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.
Lou didn’t look at me. “He gets a nice crowd down there,” he said. “He has a small dance floor and a five-piece Mexican band to help the customers relax. They dance a bit and then go back for another trimming, instead of going away disgusted.”
I said: “What do you do?”
“I guess you might call it a system,” he said softly, and looked at me under his long lashes.
I looked away from him, looked around the room. It had a rust-red carpet, five green filing cases in a row under an advertising calendar, an old costumer in the corner, a few walnut chairs, net curtains over the windows. The fringe of the curtains was dirty from blowing about in the draft. There was a bar of late sunlight across my desk and it showed up the dust.
“I get it like this,” I said. “You think you have that roulette wheel tamed and you expect to win enough money so that Canales will be mad at you. You’d like to have some protection along — me. I think it’s screwy.”
“It’s not screwy at all,” Lou said. “Any roulette wheel has a tendency to work in a certain rhythm. If you know the wheel very well indeed—”
I smiled and shrugged. “Okey, I wouldn’t know about that. I don’t know enough roulette. It sounds to me like you’re being a sucker for your own racket, but I could be wrong. And that’s not the point anyway.”
“What is?” Lou asked thinly.
“I’m not much stuck on bodyguarding — but maybe that’s not the point either. I take it I’m supposed to think this play is on the level. Suppose I don’t, and walk out on you, and you get in a box? Or suppose I think everything is aces, but Canales don’t agree with me and gets nasty.”
“That’s why I need a guy with a rod,” Lou said, without moving a muscle except to speak.
I said evenly: “If I’m tough enough for the job — and I didn’t know I was — that still isn’t what worries me.”
“Forget it,” Lou said. “It breaks me up enough to know you’re worried.”
I smiled a little more and watched his yellow gloves moving around on top of the desk, moving too much. I said slowly: “You’re the last guy in the world to be getting expense money that way just now. I’m the last guy to be standing behind you while you do it. That’s all.”
Lou said: “Yeah.” He knocked some ash off his cigarette down on the glass top, bent his head to blow it off. He went on, as if it was a new subject: “Miss Glenn is going with me. She’s a tall redhead, a swell looker. She used to model. She’s nice to people in any kind of a spot and she’ll keep Canales from breathing on my neck. So we’ll make out. I just thought I’d tell you.”
I was silent for a minute, then I said: “You know damn well I just got through telling the Grand Jury it was Manny Tinnen I saw lean out of that car and cut the ropes on Art Shannon’s wrists after they pushed him on the roadway, filled with lead.”
Lou smiled faintly at me. “That’ll make it easier for the grafters on the big time; the fellows who take the contracts and don’t appear in the business. They say Shannon was square and kept the Board in line. It was a nasty bump-off”
I shook my head. I didn’t want to talk about that. I said: “Canales has a noseful of junk a lot of the time. And maybe he doesn’t go for redheads.”
Lou stood up slowly and lifted his cane off the desk. He stared at the tip of one yellow finger. He had an almost sleepy expression. Then he moved towards the door, swinging his cane.
“Well, I’ll be seein’ you some time,” he drawled.
I let him get his hand on the knob before I said: “Don’t go away sore, Lou. I’ll drop down to Las Olindas, if you have to have me. But I don’t want any money for it, and for Pete’s sake don’t pay any more attention to me than you have to.”
He licked his lips softly and didn’t quite look at me. “Thanks, keed. I’ll be careful as hell.”
He went out then and his yellow glove disappeared around the edge of the door.
I sat still for about five minutes and then my pipe got too hot. I put it down, looked at my strap watch, and got up to switch on a small radio in the corner beyond the end of the desk. When the A.C. hum died down the last tinkle of a chime came out of the horn, then a voice was saying: “KLI now brings you its regular early evening broadcast of local news releases. An event of importance this afternoon was the indictment returned late today against Maynard J. Tinnen by the Grand Jury. Tinnen is a well-known City Hall lobbyist and man about town. The indictment, a shock to his many friends, was based almost entirely on the testimony—”
My telephone rang sharply and a girl’s cool voice said in my ear: “One moment, please. Mr. Fen weather is calling you.”
He came on at once. “Indictment returned. Take care of the boy.”
I said I was just getting it over the radio. We talked a short moment and then he hung up, after saying he had to leave at once to catch a plane.
I leaned back in my chair again and listened to the radio without exactly hearing it. I was thinking what a damn fool Lou Harger was and that there wasn’t anything I could do to change that.
Two
It was a good crowd for a Tuesday but nobody was dancing. Around ten o’clock the little five-piece band got tired of messing around with a rhumba that nobody was paying any attention to. The marimba player dropped his sticks and reached under his chair for a glass. The rest of the boys lit cigarettes and sat there looking bored.
I leaned sidewise against the bar, which was on the same side of the room as the orchestra stand. I was turning a small glass of tequila around on the top of the bar. All the business was at the center one of the three roulette tables.
The bartender leaned beside me, on his side of the bar.
“The flame-top gal must be pickin’ them,” he said.
I nodded without looking at him. “She’s playing with fistfuls now,” I said. “Not even counting it.”
The red-haired girl was tall. I could see the burnished copper of her hair between the heads of the people behind her. I could see Lou Harger’s sleek head beside hers. Everybody seemed to be playing standing up.
“You don’t play?” the bartender asked me.
“Not on Tuesdays. I had some trouble on a Tuesday once.”
“Yeah? Do you like that stuff straight, or could I smooth it out for you?”
“Smooth it out with what?” I said. “You got a wood rasp handy?”
He grinned. I drank a little more of the tequila and made a face.
“Did anybody invent this stuff on purpose?”
“I wouldn’t know, mister.”
“What’s the limit over there?”
“I wouldn’t know that either. How the boss feels, I guess.”
The roulette tables were in a row near the far wall. A low railing of gilt metal joined their ends and the players were outside the railing.
Some kind of a confused wrangle started at the center table. Half a dozen people at the two end tables grabbed their chips up and moved across.
Then a clear, very polite voice, with a slightly foreign accent, spoke out: “If you will just be patient, madame... Mr. Canales will be here in a minute.”
I went across, squeezed near the railing. Two croupiers stood near me with their heads together and their eyes looking sidewise. One moved a rake slowly back and forth beside the idle wheel. They were staring at the red-haired girl.
She wore a high-cut black evening gown. She had fine white shoulders, was something less than beautiful and more than pretty. She was leaning on the edge of the table, in front of the wheel. Her long eyelashes were twitching. There was a big pile of money and chips in front of her.
She spoke monotonously, as if she had said the same thing several times already.