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 was just going to do that,” Betty says. “Coming along, Mitzi?”
Mitzi gives me a dirty look, but she gets up. When the girls are gone, the prince says to me, “She is charming, no?”
“She’s only my secretary. Her steady is a prize fighter, who’s very jealous. And now that we’ve got that cleared away, let’s talk business. You’ve been holding out on me, Prince. You want me to find W. C. Roberts and all the time you’re working for him.”
“Of course I am working for him. But I do not know Mr. Roberts. I have never seen him. Always, he sends me just letters.”
“What about the dough you collect from these hunkies, these countrymen of yours.”
“I send it to him, all! Then he mail me the commission, ten per cent.”
“A very likely story. You collect from these people and mail it to Roberts. He trusts you?”
The prince scowls sadly. “That is the trouble. He does not trust me. One time, just for a joke, you know, I send him not as much money as I collect. Next week I get the letter from him. He know how much I have hold out.”
“Ah, he’s got a spotter. Someone who goes to the meetings and checks up on you. Right?”
The prince shrugs wearily. “That is what I think. But I do not know who it is. I have try to find out and I cannot.”
I make a guess. “Maybe the spotter’s name was Tony Druhar!”
The prince gets sore about that. “What you mean by that, Mr. Cragg?”
“Nothing. I was just joking.”
“It is not a good joke. I go to see Mr. Druhar, yesterday, because he wants sell me note for ten dollars.”
“You said you were seeing him because he’d applied to you for a job of some kind.”
“When I say that I do not know you. It was because of note. I buy note sometimes at bargain.”
He’s lying like hell. Maybe a Serbian’s note is a bargain at five dollars, but it isn’t to an Irishman.
I say, “You send this money to Mr. Roberts; to what address?”
“I send the letter to General Delivery. In two-three days I get back letter, with my commission.”
“Where’s the letter mailed, Chicago?”
“Yes, that is why I know Mr. Roberts still live here.”
“Well, it’s a nice racket for you, Prince. As long as you get your dough, what’re you kicking about? Why do you want to see Roberts?”
He doesn’t like that. He gives me a once-over through his monocle. “Mr. Cragg, I pay you five hundred dollars to find Mr. Roberts. You wish to continue working for me?”
“Why, certainly, Prince!” I tell him. “I was just trying to get a line on Mr. Roberts... Ah, here’re the girls.”
They look like they’d chewed up the olive branch in the ladies’ room. I get up and say to Betty: “Gosh, I just remembered we’re supposed to be at Bill’s party.”
“I was about to remind you,” Betty says smartly.
I say, “So long, Prince. Be seeing you in a day or two.”
He grabs hold of Betty’s hand and tries to kiss it. She jerks it away. “I just washed it,” she tells him.
“But your telephone number? And your address? I like to send you the flowers.”
“I’ve got hay fever,” Betty says. “I can’t stand flowers. And I haven’t got a telephone. I never learned how to work one. So long, Prince.”
“Good-by!” snaps Mitzi. “It was nice meeting you.”
We exit.
Outside, Betty says, “Nice boy, that Prince. Some woman’s husband is going to shoot him one of these days.”
“You forget Mamie Kelly. She’s got something on him.”
“You going to snitch on him?”
“Not yet. Still a few things to settle with him.”
“You get anything out of him?”
“Uh-huh, the reason he wants me to find this Roberts. He tried holding out one week and discovered Roberts has a checker on him. My hunch is the Prince prefers a hundred per cent to ten.”
The Red Mill is only a couple of blocks from Betty’s apartment hotel. I walk east on Lawrence Avenue with her. I turn her into Winthrop and we are almost to Ainslee before she’s aware of it. Then she says, “You’re taking me home? What a large evening!”
“Be a large one next time. Maybe tomorrow?”
“You’ll probably take me to the Bulgarian or Siberian meeting.”
I leave her outside her apartment hotel. She’s sore when she goes inside. I can’t help it. I’ll see her in the morning. There’s a couple of little things I still have to do and I have to get up early in the morning.
I go to a stationery store on Broadway that is still open and buy a large children’s book, one with stiff covers. I have the clerk wrap it in the reddest paper he has in the store, some glossy Christmas wrapping paper.
Then I get an address label from him and a bunch of postage stamps.
It’s a long ride downtown so I take the elevated. I get off at Quincy and walk over to the post office and mail the red package at the mailing window. Then I go to my cheap hotel on Jackson Street and go to bed.
Seven-thirty I get up and have breakfast at Thompson’s — without the Death Notices, this time. After which I hoof over to the post office to see if my little trick works.
There are a couple of thousand lock boxes in the General Delivery room at the main Chicago post office. To watch them all during the rush hours would take eighteen pairs of eyes. That’s why I mailed the book to Mr. Roberts. The postal clerk would put a card in his box, saying there was a package for him. He’d have to call at one of the windows for it.
So I fool around at a writing stand near the windows. I fill out eighteen or twenty post-office money orders for fancy amounts and tear them up or stick them in my pocket. I make one out every time someone comes from a box and goes to one of the windows to get a package.
It’s nine forty-five when the red package is handed out. I’m almost caught sleeping, because I’d been expecting a man and this is a girl, a young girl probably just out of high school.
I’m right behind her when she goes out of the post office. She doesn’t even suspect she’s being followed. She walks north up Clark Street to Monroe, then turns east and goes into a building. I ride up in the same elevator with her to the tenth floor.
When she goes in a door I walk over and look at the inscription on it. It reads: “Harker Service Company.”
I wait about five minutes, then go inside. The girl I’d followed from the post office is at a typewriter, but another, a big horsy-faced dame, is behind a desk just inside the door. Beside her, against the wall is a big cabinet with narrow pigeon-holes. There are letters in most of the pigeon-holes and another stack on the desk in front of the girl. The red package is there, too.
I say, “I understand you run a business mail service here.”
“That’s right,” the girl replies. “We also take telephone calls, forward mail and provide you with a business address. No room number is necessary. The charge is only $2.00 per month.”
“That’s fine,” I say. “Now, tell me, does a man named Brown get his mail here?”
She freezes up, right away. “Our service is absolutely confidential!”
“But I got a letter from Brown; he gave this address. I want to see him.”
“In that case, you’d have to leave a message for him. Although,” her face twists, “there’s no Mr. Brown in our service.”
“I must have got the address wrong then,” I say.
I go out. There’s a cigar stand in the lobby on the first floor, with a marble game next to it. I buy a package of cigarettes and shove a nickel in the slot of the marble game. There was a sticker on the glass: “For Amusement Only. No Prizes or Awards.”
It’s a bumper game; the steel marbles make electric contact with springs and light up lights and register a score. I waste three nickels, then get some change from the cigar stand. “You’re playing that just for fun, you know,” the cigar stand man warns me.