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.
Rain, drumming at the closed window, made a softly sinister sound.
“Everything is very, very right, my friend!” Her laugh quivered. “As — as right as rain.”
He let the subject drop for the moment. “The big package is a cake,” he said. “Biggest damn’ cake in the local cakery. Candles in the smaller bundle. Later on we’re gonna let you inflate the lovely bosom — and Lord help you if you don’t blow ’em all out with one big foooof! I thought that after dinner—”
“Dinner? Of... of course.”
“Corned beef.” Tracy grinned. “Same as it’s always been, same as it always will be. Cooked à la Sweetie Malloy, with gobs of hot English mustard—”
“And... and chopped cabbage with plenty of salt and pepper, lots of b-butter—”
Her voice stopped quite suddenly. Her mouth twisted, began making queer, choking sounds. She turned away towards the couch. Tracy didn’t move an inch from where he stood. The sound of her harsh weeping made his heart ache, but he let her alone, let her have the thing out by herself. After a while her fingers stopped bunching the covering on the couch’s arm.
“Jerry, will you do something for me — if I beg you as an old friend?”
The look in her eyes made him wary at once. He didn’t reply.
“I want you to leave this house immediately and go back to New York.”
“No.”
“You don’t understand. For your own sake, Jerry, you’ve got to go! Just forget that you were here.”
“No.”
He winced at the sound of her tragic laugh. “In that case, you will have to be convinced. You see, you’re not the only one with a surprise this evening. I... I have one for you.”
Her cold fingers touched his and held on. She walked silently towards the stairs, and Tracy with her. Upstairs in silence, past the bathroom, down a short, incredibly ugly hallway to a closed door which, being opened, disclosed a curtained bedroom where twin boudoir lamps burned softly atop a dresser.
Tracy stared at the room’s quiet charm, doubly quiet by reason of the lash of the rain against the shade-drawn windows.
“So what?” he said in a puzzled voice. “Where’s the surprise come in?”
“It’s — on the other side of the bed.”
“It better be a good one, because — Oh!”
He stopped short. His voice sounded like dried peas rattling in a tin pan. “How did this happen?”
“It... it happened.”
“Who killed him?”
“I did.”
Tracy said very softly: “I knew a guy once who used to lie the same way you do. The more he lied, the more truthful he looked. He never could fool me worth a damn.”
Jerry Tracy bent downward above the sprawled body and surveyed it with narrowed eyes. The man had taken a small-calibered bullet almost exactly through the navel. The corpse was on his back, with his legs together, one arm trailing stiffly towards the dresser. The sleeve of the extended arm, Tracy noted, was quite rumpled. Black, silky hair, a little thin on top; a small black mustache that accented the curve of petulant lips. Eyelids shut tightly. Ears without lobes.
Tracy straightened. “You killed this fellow, Sweetie?”
“Yes.”
“Right here?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“For... for reasons I’d rather not discuss, Jerry.”
“We’ll skip the reasons. You killed him about a half hour ago, eh?”
“No,” Sweetie Malloy said calmly. “I killed him early this afternoon.”
Tracy’s chuckle held no amusement. “Smart woman refuses to be tripped by cunning columnist.” He shook his head. “It’s no use lying, Sweetie. Too many other things to explain away. Corpse bled like a pig when he took the slug in the belly — but your rug’s nice and clean. The gun on the rug could have done it — maybe did do it — but not here, Sweetie. And you should never try to bend an arm after rigor mortis has set in; it makes a lot too many wrinkles in the sleeve and sets the mind of a bright little guy galloping with the proper answers.”
“Nevertheless, I killed him here in my bedroom,” she said, stonily.
“What were you planning to do if I hadn’t butted in?”
“I was going to call the police and confess.”
“Mmmm... Going to, eh? Since this morning?”
Composure fled from her. “My God, Jerry — stop grinning at me like a... a hyena! Did you ever murder anyone... and... and try to decide what to do? Did you ever stare all day at a dead man and think... and think... till you almost went mad with terror and despair? And then, just when you had nerved yourself to take what you deserved — to have the doorbell ring and... and be tortured by a well-meaning friend who—”
Tracy strode grimly forward as her voice mounted shrilly. With deliberate brutality he shook the hysteria from her.
“Stop yelling. Do you want to get me into trouble, too?”
“No, no!” she gasped. “Please go — please, Jerry! I... I brought you up here to show you how dangerous, how suicidal it would be for you to remain until—”
“Save your breath. I won’t budge an inch. Who you trying to shield?”
Sweetie didn’t reply.
“Who’s the lad on the floor?”
“A... a man named Phil Clement. He was a — lover of mine. If you’re familiar with the movies we were — living in sin.” The hard desperation went out of her voice suddenly. “Jerry, you must believe me! Phil Clement found out something that I couldn’t bear to have exposed, and he... he tried to blackmail me.”
“I happen to know,” Tracy reminded her, “that the income you live on, Sweetie, wouldn’t attract a grasshopper.”
“For your own sake, leave before I call the police.”
“I’m staying here until I find out the truth.”
There was a telephone on the low night table and Sweetie sprang towards it. Jerry wrenched the receiver out of her hand before she could utter a word. He slammed it back on the prong and held the sobbing woman motionless for an instant. Something in the wild stare of her eyes gave him a sudden idea.
“If I promise to leave here in ten minutes, will you have one drink with me as a... a substitute for the birthday cake and the... the candles?”
Sweetie Malloy nodded haggardly.
“Where do you keep the liquor?”
“Downstairs. Kitchen. There’s a bottle of Scotch in the little closet off the dinette.”
She had sunk into a chair, her eyes closed. He closed the bedroom door softly, his mind grimly on the bathroom and the medicine cabinet. A sedative! There must be a sedative there! He was betting shrewdly on the habit that must have been a part of Sweetie Malloy at the height of her Broadway glamour. He had never known a celebrity yet who wasn’t an insomniac. Jerry was one himself. Late hours and the constant whirl of excitement made a sedative as familiar as breakfast food. And where would it be but in the medicine cabinet?
He found a bottle of veronal on the lowest shelf. Soundlessly he tiptoed down the carpeted stairs, hurried to the kitchen. He made two stiff highballs. Into the glass with a slight nick at its edge he put a double dose of veronal. He placed both glasses on a tray and went back upstairs.
Sweetie Malloy reached out listlessly as he touched her shoulder and presented the tray. She took the glass without the nick.
“Whoa!” Tracy said humorously and plucked it from her fingers.
“What’s the matter?”