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.
The detective made no attempt at quartering his attacker. He walked along a dry, brushy gulch, came out on a hillside and returned to the village through a weedy alley.
He drew up beneath the first streetlight, wiped his knees and elbows with his handkerchief, balled it up and lobbed it behind a picket fence. He was, he decided, fairly presentable.
The gent with the shotgun could wait.
One thing was certainly evident. Lester Hodges, the old recluse, hadn’t met his death and been rolled in Jarrell’s yard through some sort of grotesque accident. There was design behind this, cold-blooded merciless design. From now on anything might happen. The slayer was smart, cunning — and he knew he was being hunted.
The back street brought McGavock to the rear of the courthouse. He circled the building, selected a bench in the deserted court square, sat down and redigested a few conclusions. An inspection of his ten-cent compass showed that it had not been damaged. Main Street was nearly empty. This was a town that really closed like a mouse-trap at the stroke of nine.
One window alone remained lighted. A little office with an eight-foot front beside the undertaker’s. A desk was pulled up close to the window, a man sat behind it in a swivel chair. He appeared to be looking through the pane, across the street, into the court square — directly at McGavock. The gold lettering on the door said: Hal Maldron, Attorney.
McGavock got up, crossed the street. Hardly had his instep touched the curb than the man leaned over his desk and rapped on the window.
It was a shrill commanding rap — a piercing, arrogant vibrato.
McGavock opened the door and strode in.
“If you want to speak to me,” he exploded, “heist your pants off that sponge rubber cushion and address me like a gentleman. I don’t go for window banging—”
Hal Maldron was a blubbery, grayish man with bad teeth and a pair of the smallest, cruelest eyes that McGavock ever looked into. He smirked at McGavock’s rage. “Calm yourself, brother.”
Maldron held up a hand, waved a huge horseshoe-nail ring. “It’s this ring that does it, brother,” he boasted. “It makes me the most hellacious lawyer in these hills. I’m sure-fire. I never lose a case. But why the ring, you ask? I’ll tell you. Why chase around looking for clients, interviewing witnesses, suborning jurymen? No need for it. I just sit here in my swivel chair and let the world come to me. Across the street’s the courthouse, yonder’s the post office, next door’s the undertaker’s. What more could a lawyer ask? I’m plump in the middle of the county’s bloodstream. Anyone with any kind of business has to pass my window sometime or other. Comes a prospect or a hostile witness, I just reach over and rap on the pane.” A malignant look settled itself in his rubbery jowls. “And, believe me, they come when I call them!”
McGavock was speechless with fury.
“You got off the bus at seven fifty-eight,” Maldron declared. “You registered at the Bradley House and then proceeded to Malcom Jarrell’s, where he informed you that he was secreting a corpse. What you’ve been doing for the last half hour, I do not as yet know — but I’ll find out. I summoned you in here to advise you that you are now working for me. There have been developments. Jarrell has given himself up to the police; he is at liberty, on bond. I’m representing him—”
McGavock managed to speak. “He’s retained you?”
“That’s beside the point. I said I was representing him. I’m being retained by another party, one who has his welfare at heart.”
“Just who is this other party?”
Maldron showed his spotted canines. “That, too, is beside the point. I just wanted you to understand that there’s been a shifting of conditions, a change of ownership, so to speak. You’ve been demoted. I’m head man. If you play with me, I’ll keep you on the payroll. No cooperation and I’ll send you scooting back to the city.”
McGavock gave a low, strained laugh — a strangled sound, almost a whine. “I ought to kick your teeth in. Which wouldn’t take much of a push.” He held his breath, tried to control himself. “I’m not employed by Jarrell. I’m laboring for a guy named Atherton Browne. Try a tank-town frame on me and the boys will be in your hair like seventeen-year locusts. You’ll learn a little about metropolitan detective agencies.”
He was still boiling when he reached the hotel.
Cal Bradley, fussing behind the desk, was acting as his own night-clerk. The spidery little man seemed self-conscious, over-polite. “Mr. McGavock!” he greeted. “About to retire? A good night to sleep, suh. There’s a breeze from the north.” He laid the key on the blotter. “Number eleven, at the end of the hall. The best room in the house.” Abruptly, as an afterthought, he reached inside his shirt, dragged out a rumpled, soiled envelope. “This was left on the desk — addressed to you. I didn’t see who placed it there.”
McGavock ripped open the flap. The note was written on hotel stationery: Hodges can’t use your help now. Let the dead alone. Get out of town.
“It’s written on your letterhead — and unsigned,” McGavock snapped. “I suppose the entire town has access to your paper.”
Bradley sighed. “That’s true. Everyone filches from a hotel.” He brightened. “Just think. You’ve only been in town a few hours and already admirers are sending you unsigned letters. You make friends quickly, suh.”
When McGavock was halfway down the corridor, Bradley’s strident voice rattled after him. “Another thing. It almost slipped my mind. You’ve had a charming visitor — Laurel Bennett. She’s dropped in three times within the last hour. Perhaps she wants to sell your employer, Mr. Boggs, the old Fern Springs resort?”
McGavock answered crossly: “I wouldn’t know. I’ve never heard of her. If she comes again, I’m not seeing callers. I’m footsore and weary. I’m hibernating for the night.”
Chapter Two
The Heavy Loser
Luther McGavock gazed at his room and flinched. It was about ten feet square. The wallpaper was water-stained in coffeelike splotches; the worn rug was as thin as a bait seine. There was an oval crayon enlargement above a washstand, a crockery bowl and pitcher — and a lumpy iron bed.
The single, grimy window looked directly onto the tin roof of an adjoining shed. Bradley’s finest room was no bridal suite.
McGavock stuck the tobacco tin behind the crayon enlargement. He opened his Gladstone and took out a belly gun, a stubby thirty-eight cut back almost to the cylinder — and a pair of wire clippers. He shoved the pistol under his coat, turned back the mattress and with the wire clippers snipped off a foot of stiff wire from the bedsprings.
The detective took the wire to the door, threw a tight turn around the doorknob, pulled the ends down and threaded them through the eye of the key. He tested the apparatus; it was steady, strong. No outside manipulation could jiggle the bit in the lock; it was tamper-proof.
Cheap hotels with shaky door locks were no new experience to Luther McGavock.
He raised the window, laid the towel from the washstand over the sill. A landmark to help him identify the correct room on his return.
McGavock crawled through the window, groped down the tin roof, lowered himself catlike into the alley. The silence was oppressive, appalling. It was as though the village were quarantined. The detective glanced at the luminous dial of his wristwatch.
It seemed like two in the morning — yet it was scarcely nine-thirty.
Every small southern town has its leading family. The Bennetts assumed this position in Bartonville. McGavock had been aware of their prominence from the moment of his arrival. Everywhere he’d looked he’d seen the name: on the town’s drugstore, the garage, the cotton gin. He could visualize the sort of home Laurel Bennett would be living in — a sleek white mansion with fluted columns and a veranda as big as a parade ground. She would, in other words, be occupying the house he had mistakenly allotted to Malcom Jarrell.