The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps
- Автор: Anderson Lars, Barr Randolph
- Год: 2007
- Язык: английский
- Год: Vintage Books
- ISBN: 978-0-307-28048-0
- Жанр: Криминальные детективы
Электронная книга - «The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps». Краткое содержание книги:
Weighing in at over a thousand pages, containing over forty-seven stories and two novels, this book is big baby, bigger and more powerful than a freight train — a bullet couldn’t pass through it. Here are the best stories and every major writer who ever appeared in celebrated Pulps like Black Mask, Dime Detective, Detective Fiction Weekly, and more. These are the classic tales that created the genre and gave birth to hard-hitting detectives who smoke criminals like packs of cigarettes; sultry dames whose looks are as lethal as a dagger to the chest; and gin-soaked hideouts where conversations are just preludes to murder. This is crime fiction at its gritty best.
“The front room is empty. The bed has not been slept in. Evidently he wasn’t expecting to retire at — at the time whatever it was happened. But the Colonel’s gone.”
“Yes,” said O’Rourke. “No sign of any one. Search the house.”
“Men going through it now,” said the gray haired dick. And as a lad holding an axe came into the room, black and disheveled, “About the cellar, Tim?”
“Even stirred up the coal.” A round Irish face grinned. “Not a chance for a mouse to hide away.”
“You got the axe, I see. Give it to me.” The old dick addressed Tim.
“Er, what for?” demanded O’Rourke.
“There’s a closet door that’s locked, and a key missing, in his nib’s bedroom.” The dick jerked a thumb upward. “It may mean nothing, but we’ll have a look.”
“Give me that axe.” O’Rourke took the axe, pounded up the stairs, with me at his heels. He nodded to the cop who stood in the outer room, and walked to the closet door in the bedroom. He pulled at the knob and said:
“Hi, Colonel.” Listened a moment, half lifted the axe and put it down again, and turned to the cop. “Don’t want anything disturbed here. Papers and the likes of that. A strong man should jerk that door smack off its hinges.” He grabbed at the door. A quick jerk, and O’Rourke cursed. The door held fast. Then he spotted the lamp cord knotted to the end of the bed, and it took his mind off the door. But it was curled on the floor and no longer hung over the sill, as it did when I first visited that house.
“A lad might have come up by that, slipped through the bedroom, and, damn it, I forgot about this window. But how the devil could he throw it down to himself? Certainly he didn’t leave by it and—”
“I don’t think that fits this racket.” And I told O’Rourke about Toney, the little snow-bird who had left the house where he had sought protection.
“The lad who was killed last week.” O’Rourke nodded. “That’s what comes of being so secretive. This Colonel has more information coming to him than you’d find in the World Almanac. He tells you this and he tells you that, and shuts up like a clam when you want to know the how of it. Passes his word to stoolies, his word of honor as a gentleman, he tells me. Now, see what comes of it? Two men dead, and me not even knowing where the Italian, Giovoni, was till I looked at his dead body at Elrod’s Sanitarium. I’m to take orders, Race.” He looked at me suddenly, “I think we’ll keep quiet on this — this disappearance ’till we hear something. It will be the biggest and worst thing in the world if the Colonel turns up dead. You know who he is, of course.”
“Of course,” I said. “Colonel Charles Halsey McBride, friend of the deputy police commissioner, and no doubt working secretly for him.”
“Well, it sounds good, in theory. And one can’t blame the Commissioner for showing the district attorney’s office, and maybe state officials, that he can take care of his own department. If Michelle Gorgon rides, it bursts up the biggest racket the city has ever known. Just now, I’d lay you a hundred to one that I can name twenty-five murders in New York that Michelle Gorgon is responsible for, directly responsible for. Yet, I’d lay you another hundred to one that I couldn’t prove a one of them in a court of law. I—” He threw up his head. Some one called him.
“Coming!” said O’Rourke, in answer to a shout from down stairs. “I’ll leave you here, Race to keep an eye on that locked closet door. I wouldn’t keep a thing from you. But men are men, and you couldn’t expect them to coddle to an outsider. Come on!” he said to the cop by the door, and following that cop out into the hall he closed the door behind him.
What a break for an amateur detective! To go over the room alone, find those hundreds of little clews that the regular police officer misses. You know what I mean. The man is found dead in his palatial library. The police search the place. And then the amateur detective discovers in one corner of the room a cord of wood, or under the bed an Austin car, that the hard boiled Inspector of police had overlooked. Oh, I daresay there are clews, if guys are willing to leave them. But a burnt cigar ash only tells me that some one has smoked a cigar, and nothing more. Real clews, to me, are letters, letters that any guy able to read can understand.
I jerked around from the desk I was pawing over. A key had clicked in a lock, the lock of the closet door.
I stepped a little to one side, drew a bead about the center of that door, saw the knob turn, but heard no click as the latch was slowly slipped back again when the door gave an inch. Then that closet door opened very slowly. Wider — wider — and I saw the figure.
The face was very pale and slightly dirty beneath the long peaked hat. The blue shirt was rather a bad fit, at least, baggy, and little hands were shoved in jacket pockets. A man’s clothes and a boy’s figure it may have been. But I knew her at once, of course. It was The Flame, alias Florence Drummond. The Girl with the Criminal Mind.
Chapter XIX
The Flame Fights for Freedom
Well—” The Flame sort of gasped, as if breathing had suddenly become a luxury, after the closet. “I’m in a mess, I guess.”
“You guess right,” I said, when I got my own breath back, but I didn’t lower my gun.
She smiled a wan little smile as she looked at my gun, and lifted both her hands from her jacket pockets, empty.
“There isn’t time for a plea, Race, even an explanation, if I had any. What are you going to do — about me?”
“What do you think?” Maybe I sneered slightly. “You picked the Gorgons as little playmates. There have been two murders already, and may be another, now. You,” and with a smile of my own, “you even have put me, or are in with those who have put me on the spot.”
“God in heaven!” she half threw up her hands. “Don’t preach. And there have been as many spots picked out for you, in your day, as for a leopard.”
“You’re in bad, Florence.” I came a little closer to her. She looked very tired; there were rings under her eyes. “There’s no reason I should protect you. If you’ll sell out the Gorgons, I’ll—”
“A stool-pigeon! You want to make a stoolie out of The Flame. You—. I might tell you that letting me go may mean a man’s life. I might tell you—. But just one question. Will you let me go? Yes or no.”
“Florence,” I ignored her question, “if I get you out of this. If—. What will you promise me. What will—”
“Don’t play the heavy dick. I’ll never squeal, for a price, if I could squeal.” She glanced quickly down at the watch upon her wrist. “Well, shout out, or stand aside.”
She pushed by me suddenly and made for the door, just as if she didn’t know the whole house was thick with police.
I clutched her by the arm and swung her back. She spun, and looked at me. There was hatred, or anger, or defiance, in her eyes. Then she read the truth in mine, I guess, because her eyes went sort of fearful, like a frightened animal, before I spoke.
“The Flame,” I said, as I gripped her arm tighter, “has swung with her mind and her eyes the honor of many men. You know something, and, by God! you’re going to talk. You’ve made monkeys out of me long enough. Yes, you’re right.” I looked straight into her eyes. “I’m going to turn you in to the cops.”
And she wilted. Was in my arms, her little head upon my shoulder, her arms about my neck. She was sobbing softly. I leaned down and forced up her head. The tears in her eyes were real, the quiver to her lips seemed hardly possible of acting. It was the girl again, but this time without the sparkle of youth in her eyes, the laughter on her lips, and—.