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.
McGavock said tartly: “I’m no horticulturist. All the way down from Memphis and you—”
Jarrell smiled sadly. “There’s a dead man under it.”
The story was quickly told. The man was Lester Hodges — a recluse. He lived in a shack at the other end of town. Jarrell had been awakened the night before by a dragging sound outside his window; he’d slipped into a robe, gone out to investigate and had found the body of his old friend.
The naturalist had then covered the corpse with mulch straw and had ensconced himself on the back porch to wait for aid from Memphis. Sixteen hours on the deathwatch — no meals, no visitors. No break except when he’d phoned his cousin.
McGavock got to his feet, wandered out into the yard.
The detective laid aside the straw in fastidious handfuls, uncovered the body bit by bit — like a geologist exposing a rare fossil.
“His head,” Jarrell said. “Look at the back of his head.”
It wasn’t pretty. Hodges was a birdlike man in his seventies, hard-bitten, wiry. A large roofing nail had been driven through his skull — into his brain. The metallic nail head, as large as a nickel, lay flat and firm against the old man’s silvery hair.
“I can’t understand it,” Malcom Jarrell complained. “It’s practically impossible! I can’t drive a nail into a box and do it satisfactorily. Say the slayer crept up on him in his sleep, even then how could he do it? Imagine! Holding the nail in position with one hand and swinging the hammer with the other. Those roofing nails are like big tacks. It isn’t feasible!”
“You’re on the wrong track,” McGavock contradicted him. “I think I know how it was done. A novel and a brutal weapon — but a simple and efficient one, too.”
They hesitated by the gate. “I’ve a batch of important questions to ask you,” McGavock said. “But they’re personal and I’ve got you placed. You’d bat me around with evasions until I wouldn’t know where I was. So — I’ll circulate around town and collect a little lowdown on you — and you’ll have to come in with me. Then maybe we can get someplace. I’ve handled clients like you before. In the meantime, I’m giving you advice and I want you to heed it. Go to the sheriff and tell him the whole yarn. Leave me out, of course, but tell him everything else. It’ll be embarrassing but we’ll have to do it if we want to flush our quarry.”
Jarrell made a pretense at pondering. “Wouldn’t it be a better idea,” he said carefully, “to wait until nightfall and then to take Lester out into the hills and leave him by the road?”
McGavock was withering. “Who do you think it’ll fool? Not the guy that unloaded him in your yard. Just try to dispose of that body and they’ll have hemp around your neck so quick you’ll think your ascot slipped!”
Twilight was blending into night — it was that period that the natives called dusk-dark — when McGavock returned to the main drag. The air was sweltering. Somewhere, beyond the bridge, a revival meeting was getting under way. High-pitched voices lifted their rhythms to the summer sky. Storefronts blazed soft golden light. McGavock ambled through the jocular bustle of dallying citizens — family folk out for an evening stroll before bedtime, high school girls in their sweet-starched ginghams, village boys with pomaded hair and roving eyes. The detective located a hardware store, entered.
A clerk got up from the sidewalk bench in front of the store and followed him inside.
McGavock purchased a ten-cent compass.
The clerk was curious. “Buyin’ a compass! I don’t recollect seeing you in these parts. Are you aimin’ to tramp the hills?”
“Skip it,” McGavock said boorishly. “I’m not a revenuer. I see you have quart whiskey bottles as well as oak casks that can be converted to thump kegs. There’s no copper on display but doubtless you’ve plenty hidden in the back room. Don’t alarm yourself, I’m not in town to bloodhound any of your rural customers.”
The clerk was abashed, befuddled. “You’ll have to excuse me, Mr... er—”
“Hodges.” McGavock was expansive. “The name is Lester Hodges. At your service.”
The clerk went bug-eyed. “Lester Hodges! Think of that. Listen, friend, we got a feller right here in this town by that very name.”
McGavock reeled dramatically, grimaced with incredulity.
“Them’s true words,” the clerk insisted defensively. “Lester Hodges. Many a hour he’s sat by that pot-bellied stove and whittled.”
It came out like an appendix under a local anesthetic: where Hodges lived, his annual income — nil — and his likes and dislikes. “Why don’t you look him up?” the clerk urged. “He might be kin.”
“It’s hardly likely,” McGavock said dolefully. “All my kin were killed off in the battle between the Monitor and the Merrimac.”
The shanty was in a hollow at the edge of town. It was built flush into a red clay bank. Above it, as a background, the ridge road passed it over a wobbly wooden trestle. A full moon was rising down the valley and the trestle with its crazy-angled supports looked like a gigantic tarantula against the sky. McGavock stood across the path and sized things up.
His calculations told him he had a good ten minutes on the sheriff. Yet a lighted lamp burned in the window of Lester Hodges’ shack.
The detective climbed the rickety stairs to the narrow porch and knocked. There was no answer. He twisted the knob and stepped in. The room was empty.
The furnishings were scant — a dilapidated iron range, a pallet on the floor, a fire-blistered bureau. And that lonesome lamp flickering in the window.
The bureau drawers held the recluse’s food stock: a sack of dried beans, a little cornmeal, a rancid ham hock. McGavock glanced about him angrily — it was a difficult layout to frisk. There was no place to conceal anything.
He found them in the cold ashes of the iron range, and when he found them he didn’t know what to do with them. A few tiny firecrackers and a shank of fishing line, in a tobacco can.
He stared blankly at the tin, thrust it in the pocket of his sack coat.
The lamp bowl was almost full, it had just been lit.
The detective had got himself into a spot and knew it. The little one-room shanty had no back door. He’d realized the lamp was a trap but he’d planned on a back door. Someone out in the night was waiting for him. Someone who had a sense of engineering: the light was placed so that when he left he’d show up like a treed possum.
McGavock made a quick decision. He blew out the lamp, swung open the sagging door and stepped out onto the narrow porch. “O.K., Sheriff,” he shouted. “Come on in. You want to take a look at this!”
A shadowed figure materialized in the blackness of the trestle timbers. There was the liquid glint of moonlight on a blue steel shotgun barrel. McGavock realized he was facing a desperate killer.
The phantom wavered. McGavock thought, He’s trying to grapple with the new break, trying to play it so that he gets the most out of it — he wonders what I’ve discovered.
A husky, heavily disguised voice called back: “Take a look at what?”
McGavock dropped like a plummet, rolled tumbler-fashion down the red clay bank. The shotgun let loose with both barrels. There was a deafening, coughing blast and the shrieking of splintered glass as the shanty window went into shard and dust.
A clump of sumac caught McGavock’s fall. He got to his feet, listened a moment, heard nothing.