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.
Then a revulsion of feeling set in. Julia could not have done this monstrous thing! Such a theory was too fantastically horrible for sane and reasonable thought. There must be some logical explanation that did not offend every canon of decency. Stoddard forced himself to meet her wide, searching eyes. His suspicions were sacrilege; he swept them out of his mind. Julia caught him by the arm.
“Mr. Stoddard,” she began, “I heard you knocking at the front door! I didn’t dare to open it! I was terrified — I couldn’t think! My uncle had been shot down, and I was the only one in the house with him — so far as I knew. I felt sure that every window and door was fastened on the inside — and I had seen no one — heard no one! I was nearly frantic. You know what it means! They’ll say I — did it!” Her voice broke; then she went on more quietly. “I can’t think how it has been done — men don’t pass through adobe walls and locked doors!” She gripped Stoddard’s arm in a sudden access of terror. “You don’t think — you don’t think I did it, Mr. Stoddard?”
“No!” Stoddard shouted. He caught the girl by the shoulders. Their eyes held and kindled; an indissolvable bond of understanding seemed to draw them together. “You didn’t do it, Julia, and nothing will ever make me think you did!”
A sob of relief broke from the girl’s lips. Stoddard was seized with a nearly irrepressible desire to draw her to him. He contented himself with merely pressing her hand reassuringly.
“You must phone the police,” she whispered.
Stoddard had forgotten the police. Julia was right, of course. The sooner he got in touch with the authorities, the better. Just then he heard the purr of an engine in the drive outside, followed by the creak of a stopping car.
“Tyson,” Julia stated.
There came a slow, dull knock on the kitchen door. Stoddard shot back the bolt.
Tyson was a little wisp of a man with disheveled grey hair, small eyes of a curious faded blue, rather shrewd in their expression, and a wizened skin that reminded Stoddard of a last year’s apple. He was quite old — seventy, at least: his small, thin body was stooped with age, though a sinewy strength like that of an old gnarled stick still clung to it tenaciously. At sight of their grave faces, a look of apprehension leaped into his faded eyes.
“What’s wrong?” he queried in a thin, cracked voice.
Stoddard looked at him gravely for a moment without speaking. The kitchen grew very still and quiet, and the old man seemed to grasp something of the gravity of the situation.
“Mr. Hammond—” he began in a trembling voice.
Stoddard nodded.
“Mr. Hammond is dead,” he stated, slowly. “He has been shot.”
Tyson’s eyes almost started out of their sockets; his russet color faded and he caught at the table to support himself. Stoddard watched him narrowly.
“Dead!” Tyson muttered, as if he found the fact unbelievable. “Dead!” Then he shot a sharp, penetrating look at Stoddard. “Who did it?” he croaked.
“We are trying to find out,” Stoddard returned gravely. “Did you meet anyone in the drive or on the road?”
Tyson shook his head emphatically.
“I saw no one,” he quavered shrilly.
The engineer silently led the way into the library. Julia was still deathly white, but into her face had come an impassive expression that suggested little of the terror and misery behind it. Tyson stared at the body of his master in silence, a look of unutterable horror in his faded eyes.
Stoddard picked up the telephone and got in touch with the office of the San Paulo Town Marshall. The latter, it appeared, was out. He would return within the next half hour and would come at once. Stoddard put the instrument down, thankful for the small respite.
Tyson was still staring at Hammond’s body in frozen silence and Stoddard dismissed him impatiently. The old man went off to his kitchen mumbling indistinguishably to himself. Two chairs were drawn up before the fireplace, and Stoddard dropped into one of them. Julia seemed on the verge of taking the other when she cast a shuddering glance at the limp figure by the desk. She went to the switch and snapped out the light. Then she took the vacant chair.
“You don’t mind — the dark!” she whispered, tremulously. “I can’t bear the light — with him there.”
Stoddard nodded understandingly. The dying firelight played redly on Julia’s dark head. They regarded each other unhappily. Neither of them spoke. The silence seemed to knit them closer together. Outside, the wind still swished dismally in the tree tops. Suddenly, Stoddard took Hammond’s letter from his pocket and showed the postscript to the girl.
“Why did you write that, Julia?” he asked, gently.
She looked at him searchingly for a moment.
“I was doing secretarial work for Uncle Nat.”
“And you didn’t want me to buy the Parsee Sunrise?”
Julia’s eyes grew humid with expression.
“I wonder if I can make you understand, Mr. Stoddard,” she went on, slowly. “Uncle Nat hated beauty — my father loved it — passionately. After the accident — you remember? — he simply adored that Parsee symbol. It was pitiable to see him with it. Last year when Uncle Nat wanted him to sell it to you, he went into hysterics and made me promise to keep it — always. Just before he died he made me promise again. Uncle Nat has charge of my estate until I am twenty-five — next June — and he insisted on selling the Sunrise. I begged him not to. He called me a silly fool — said the market was just right for disposing of antiques — and he wrote that letter to you. He gave it to me to mail. I was desperate and I added that absurd postscript. I might have known that it would bring you quicker than anything else!
“Uncle Nat had no feeling, no love, no tenderness in him!” Julia continued bitterly. “Sometimes I positively hated him!” She leaned forward. “Do you know, Mr. Stoddard, I can’t help thinking that that Parsee Sunrise has something to do with his death!”
This had already occurred to Stoddard, and he nodded silently. Julia’s explanation had increased his fears on her behalf. If she repeated it to the police an ambitious prosecuting attorney would easily find in her dislike of Hammond and in her desperate determination to prevent him from selling the symbol a motive strong enough to account for the crime.
“Julia,” he began, earnestly, “I had to break that window to get into the room! We’ve got to tell the San Paulo marshal that I found it broken and open! We must give the impression that someone got in, shot Nat Hammond, and got out that way! And we are not going to say anything about your trouble with Hammond!”
But Julia shook her head emphatically.
“No, Peter.” She smiled, using his first name with a tenderness that thrilled him. “We are going to tell the truth — all the truth — nothing else! Don’t you understand? If we lie, they’ll find us out somehow and that will make it all the worse.”
“But appearances are so strongly against you!”
“I know. That is why I’m going to tell the truth, Peter. Nothing but the truth. It is the best way. You’ll stand by me, won’t you?”
A lump rose in Stoddard’s throat and he could not command his tongue. He caught her hand in his and pressed it tightly. The contact seemed to tell her more than a hundred expressions of loyalty could have done...