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.
“Of course not.”
There was an awkward interval.
The sheriff changed the subject. “Back there, before we started to dig, you said something about Attila. What did you mean?”
“Attila the Hun,” McGavock explained. “That was the way his brother tribesmen buried him. They wanted to hide his body so they dammed a stream, buried him, and then turned the water back in its channel. I wonder how many anonymous killers have done it since!”
The sheriff parked behind the courthouse. “Promise me this,” McGavock said earnestly as they separated. “Promise me you’ll do nothing stringent until you hear what I have to say at Malcom Jarrell’s tonight. Be there on the dot — and bring your buddy Hal Maldron.”
The sheriff was hesitant. “It’s mighty irregular—”
McGavock soothed him. “If it’s the credit you’re worrying about — don’t! I don’t want any headlines. All I want is this slayer.”
That did the trick. Robley smiled. “I wasn’t thinking of headlines but if you put it that way, it’s mighty fine of you. I’ll be seeing you.”
The detective had an early supper at the Bradley House. Its lord and master was nowhere to be seen. But the boy in the alpaca coat was in a talkative mood. “A fellow was a-saying you’re a detective,” he observed. “You and Steve Robley been out all evening, ain’t you? Fellow was a-saying y’all are teamed up to ketch you’uns a badman.”
McGavock grabbed the boy’s wrist, punched his hand in the inkwell, slapped it on a piece of paper. He gave the brat a terrible leer. “Fingerprints,” he explained. “I’m not passing up anybody. I’ll just send these up to Nashville and—” He paused, studied the paralyzed clerk thoughtfully. “Maybe you’d like to turn state’s evidence?”
“But I don’t know nothing about nothing.”
“The heck you don’t. Where’s Cal Bradley?”
The adolescent licked his lips. “He’s out in the country somewhere training a bitch pointer.”
“Why didn’t you say so in the first place? Why all the secrecy?”
“I swear I couldn’t tell you. He threatened me not to. That’s all I rightly know.”
“If you see him before I do,” McGavock ground out, “you tell him the sheriff said he’s to show up at Malcom Jarrell’s at eight.”
He was dog tired. He rubbed his unshaven chin, knew that a bath and shave would freshen him, but decided to wait a little. In a far corner of the lobby — back in a sort of alcove — he could make out the outlines of a couple of comfortable-looking chairs in the half gloom. He sauntered over, sank down into cool, deep-cushioned leather and closed his eyes. He was half-asleep — thinking about that little ball of gray fur beneath the tile in Malcom Jarrell’s hearth — when he heard footsteps advancing toward him.
Laurel Bennett burst out: “I have to see you. Thank goodness I’ve found you—” She was dressed as she had been that morning: baggy sweater and worn riding breeches. There was a disheveled, dramatic rumple to her hair.
“You haunt me,” McGavock grated. “It’s not right. You’re a married woman. What now?”
“I have to confess,” she said demurely. “I storied to you this morning. I didn’t find any hammer. I just wanted to study your psychological reactions. When I was at college I wrote my thesis on—”
“Sure, sure.” McGavock yawned. “Some other time, please!”
She ground her heel on the floor. “Where I come from,” she stormed, “people pay me the proper respect.”
“If they don’t they get horse-whipped, eh?”
She went suddenly docile. Her somber eyes fastened themselves on him, intent and warm. “What makes you so attractive?”
McGavock kicked out a chair. “Sit down. What’s all the bedlam about this time?”
“This. I’ve just been consulting with my attorney, Mr. Maldron. We want to retain you. Not through your agency, you understand, but on sort of a freelance job. We’re so impressed with your energy and capability that—”
“That what?”
“Well, it’s this way. I’m just a young girl. Gil came down to Louisiana and married me before I realized what was happening. Swept me off my feet and brought me back here with him. Now I’m beginning to regret it.”
“How so?”
“My husband doesn’t love me. He makes big withdrawals from our account and sends them to Paducah. He’s keeping another woman up there. On my money!”
“Think of that!” McGavock snorted. “You overrun yourself, my child. Last night it was that Gil was gambling his dough away — now it’s a new twist.”
“You must believe me,” she pleaded. “I’m sure I’m right. Hal, Mr. Maldron, says it’s quite possible.”
“How do I come in?”
“We want you to go up to Paducah right away and browse around. We want you to trace this woman down and get information on her. You can name your own salary!”
“It sounds highly attractive,” McGavock decided. “But I’d like a couple of weeks to think it over.” He ogled her. “I’ll have to write my congressman.” He called to her as she strode away. “Be at Jarrell’s tonight at eight. The sheriff’s orders — and bring your husband.”
He sat there for perhaps five minutes, in a glow of pleasure at her anger, and then, on impulse, got to his feet and walked diagonally across the lobby — towards the rear. There was a door just beyond the desk which aroused his curiosity.
He turned the knob, pushed open the panel and stepped out into a small, enclosed court.
The little space, paved with brick and fenced on three sides with rotting eight-foot planks, appeared to be the hotel dump. Rusty bath tubs, broken crockery lay scattered in trashy litter. A wooden gate with a shoestring latch, inset in the fence by the alley, led down a short flight of stone stairs to an arch of brick. The entrance to an old cellar which lay behind the building’s foundations.
McGavock descended the stone stairs, walked warily into the musty blackness. Just inside the arch, he stopped, got out his pencil flash. It was a “plunder room,” a storage place for broken furniture.
He flicked his light in a swinging survey, across the great hand-hewn beams above his head, about the loamy, crumbling walls. Then, with the mathematical precision of a hawk circling for a field mouse, he crossed the floor with his beam, began a painstaking, clockwise examination of the cellar’s cluttered contents.
He felt, knew, that he was in the presence of death.
His light indexed the hodgepodge: chests and highboys, cobwebbed and battered; rolls of rugs and matting disintegrating in the yeasty dampness.
From a frayed, red silk settee — in the heart of the untidy jumble — the corpse of Cal Bradley watched him with popping, lifeless eyes.
McGavock clicked his tongue, took a quick step forward. The hotel man’s hair was a bloody spongy mass. “Our man likes hammers,” McGavock thought. “And he’s learning to get along without nails. This is a ball-peen job.” He inspected the victim without the slightest twinge of sympathy.
Bradley had been dead for at least six hours. In death, the man’s real nature showed itself. His puffy, spiderish face was grooved in lines of greed and malice. McGavock turned away in disgust.
On the earthen floor beside the settee was a granite washbowl full of gasoline. In the center of the bowl was a paving brick. On the brick, its base just awash with the gasoline, was a china teacup of gun powder. A new plumber’s candle was thrust into the cup of powder.
The nape of McGavock’s neck crawled. “He was coming back tonight to give it the works! When everyone was asleep. He’s willing to burn down half the town. A fire here and all of Main Street goes like excelsior. And, according to his plan, I’m upstairs sawing wood.”