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 heat was searing, terrific.
“What are you thinking?” McGavock asked.
“I’m thinking the same thing you are,” the young man answered calmly. “If this fire’s been going on since daybreak I’ll eat a box of .38s. The building’s been exploded — and I should say within the last twenty minutes.”
McGavock pointed to a blurred tire tread in the soft ground. “That’s not a bear track. Our killer’s been here, done his little chore — and gone.”
The dapper sheriff was nettled. “We’ll jusk ask a few questions of that hillman’s wife, Mrs. Tenniman, who saw the building burn at daybreak. It looks like connivance.”
“Mrs. Tenniman can wait.” McGavock scowled, surveyed the surroundings with moody concentration. “Wainwright was killed in the hotel. There was a lawn party going on, a big fiesta out front. He signed up with Bradley and retired to his room. He’d been there a few minutes when somebody, another guest, knocked on his door, lured him into this guest’s room and knocked him off. It’s an old pattern, it’s been done dozens of times before.”
“It’s very possible.”
“I’m telling you that’s what happened. The killer then went to Wainwright’s room, got his cowhide satchel with the seventy grand and took it back with him to his room. Now listen to this, because the time’s going to come when I want you to remember it: the murderer pilfered the satchel, pried up a couple of planks in the floor and hid it there.”
“I don’t see—”
“You will. It worked so well that time that he tried it later. And that’s how we’re going to catch him.”
Steve Robley said suavely: “Well, we’ve got the body in our room, what are we going to do with it?”
“We’re going to wait until about eleven thirty, when the lawn party’s in full swing, and then we’re going to lug it out a side door and dispose of it.” McGavock added casually: “You don’t happen to have a shovel on you?”
Steve Robley smiled. “Yes, I have. There’s one in the car. I came prepared for almost any contingency. Don’t look surprised.” He walked away, returned with the two short-handled spades. “This is going to be pretty hopeless, isn’t it? Where do we start?”
“We don’t dig until we reason it out,” McGavock declared. His words sounded silly to him. “Let’s get the lay of the land, let’s prowl.”
The ferny springs, from which the resort had gotten its name, were halfway up the hillside. They lay in a grotto of fetid fronds — back beneath an overhang of black wet rock. There were seven of them and they drained into a silty pool where a rusty iron pipe carried their curative waters down the slope to an ornate pagoda-like bath-house.
McGavock leaned over the pool, peered into its scummy, yellowish depths. “And this stuff was supposed to be healthy! Yow!”
“He didn’t toss the body in there,” the sheriff said dryly. “That water was in constant use at the time. I don’t see any bones. Do you?”
“No,” McGavock answered. “But we will. Hold your horses.”
At one side of the pool, far under the shelving overhang, a V trough had been cut in the limestone at the rim to check the overflow. A steady stream of water poured from this trough, struck a slab of shale and flattened out to a tiny brook which meandered down the bank in a little pebbled channel. McGavock began to whistle. He whistled “The Letter Edged in Black.” He raised an impudent eyebrow at the young sheriff. “Just like Attila! I’ll give you odds.”
Robley showed wavering signs of temper. “Don’t be cryptic. This thing is getting me down.”
McGavock declared: “It has to be so. Our man’s an engineer. Everything he does shows balanced planning.”
He lifted the slab of shale from the brook, jammed it up against the drain trough in such a way that it diverted the overflow from the pool. A new runlet angled off down the hillside. Except for a few shallow puddles, the brookbed went dry.
“Get to work,” McGavock ordered. “We dig in this dry channel.” He cleaned a handful of tangled watercress from the ravine, thrust his spade blade into the gravelly earth.
“I’ll start part-way down,” the sheriff said, “and work up towards you.” He disappeared down the slope in the brushy shrubbery.
Ten minutes later the sheriff’s loud, clear voice called out excitedly: “By golly! Luther, I’ve found it!”
McGavock grinned at the young man’s unconscious intimacy. “You’ve found what, Steven?”
“I’ve found the skull!” He sounded perplexed. “Wainwright must have been a midget. This looks like a child’s skull.”
“If you’re not satisfied with your skull,” McGavock yelled back, “come up and pick one from me. I’ve found three.”
In a grisly hour they excavated the bones and skulls of six bodies. Two children and four adults. They laid the macabre relics on the marsh grass. Sheriff Robley was thunderstruck, nauseated. “A graveyard,” he whispered hollowly. “A ghastly funeral trench! What sort of charnel work went on here? I’ll have half the town in my cells as soon as I return! It makes me dizzy. I can’t seem to make heads or tails—”
“Charnel work is right,” McGavock agreed gravely. “I was afraid of something like this.” He looked old, cruel. “But I’ve got our boy in the bag. Meet me at Malcom Jarrell’s tonight about eight and we’ll go to town.” He scraped the sandy loam from his shovel, started for the car. “Let’s chat a bit with that south neighbor — Mr. Tenniman.”
The ancient two-room cabin, with its log doorstep and its pack of yelping fox dogs, nestled at the turn of the trail. It was almost concealed by the waxy, swooping branches of aromatic pine. A wizened old woman, barefooted and smoking a juicy-looking pipe, sat in the runway. She pretended not to notice them as they approached.
The sheriff took off his hat. “Good evening, ma’am. Are you Mrs. Asie Tenniman?”
“I hain’t her sister.”
“I understand that at sun-up this morning you heard an explosion at the old hotel and that a few moments later you saw the sky redden as the building caught fire?”
The old woman chewed her pipe stem.
“I’m Steve Robley,” the sheriff said placatingly. “Don’t be afraid to talk to me. You probably knew my father. We mean you no harm. We understand—”
“You understand! You understand! Who-all’s bin a-tellin’ y’all these tales?”
The sheriff answered complacently: “Your husband, Asie.”
The old woman said sweetly: “Now hain’t that a marvel? If you was any sheriff at all you’d know your county. I’m a widow-woman. Asie’s bin dead and gone three year now. The big-pox takened him.”
There was a flustered silence.
McGavock put in his oar. “You tell us you’re a widow. Those look to me like mighty fine fox hounds. Do you hunt foxes?”
The old dame went into a frenzy of rage. “Yes, by daddy! I hunt fox and I hunt deer and I hunt bear. And I got me a thirty-thirty inside that can roll you up like a cigarette paper. And if you fellers don’t quit pesterin’ me and git gone I’ll shore haul ’er out!”
In the car, on the way back to town, the sheriff said: “The man that gave that false report to Bennett was an impostor. What did he look like?”
“He had a plaid cotton shirt and a flashy brass-studded belt. He was about eighteen years old. Do you make him?”
“I think I do. He’s a character — and a bad one — from over in the Hostetter’s Store neighborhood. How he got into the picture, I couldn’t tell you. Maldron’s defended him time and again — but that doesn’t mean anything.”