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 went out and sat in my Marmon for a few minutes, smoked a cigarette, imbibed a little from my pint of Canadian Club. Then I went back into the Carillon and shut myself in a pay booth. I dialed the Telegram, asked for the City Desk, got a man named Von Ballin.
He yelped at me when I told him who I was. “You still walking around? That ought to be a story. I thought Manny Tinnen’s friends would have had you laid away in old lavender by this time.”
I said: “Can that and listen to this. Do you know a man named Lou Harger? He’s a gambler. Had a place that was raided and closed up a month ago.”
Von Ballin said he didn’t know Lou personally, but he knew who he was.
“Who around your rag would know him real well?”
He thought a moment. “There’s a lad named Jerry Cross here,” he said, “that’s supposed to be an expert on night life. What did you want to know?”
“Where would he go to celebrate,” I said. Then I told him some of the story, not too much. I left out the part where I got sapped and the part about the taxi. “He hasn’t shown at his hotel,” I ended. “I ought to get a line on him.”
“Well, if you’re a friend of his—”
“Of his — not of his crowd,” I said sharply.
Von Ballin stopped to yell at somebody to take a call, then said to me softly, close to the phone: “Come through, boy. Come through.”
“All right. But I’m talking to you, not to your sheet. I got sapped and lost my gun outside Canales’ joint. Lou and his girl switched his car for a taxi they picked up. Then they dropped out of sight. I don’t like it too well. Lou wasn’t drunk enough to chase around town with that much dough in his pockets. And if he was, the girl wouldn’t let him. She had the practical eye.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Von Ballin said. “But it don’t sound promising. I’ll give you a buzz.”
I told him I lived at the Merritt Plaza, in case he had forgotten, went out and got into the Marmon again. I drove home and put hot towels on my head for fifteen minutes, then sat around in my pajamas and drank hot whiskey and lemon and called the Carillon every once in a while. At two-thirty Von Ballin called me and said no luck. Lou hadn’t been pinched, he wasn’t in any of the Receiving Hospitals, and he hadn’t shown at any of the clubs Jerry Cross could think of.
At three I called the Carillon for the last time. Then I put my light out and went to sleep.
In the morning it was the same way. I tried to trace the red-haired girl a little. There were twenty-eight people named Glenn in the phone book, and three women among them. One didn’t answer, the other two assured me they didn’t have red hair. One offered to show me.
I shaved, showered, had breakfast, walked three blocks down the hill to the Condor Building.
Miss Glenn was sitting in my little reception room.
Five
I unlocked the other door and she went in and sat in the chair where Lou had sat the afternoon before. I opened some windows, locked the outer door of the reception room, and struck a match for the unlighted cigarette she held in her ungloved and ringless left hand.
She was dressed in a blouse and plaid skirt with a loose coat over them, and a close-fitting hat that was far enough out of style to suggest a run of bad luck. But it hid almost all of her hair. Her skin was without make-up and she looked about thirty and had the set face of exhaustion.
She held her cigarette with a hand that was almost too steady, a hand on guard. I sat down and waited for her to talk.
She stared at the wall over my head and didn’t say anything. After a little while I packed my pipe and smoked for a minute. Then I got up and went across to the door that opened into the hallway and picked up a couple of letters that had been pushed through the slot.
I sat down at the desk again, looked them over, read one of them twice, as if I had been alone. While I was doing this I didn’t look at her directly or speak to her, but I kept an eye on her all the same. She looked like a lady who was getting nerved for something.
Finally she moved. She opened up a big black patent-leather bag and took out a fat manila envelope, pulled a rubber band off it and sat holding the envelope between the palms of her hands, with her head tilted way back and the cigarette dribbling gray smoke from the corners of her mouth.
She said slowly: “Lou said if I ever got caught in the rain, you were the boy to see. It’s raining hard where I am.”
I stared at the manila envelope. “Lou is a pretty good friend of mine,” I said. “I’d do anything in reason for him. Some things not in reason — like last night. That doesn’t mean Lou and I always play the same games.”
She dropped her cigarette into the glass bowl of the ash tray and left it to smoke. A dark flame burned suddenly in her eyes, then went out.
“Lou is dead.” Her voice was quite toneless.
I reached over with a pencil and stabbed at the hot end of the cigarette until it stopped smoking.
She went on: “A couple of Canales’ boys got him in my apartment — with one shot from a small gun that looked like my gun. Mine was gone when I looked for it afterwards. I spent the night there with him dead... I had to.”
She broke quite suddenly. Her eyes turned up in her head and her head came down and hit the desk. She lay still, with the manila envelope in front of her lax hands.
I jerked a drawer open and brought up a bottle and a glass, poured a stiff one and stepped around it, heaved her up in her chair. I pushed the edge of the glass hard against her mouth — hard enough to hurt. She struggled and swallowed. Some of it ran down her chin, but life came back into her eyes.
I left the whiskey in front of her and sat down again. The flap of the envelope had come open enough for me to see currency inside, bales of currency.
She began to talk to me in a dreamy sort of voice.
“We got all big bills from the cashier, but makes quite a package at that. There’s twenty-two thousand even in the envelope. I kept out a few odd hundreds.
“Lou was worried. He figured it would be pretty easy for Canales to catch up with us. You might be right behind and not be able to do very much about it.”
I said: “Canales lost the money in full view of everybody there. It was good advertising — even if it hurt.”
She went on exactly as though I had not spoken. “Going through the town we spotted a cab driver sitting in his parked cab and Lou had a brain wave. He offered the boy a C note to let him drive the cab into San Angelo and bring the Buick to the hotel after a while. The boy took us up and we went over on another street and made the switch. We were sorry about ditching you, but Lou said you wouldn’t mind. And we might get a chance to flag you.
“Lou didn’t go into his hotel. We took another cab over to my place. I live at the Hobart Arms, eight hundred block on South Minter. It’s a place where you don’t have to answer questions at the desk. We went up to my apartment and put the lights on and two guys with masks came around the half-wall between the living room and the dinette. One was small and thin and the other one was a big slob with a chin that stuck out under his mask like a shelf. Lou made a wrong motion and the big one shot him just the once. The gun just made a flat crack, not very loud, and Lou fell down on the floor and never moved.”
I said: “It might be the ones that made a sucker out of me. I haven’t told you about that yet.”
She didn’t seem to hear that either. Her face was white and composed, but as expressionless as plaster. “Maybe I’d better have another finger of the hooch,” she said.