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.
Somebody behind him said: “Hold it.”
It was a quiet voice with a low snarling edge to it. Before Keenan the major stopped suddenly, with an instant’s stiffness, so that one of his hands, halfway to the knob, froze in the air, the fingers spread, the thumb straight up. Keenan did not move; the girl gave a soft cry.
“You’ll turn,” the voice said. “All of you with your hands up. Over your head. And slow.”
There was a closet set flush against the wall of the room they had just left. Its door was open now and a man stood there — a gaunt man with a long dark face and a mouth that twitched unpleasantly.
“Peale,” Major Russell said, in an incredulous voice.
“Peale,” the gaunt man repeated nastily. “Everything fine, huh? Or it was until I dug up the van that moved your trunks.” His eyes widened, narrowed swiftly as Joe Keenan turned around. “Keenan — what are you doing here?” His glance swept over the girl without recognition, and the first touch of surprise in his features changed to an expression of bitter mirth. “Joe Keenan! Don’t tell me the boy friend here got—”
Major Russell interrupted him in a cold voice. “You shouldn’t have tried to do anything like this, Peale. I don’t see what—”
“Maybe you don’t,” Jerome Peale snarled, dark flame spouting up in his eyes. “Maybe pretty soon you won’t see anything at all. Dead men are funny that way.”
Standing at the girl’s right, Major Russell’s blue eyes remained calm, steady, unafraid. “Killing me won’t help, you know. There’s—”
“Shut up!” Peale raised the automatic; his eyes blackened with hate. After a moment the Englishman shrugged, subsided. Turning slightly to Keenan, Peale went on in the same low snarclass="underline" “I had you pegged for a square guy, Joe. You have that name and everyone knows it. If the skirt’s with you there’s a chance for you to blow now. I’ll figure you were like me; dumb enough to—”
At Keenan’s left there was a flicker of motion, a blur of silver that crossed the corner of his eye too swiftly to be defined. Before him Peale swung around his automatic, with his mouth open above it twisted down and sidewise in the gaunt face. His eyes glittered, black and venomous with rage, but in the split second that it took him to bring the gun up terror spread swiftly in them, transfixing the irises, widening the lids.
There was a sharp, distinct crack, like wood snapping. It was gone in an instant, without echo. Peale stared ahead stupidly, with the terror fixed in his eyes and an irregular brown smear high up in his forehead, just under the hair. Then he swung forward stiffly, with all his body rigid, and crashed face down to the floor.
“A mad dog,” Russell said, breathing softly. “He would have killed me.” In his right hand there was a small pistol not as large as Keenan’s palm, with a wisp of smoke drifting up from the barrel. It looked like a top, a child’s cap pistol. But at five feet it could kill a man. It had, Joe Keenan thought grimly, as he gripped Peale’s shoulder and turned him on his back.
The gaunt man must have died instantly. His eyes were still open, staring, his mouth open too, in surprise, in terror.
“He’s dead?” Ellen Bridges whispered shakily.
Keenan rose, nodding. Through the glass upper half of the front door he could see a deserted stretch of road, with trees nodding in the night wind, quietly, on the far side. Probably the shot had not been audible outside; even if it had, there was no one there to hear it. A cottage on a lonely road on Staten Island, two miles from the nearest village, was a safe place for killing. Keenan twisted his lips sourly as the thought struck his mind that that idea had come to him earlier in the evening. A swell place for murder!
Major Russell put the small pistol in the pocket of his jacket. His voice, his actions, were calm and unexcited. “Self-defense,” he said quietly. “The man was going to kill me — you both heard him say that. If you want to call the police there’s a phone here.”
Staring down at the dead man, Keenan shrugged his shoulders after a moment. “Peale asked for what he got. I’m not hopped up about hick cops nosing around and asking Miss Bridges a lot of questions. And they can’t do him any good now.”
“I had hoped you’d see it that way,” Major Russell said. “I had no choice. After you leave I’ll get him in my car and drop him off in some lonely stretch of woodland. Then there won’t be any trouble, any questions. That way, I believe, will be wisest for ourselves and our business.”
Ellen Bridges shuddered, keeping her glance away from the fixed black stare of the dead man. “Do anything,” she said, gripping Keenan’s arm. “But let’s get out of here immediately, Joe.”
The bearded man nodded, gravely calm. He held the outer door open for them, said good night quietly, and closed it without sound after they had passed through. That guy, Joe Keenan decided, had plenty of guts; through his obscure sense of dislike for the man he felt something like admiration.
In the front seat of the roadster Ellen trembled against him. She whispered: “Oh, it’s horrible, death like that! One minute he was alive talking to us; and then the next—”
“Don’t let it get you,” Keenan told her. “Jerome Peale wasn’t a kid. He had it coming that way for a long while.”
“I suppose so.” She was silent a few seconds while the needle of the speedometer flickered up to fifty-five and steadied there. Then she said in a small voice: “I’m afraid I got you in this jam, Joe. I know you didn’t want to come over here tonight; you only agreed to because you were afraid something might happen to me.”
“Forget that,” Keenan grunted. “Your father was a mighty good friend of mine.”
“Is it just because of my father?” she asked softly, looking up at him. “Don’t I count at all, Joe?”
Keenan shifted in his seat, looked down at her quizzically.
“You’re a fresh kid that ought to be whaled. If you’re asking for advice, I’ll tell you not to touch those diamonds with a ten-foot pole. They smell bad even with the story we got.”
“You’re suspicious of everybody,” the girl told him petulantly.
“After all, they don’t really belong to anyone. So why shouldn’t I buy them as well as someone else? If there were a legal owner, it would be different. But as it is—”
“As it is,” Joe Keenan said irritably, “you won’t take advice. This seems like adventure and fun, so you’re going through with it. You’re still young enough to think a British accent is wonderful.”
“Major Russell’s a gentleman,” she flashed. “Of course I believe his story.”
“I don’t,” Keenan said. “And you’re still sure you know it all. I wish you luck.”
“You’re... you’re detestable,” the girl blazed. Sullenly she turned away and looked through the window, refusing to speak even on the thirty-minute ferry ride to Manhattan.
Letting her out in front of her apartment, Keenan said, “Good night.” But he was not answered, and his lean face frowned after her. Women were queer people. And when the one you had to take care of was an obstinate, silly kid like that... He sighed. Well, it was a tough job. Joe Keenan wouldn’t have touched it for money; but his friendship for her dead father was something that could not be written off or canceled. And if she wasn’t so willful, she might even be a nice kid. Then Joe Keenan caught his thoughts there with an irritated grunt, and slammed in his gear.
Twenty minutes later he reached his own place. It was an old private house in the quiet upper seventies, remodeled into apartments, with a tall stoop in front and a light showing at the top behind glass vestibule doors. On the second landing he inserted a key in the lock on the left, turned it, and went in.