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.
I have another snort, then go back to the office of AAA, on Wells near Randolph. Betty has just come from getting her hair done. I give it the once-over. “Like it?” she asked.
It’s set in the new up-and-at-’em style. “You dames get screwier every day,” I tell her.
“Is that so?” she says, coldly. “Well, it’s a good thing I didn’t get my hair done for you.”
It’s an idea I haven’t thought about before, but I make a mental note of it. Inside his private office, Oscar Berger rubs his hands together. He can do it better than a Maxwell Street clothing merchant.
“Well, how many did you find?”
“One, but I got some good leads on two more.”
“Only one, and such good prospects!”
“Nuts, Berger,” I say to him, “they’re as tough as any others and you know it. Look, tell me something, ever hear of a crook by the name of W. C. Roberts?”
“Yeah, sure. Haven’t you? But maybe that case broke when you were on your vacation.”
“It must have. What’d Roberts do?”
“Nothing much. Except swindle about five thousand hunkies in this man’s town. He’s an inventor, see, or claims to be one. He gets a bunch of these hunkies together and tells them he invented four-wheel brakes for automobiles, but Henry Ford or General Motors swiped the patent from him. He invented wireless, but Marconi gypped him out of the patent. So what? So he wants to sue Henry Ford and General Motors. But lawsuits cost money and that’s what he hasn’t got much of. So he gets the hunkies to finance the lawsuits. Mr. Roberts gives them notes. They lend him ten bucks now, they get five thousand when he collects from the big shots.”
“How much does he collect?”
Berger screws up his mouth. “Ten or fifteen billion. Boxcar numbers.”
“And the chumps fall for it?”
“They like it! According to the papers, ten or fifteen thousand hunkies kicked in from five to a hundred bucks per each.”
“And Roberts skipped?”
“Wouldn’t you?”
“That depends. If the suckers were milked dry, maybe. But I understand there’s a lot of Bulgarians and Serbians and such still believe in Roberts.”
“Oh, sure, that’s the sweet part of it. Roberts warned them even before the law jumped on him, that he was expecting something like that. On account of Mr. Ford, Westinghouse and Edison owning the cops and sicking them on him. Slick guy, this Roberts.”
“Yeah? What’d he look like?”
“That’s the funny part of it. No one knows. He doesn’t show himself. When the cops tried to get him, they discovered that no one would even admit ever having seen him.”
“Not bad,” I say, “not bad at all.”
Oscar Berger gives me the once-over. “What’s your interest in this? Roberts didn’t put the bite into you, did he?”
“No. When someone offers me over four per cent interest I know he’s crooked. Not that I’d ever get enough to invest at four per cent.”
When I come out of Berger’s office, Betty is putting lipstick on her mouth. “All right, sister,” I say to her, “I’m going to give you a break tonight. Where do you live?”
“At 4898 Winthrop, but if you come up you’re traveling just for the exercise.”
“I like exercise,” I tell her. “I’ll be there at seven.”
“I won’t be home... What’ll I wear?”
Nice girl, Betty. “Nothing fancy. We’ll go to some quiet spot.”
I still have the best part of my hundred bucks the Serbian prince had given me. I get a haircut and a shave and I have a bite at Harding’s Grill I on Madison. Then I take a taxi to 4898 Winthrop Avenue, which is a block north of Lawrence and one east of Broadway.
The place is a second-rate apartment hotel. They won’t let me upstairs without being announced and when I get Betty on the phone she says she’ll be right down.
She’s down in five minutes. I almost don’t recognize her. She’s wearing a silver evening dress that must have cost her at least a month’s pay. Her hair’s brushed soft and shiny.
She certainly doesn’t look like the type of girl who’d work for a sleezy outfit like AAA. I say to her: “You look very interesting.”
“You never noticed it before,” she says. “How could I? All the time I’m working for Triple A I’ve got a grouch. Skip tracing is a lousy business.”
“I’m figuring on quitting myself,” Betty says. “One of your chumps came into the office last week. He was a big fellow, but he bawled like a baby. You were going to garnishee his wages unless he paid ten dollars a month on a cheap piano he bought for his daughter who wanted to be a musician, but changed her mind and eloped with a greaseball.”
“Nix,” I say. “Let me forget skip tracing for one night. I dream about it.”
“All right. Where we going?”
“A little place I discovered,” I tell her. “You’ve never seen one like it.”
I flag a taxi. Betty looks at me suspiciously when I give the driver the address, but she doesn’t make any comment until we climb out on Halsted Street, down near North Avenue.
She looks around while I pay the driver. “What is this, one of your jokes?”
We’re in front of a dump that has a sign on the window. “Plennert’s Cafe. Lodge Hall for Rent.”
“No. A fellow told me this place would be interesting.”
The cafe is a cheap saloon. You have to go through the saloon to get into the lodge hall, in the rear.
Betty’s game, I’ve got to say that for her. We go through the saloon into the lodge hall. There are rows of folding chairs set up in the hall and most of them are filled with men, women and kids. You can cut the smoke.
Almost all the men in the place are dark complected. Some of them have to shave twice a day. The women are swarthy, too, although here and there you can see a blonde, just by way of contrast.
Betty comes in for a lot of gawking. She’s glad when I pull her down in a seat near the rear.
“What is this?” she whispers to me. Her face is red and I know she doesn’t like it any too well.
I say, “This is a patriotic meeting of the Sons and Daughters of Serbia. Look, up there on the platform, there’s something you’ll never see again — a Serbian prince.”
Yeah, Prince Peter. He’s pouring out a glass of water on a speaker’s stand and the way some of the Serbs on the platform stand around, you can tell that they think a lot of Prince Pete.
There are about eight men on the platform and one woman. The woman is as big as three of the men. Yeah, she’s the amazon who keeps the confectionery store on Sedgwick Street. She’s sitting on a stout wooden bench near the side of the stage, where she can watch Prince Pete. She’s pretty interested in him.
The prince drinks his water and holds up his hands. The room becomes as still as a cemetery at midnight.
“My country people,” the prince says in English. And then he starts jabbering in the damnedest language. He sounds off for ten minutes and I don’t understand a word of it — until everyone in the place begins clapping hands and cheering and one or two of the younger fellows yell in English:
“The hell with Henry Ford! The hell with General Motors! We’ll stick with Mr. Roberts!”
“Fun, isn’t it?” I say to Betty, next to me.
“Is it? I suppose this is your idea of a joke.”
“Not at all. You see in this room about two hundred of the choicest suckers in the city of Chicago. And do they like it? Listen to them.”
About twenty or thirty of the Serbians climb up onto the platform. Prince Pete gives them some aristocratic condescension and they like it. Every one of them.
“You want to see the prince’s monocle?” I ask Betty. “Wait here a minute.”