The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps
- Автор: Anderson Lars, Barr Randolph
- Год: 2007
- Язык: английский
- Год: Vintage Books
- ISBN: 978-0-307-28048-0
- Жанр: Криминальные детективы
Электронная книга - «The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps». Краткое содержание книги:
Weighing in at over a thousand pages, containing over forty-seven stories and two novels, this book is big baby, bigger and more powerful than a freight train — a bullet couldn’t pass through it. Here are the best stories and every major writer who ever appeared in celebrated Pulps like Black Mask, Dime Detective, Detective Fiction Weekly, and more. These are the classic tales that created the genre and gave birth to hard-hitting detectives who smoke criminals like packs of cigarettes; sultry dames whose looks are as lethal as a dagger to the chest; and gin-soaked hideouts where conversations are just preludes to murder. This is crime fiction at its gritty best.
They maneuvered the trunk down the narrow ship’s corridor and into the stateroom by the skin of its teeth. It was a tight squeeze. It couldn’t, of course, go under either one of the bunks. One remaining wall was taken up by the door, the other by the folding washstand, which opened like a desk. The middle of the room was the only answer, and that promptly turned the cabin into nothing more than a narrow perimeter around the massive object. That his fellow passenger, who wasn’t any sylph, should put up with this was the deadest give-away ever, to Babe’s way of thinking, that he was on to something. Some of these punks had a sixth sense, almost, when it came to scenting crime in the air around them. He wouldn’t need more than one, though, in about a day more, if Babe didn’t do something in a hurry! It was July, and there were going to be two of them in there with it.
He tried half-heartedly to have it shunted down to the hold after all — although that would have been just jumping from a very quick frying pan to a slower but just as deadly fire — but they balked. It would have to be taken out again onto the quay and then shipped aboard from there, they pointed out. There was no longer time enough. And he’d cooked up a steam of unpopularity for himself as it was that wouldn’t clear away for days.
The dick didn’t show right up, but a pair of his valises came in, and Sherman lamped the tags. “E. M. Fowler, New York.” He looked out, and he saw where he’d made still another mistake. He’d bought a cabin on the A-deck, the middle of the three, just under the promenade deck; a C-cabin would have been the right one, below deck level. This one had no porthole opening directly above the water, but a window flush with the deck outside. But then he hadn’t known he was going to travel with a corpse, and her money had made it easy to buy the best. Now he’d have to smuggle her outside with him, all the way along the passageway, down the stairs, and out across the lowest deck — when the time came.
He beat it out in a hurry, grinding his hands together. Should have thought of it sooner, before he’d let them haul it in there! He’d ask to be changed, that was all. Get the kind he wanted, away from that bloodhound and by himself. Sure they could switch him, they must have some last-minute cancellations! Always did.
The purser spread out a chart for him when he put it to him in his office, seemed about to do what he wanted; Sherman felt better than he had at any time since five that morning. Then suddenly he looked up at him as though he’d just remembered something. “You Mr. Sherman, 42-A?” Babe nodded. “Sorry, we’re booked solid; you’ll have to stay in there.” He put the chart away.
Arguing was no use. He knew what had happened; Fowler and his badge again. He’d foreseen this move, beat him to it, blocked it! “You weren’t bragging, brother, when you called yourself a clairvoyant!” he thought bitterly. But the guy couldn’t actually know what was in the trunk, what was making him act like this? Just a hunch? Just the fact that he’d sized Babe up as off-color, and noticed the frantic way Babe had tried to keep the trunk with him when he boarded the train? Just the way any dick baited anyone on the other side of the fence, not sure but always hoping for the worst? Well, he was asking for it and he was going to get it — and not the way he expected, either. He’d foreclosed his own life by nailing Babe down in the cabin with him!
Just the same, he felt the need of a good stiff pick-up. They were already under way when he found his way into the bar, the jurisdiction of the French Republic was slipping behind them, it was just that pot-bellied old gent now with the brass buttons, the captain. The straight brandy put him in shape; the hell with both sides of the pond! Once he got rid of her there wouldn’t be any evidence left, he could beat any extradition rap they tried to slap on him. Water scotches a trail in more ways than one.
He spent the afternoon between the bar and 42, to make sure Fowler didn’t try to tackle the trunk with a chisel or pick the lock while his back was turned. But the dick didn’t go near the cabin, stayed out of sight the whole time. The sun, even going down, was still plenty hot; Sherman opened the window as wide as it would go and turned on the electric fan above the door. It would have to be tonight, for plenty of good reasons! One of the least was that he couldn’t keep checking on the thing like this every five minutes without going bughouse.
A steward went all over the ship pounding a portable dinner gong, and Sherman went back to the cabin, more to keep his eye on Fowler than to freshen up. He wouldn’t have put on one of his other suits now even if he could have gotten at it.
Fowler came in, went around on his side of the trunk, and stripped to his undershirt. Sherman heard a rustle and a click, and he’d turned off the fan and pulled down the shade. Almost instantaneously the place got stuffy.
Babe said, “What’s the idea? You ain’t that chilly in July!”
Fowler gave him a long, searching look across the top of the trunk. “You seem to want ventilation pretty badly,” he said, very low.
It hit Sherman, like everything the guy seemed to say, and he forgot what he was doing for a minute, splashed water on his hair from force of habit. When it was all ganged up in front of his eyes, he remembered his comb was in there, too, he didn’t have a thing out. He tried combing with his fingers and it wouldn’t work. He stalled around while the dick slicked his own, waiting for him to get out and leave it behind.
The dick did some stalling of his own. It started to turn itself an endurance, the second dinner gong went banging by outside the window. Sherman, nerves tight as elastic bands, thought: “What the hell is he up to?” His own shirt was hanging on a hook by the door, he saw Fowler glance at it just once, but didn’t get the idea in time. Fowler parked a little bottle of liquid shoe-blackening on the extreme edge of the trunk, stopper out, right opposite the shirt. Then he brushed past between the two, elbows slightly out. He had no right to come around on that side; it was Sherman’s side of the place. The shirt slipped off the hook and the shoe-polish toppled and dumped itself on top of it on the floor. The shirt came up black and white, mostly black, in his hand.
“Oops, sorry!” he apologized smoothly. “Now I’ve done it — have it laundered for you—”
Sherman got the idea too late, he’d maneuvered him into opening the trunk in his presence and getting a clean one out, or else giving up his evening meal; he couldn’t go in there wearing that piebald thing!
He jerked the thing away from the detective, gave him a push that sent him staggering backward, and went after him arm poised to sock him. “I saw you! Y’did that purposely!” he snarled. He realized that he was giving himself away, lowered his arm. “Hand over one of yours,” he ordered grimly.
Fowler shook his head, couldn’t keep the upward tilt from showing at the corners of his mouth though. “One thing I never do, let anybody else wear my things.” He fished out a couple of singles. “I’ll pay you for it, or I’ll have it laundered for you—” Then very smoothly, “Matter, mean to say you haven’t got another one in that young bungalow of yours?”
Sherman got a grip on himself; this wasn’t the time or the place. After all, he still held the trump in his own hands — and that was whether the trunk was to be opened or to stay closed. He punched the bell for the steward and sat down on the edge of his berth, pale but leering.