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.
This time he was right. He found the place without much difficulty.
Pretentious, austere, it stood at the mouth of a short avenue of old magnolias. The porch light was on — McGavock was evidently expected.
Malcom Jarrell opened the door to his ring.
McGavock said dreamily: “I imagine a house, prowl around and locate it. I ring the bell and see you standing in the doorway. This case is dopier than a tael of opium. Who is this Laurel Bennett, what’s your tie-in, and what does she want with me?”
The seedy naturalist tilted his monstrous head, stepped back, gestured the detective in. “We need your counsel. Mrs. Bennett is my godchild. She has a problem for you.”
“A problem?” McGavock mocked him. “Now that’s intriguing! A detective is like a doctor, anyone that comes along tries to panhandle a little free medicine. I’m up to my ears right now in a problem. Or haven’t you heard? I’m trying to shoo the executioner away from you. It seems to me—”
Jarrell was crotchety. “Come now, you’re not all that busy! This shouldn’t take twenty minutes. Hear what Laurel has to say. I’m sure that Atherton won’t object.”
The lady of the mansion was just about seventeen years old.
A delicate figurine in black lace with a cameo at her throat, she leaned against the creamy marble mantelpiece and watched McGavock approach. Oil portraits hung high above her head. Antebellum ancestors: eagle-nosed gentlemen — firebrands — and haughty, whale-boned grande dames.
Laurel Bennett was slim, fragilely molded. Her glossy black hair was caught by a pearl bandeau. Her eyes were somber, brooding.
Seventeen years old, McGavock thought. He judged her age shrewdly by her lips. He tried to picture her in a middy blouse and Mary Jane pumps. It simply wouldn’t work. The gal might be a child, McGavock decided, but she’s not that kind of a child. She’s wise, hard.
Her manner was impersonal, gracious. “I heard you talking to Mr. Jarrell in the hall,” the girl began. “You seem reluctant to help me. You appear to believe that there will be no remuneration. Let me say that you are going to be paid and paid liberally. Present a reasonable statement to my attorney, Mr. Hal Maldron—”
“The window rapper? The guy with the eroded teeth?” McGavock was venomous. “So you’re the party that had him bail my client. How do you people expect me to get anything done with all this meddling? Jarrell has popped off until—”
Malcom Jarrell said patiently: “You’re balked. Completely confounded. So you’re trying to put the blame for your incompetence on me.”
McGavock barked at the girclass="underline" “What is this job you want me to do?”
“You’re a man of experience,” Laurel Bennett said throatily. “I think you’ll be quick to sympathize. Gil, my husband, is middle-aged. Suddenly — for no reason that we can see — he has gone into an orgy of sowing wild oats. Not women, I mean, but drinking and gambling. It’s mortifying, of course — most middle-aged husbands are proud to pay more attention to their young brides. If they’re lucky enough to have a young bride, I mean. But it’s not only embarrassing — it’s critical. He’s jeopardizing our security. He loses enormous sums. We have a joint account — he makes secret withdrawals. It has me half-mad. It can’t go on!”
McGavock asked warily: “How do I come in?”
“He’s out right now. At a place called Chunky’s, a hell-hole down by the riverbank. I’ve been cruising around, I’ve seen his car there. I’ll drive you up and leave you. I want you to get him out and bring him home.”
“Is that supposed to cure him?”
“You could scare him on the way back,” the girl suggested. “Tell him some terrible cases where men drank themselves into disgrace and their pitiful wives starved in the gutter and things like that.”
“O.K.,” McGavock agreed. “Let’s go.” He threw a parting remark at Malcom Jarrell. “Spend the night here. I’ll see you in the morning. I want to ask you about your cotton rat.”
Jarrell answered him amiably. “I’m an early riser. Any time after sun-up.”
Chunky’s Place was in the river bottom about five miles out on the old swamp trail. A desolate, poisonous five miles. Snake-infested sloughs, milky with muddy water, thrust fingerlike from the dense second growth along the roadside. The headlights of Laurel Bennett’s car played on a ceaseless tangle of wild grape and willow and water oak. The air was brackish, dank — stagnant.
The girl was silent, intent on holding her swaying car to the boggy trail. McGavock sat beside her and whistled. It was a habit of concentration that he was unable to break. And he always whistled the same thing, the same way. The tune was “The Letter Edged in Black.”
“Cal Bradley,” he remarked, “thinks I’m a sap on the purchase for shooting land. He suggested that you might be anxious to sell me a pleasure resort, a place known as Fern Springs. Fern Springs is a new one on me and I thought I knew them all, from Florida Bay to Puget.”
Laurel smiled stiffly. “It hasn’t functioned since nineteen-ten. Maybe you don’t know it, but the south is studded with old, abandoned resorts — tucked away in wild, unreachable places. Back at the turn of the century, in the red-spoked carriage days, it was fashionable to summer at some health springs. The fad passed but the old buildings remain. Almost any county south of the Mason-Dixon has a couple. Fern Springs belongs to me, it’s back in the pine country. It’s always belonged to my family and is not for sale. I’d sell my mother’s wedding ring first.”
McGavock said: “I’m not in the market for a wedding ring, but I’ll keep your offer in mind.”
She cursed him. He lay back on the cushions, closed his eyes and listened with real enjoyment.
Laurel Bennett braked her sports car at a bend in the road. “It’s just around the corner. You’d better go the rest of the way on foot.”
“How will I spot him?” McGavock asked.
“They’ll all be drinking,” she said bitterly. “But he’ll be drunk. They’ll all be gambling — but he’ll be losing his shirt.”
Abruptly, without warning, he reached forward and turned on the dash. Deftly, before she could prevent him, he laid the ten-cent compass on her knee. The needle was as steady as a rock.
The girl flushed angrily, knocked his hand aside. “If you want to take bearings,” she spat, “take them from yourself!”
He gave a raucous, unpleasant laugh. “I’m not taking bearings. This is my electric eye. I’m just making sure that you’re not preparing to put a two-inch roofing nail into the back of my skull when I step out.” He restored the gadget to his pocket.
She caught him by the lapel as he slid through the door. “Watch yourself. They don’t like strangers.”
He bared his teeth. “Neither do I.”
The building, the size of a domestic garage and covered with tar-paper, was a black ulcerous sore in the moonglow. Its windows were caulked to the frame with soggy, mildewed quilts. Not so much as a wavering cobweb of light showed. A moody scene, depraved and threatening. McGavock was familiar with these backwoods gambling dives. They were dynamite.
There were a few clay-caked jalopies in the clearing, and a powerful, gleaming coupe — Gil Bennett’s.
McGavock knew better than to advance and knock. He slowed up at the fringe of the timber, called: “Hello. Hello, in there!” A ritual for strangers and one that had better be observed. The door opened.