet, along with some bait houses. Cabanas and cottages were stacked over the area, close together. Everything there was dark, except for a bar, a chicken-in-the-basket place, and Baxter Osgood’s beer garden.