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.
Chapter Three
Kill One, Skip One
The beer garden was crowded with people in rumpled sport shirts and slacks and cool cotton dresses. It was hot, smoky, wet and rank with the odor of beer, turgidly alive with sluggish conversation and the rasping of a juke box. I bought a beer at the bar and asked if Baxter Osgood was around.
“I’m right here,” Osgood said, practically at my elbow.
I turned around to look at him. He moved up to the bar beside me, sat down on a stool.
“I saw you come in, Carter.”
“The beer isn’t cold,” I said.
“No? Why don’t you buy someplace else?”
“I couldn’t — not the product I’m in the market for.”
“No?” he said again. “What is it you’re wanting to buy?”
“Letters,” I told him.
He watched the dancing for a few seconds. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I know you don’t, Mr. Osgood.”
“How much are you paying for this product?”
“Enough — but not too much.”
He yawned against the back of his hand. “I’ve got to run over to the house for a minute. Like to come along — just for the ride?”
“Sure,” I said. “I’ll come along, just for the ride.”
We went outside. His car was angle parked at the curb, a blue convertible. We got in, and he drove down the boulevard, turned off on Sunshine Way, braked before his bungalow.
“Every time I look at the house next door,” he said as we got out of the car, “I think of Mr. Tomlinson.”
“Too bad about Mr. Tomlinson, but I understand they’ve got the woman who killed him.”
“I thought you might be interested in it — say in an academic way.”
“Not even in an academic way.”
“Just in letters, huh?”
“You said it.”
He keyed open the front door. The house was like an oven; he turned on lights, opened windows, threw the switch on an attic fan. Cooler night air began to rush through the place.
Osgood walked over to the knee hole desk, stuck a cigarette in his mouth, and picked up a box of matches that was on the desk. He turned halfway back toward the desk, dropped the matches on it, and opened the drawer and pulled the gun, all in one liquid motion.
He laughed faintly. The gun was leveled at my middle.
“Well,” I said, “every man is entitled to one mistake.”
“Yes — one.”
He came halfway across the room toward me. “Turn around, Carter.”
I stood still, and he jerked the gun up. His words didn’t bother me — the sudden message in his eyes did. I turned around.
He came up behind me as if to frisk me. He hit me on the crown, where I’m starting to bald. I don’t remember much after that.
I think I tried to get out of the house. Common sense tells me I tried to pull Henry Fayette’s .38 out of the waistband of my pants. Putting it together later as it must have been, I think I crawled as far as the kitchen. There I passed out for a moment, and he must have unlocked the kitchen door and dragged me outside. I tried to stir on the powdery sand of the back yard. He hit me again, on the back of the head.
The next thing I sensed was a slow melting of black nothingness into a quivering curtain of heavy gray fire, if there ever was any such thing, against the walls of my eyeballs. As the black faded, feeling came in to take its place. My head was a pincushion of pain; my heart was laboring; and I was sucking in mouthfuls of cool, clean air. It was very early morning.
Ten or fifteen minutes later I sat up slowly. I was still in Baxter Osgood’s backyard. I stumbled to my feet, staggered to the kitchen door, opened it. The old man’s gun had still been in my waistband. Now it was in my hand. I intended to fix Osgood so he’d never beat another man again. In my state, I was no match for a fever-ridden midget, but that didn’t occur to me. I had a gun, I was on my feet, and Osgood deserved every damn thing I could dish out.
But he wasn’t in the house. The place was pretty well messed up, with drawers pulled out and stuff strewn over the floors. I decided he’d grabbed a few valuables and skipped. Then I looked out the window, saw his convertible still parked on the edge of the street. I tried to make sense out of it, but didn’t feel up to it.
As the anger burned out of me, I didn’t feel up to anything. I went in his kitchen, started some coffee making. I looked in his refrigerator. Two bottles of beer were in it. I drank both of them.
I followed the beer a few minutes later with two cups of scalding black coffee. I ate a piece of bread and butter, a slice of cheese, and followed that with another cup of coffee.
I went to the living room, opened the front door. My head was still aching and spinning like crazy. I wondered if I had a concussion. The sun was just over the lip of the earth in the east, rising in that burst of orange and crimson you see nowhere but in Florida.
Low in the air, over the edge of the beach, a cluster of gulls were wheeling and screaming.
I did a double take at that group of gulls, stared at them a few seconds, then went stumbling toward the strip of beach as fast as I could go.
Baxter Osgood was lying on his face, the water almost lapping the tips of his upflung hands. He’d been shot in the right temple, and near his hand lay a .38-caliber revolver.
I squatted on my heels beside Osgood’s body and tried to figure the way it had happened. He’d left me in the back yard, entered the house to get something. Somebody had arrived.
He and the somebody had walked down here, and the somebody utterly without warning had shot him, then with panic gnawing, the somebody had wiped the gun, pressed Osgood’s prints on it, and left it where it might have fallen from his hand. I was pretty sure the gun was the same that had killed Buddy Tomlinson.
It was just a hunch, but granting the hunch, and granting that Ben Aiken fell for the suicide picture, Aiken would conclude that Osgood had killed Tomlinson because one of their shady deals went sour, then in panic had killed himself.
There was one other point. The murderer evidently hadn’t known I was in the back yard. My coupe wasn’t at Osgood’s house, but up at his beer joint. There was no other evidence that I was lying in the back yard unconscious when the murderer had called on Osgood.
I turned Osgood over, remembering the way his bungalow had been searched. I patted his torso, his waist.
The money belt was one of those jobs that blends right in with the body lines. If you weren’t careful, you could search him and miss it. I tore his shirt open, took the belt off him.
Osgood’s belt contained five thousand dollars in money and a few sheets of paper that upon reading I knew were the letters that Phyllis Darnell had written to Buddy Tomlinson.
I went back in the house and phoned Ben Aiken.
An hour after that, a small crowd of people was gathered in a room in St. Pete’s old, sunbaked city hall.
They all looked at me when I entered. I had my head bandaged, three aspirins under my belt, pile drivers still in my skull, and a feeling like a wad of cotton in my throat.
I looked over the silent room. Ben and a city dick were there, along with a stenographer, who was a big, brawny man. Henry Fayette was standing beside the chair that held Emagine Buford, who’d been taken from her cell. Allene Buford stood near the windows, and Phyllis Darnell stood with her back to the wall near Emagine’s chair.
I tossed Phyllis Darnell’s letters on the scarred table. Her gaze rabbited around the room, her hands fluttering to her throat. “Go ahead,” I said, “and pick them up. My boss will render you a bill later. For my money, you’re a dirty little tramp, Mrs. Darnell, but Ben has agreed to keep the letters confidential. Not because of you — because of that poor devil up in Augusta, Maine.”