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.
Tracy gave him the address. “Drive out here right away. You can’t miss the cottage. It’s three from the corner of Locust. Pull into the drive and park at the back of the cottage. Keep your mug covered up as much as you can. I don’t want anyone recognizing you on the drive through Manhattan.”
“Oke.”
“And tell Felix over at the garage to keep his trap shut about the Chrysler going out. If anyone asks later on, both my cars were there all night.”
“Oke.”
Tracy hung up with a nervous click. He prowled swiftly about the shaded bedroom, pocketed the gun from the rug, tidied the grim evidence of struggle that Sweetie had so pathetically counterfeited, made the room normal and neat except for the huddled corpse. Sweetie was still breathing with drugged regularity; she’d be asleep for hours yet.
The Daily Planet’s pint-sized columnist went downstairs to the kitchen and made himself a hasty sandwich with some Swiss and rye he found. He was as hungry as hell; and besides, it gave him something to do while he waited for Butch. Inaction always got on his nerves, made them raw and jumpy.
He had finished the sandwich and was hunting for a bottle of beer when the bell rang at the rear door.
Jerry Tracy stiffened. He knew that the prompt caller at the kitchen couldn’t possibly be Butch. Then who was it? And should he answer the ring or let the guy get tired and go away? Again the bell rang. The guy outside knew that the lights were on in the cottage, that someone was at home. Jerry would have to answer or arouse suspicion that something was wrong.
A plan formed instantly in his mind. He sprang noiselessly towards the gas range, turned on one of the burners. He grabbed an empty kettle from the table, filled it with water, stood it over the blue flame. Then he walked noisily towards the rear door, flung it open.
To his surprise the caller was a woman. Rain slanted against the columnist’s bare head. He stared at the woman, trying to get a glimpse of her dripping face.
“Mrs. Malloy is quite ill,” he said curtly. “What did you want?”
“Ill? I’m... I’m sorry.”
Her beady eyes stared suspiciously, peered past him through the half-opened door. “I’m... I’m Mrs. Malloy’s next-door neighbor. I came to borrow a cup of sugar. You see, we’re having a little party and—”
Tracy leaned forward, glanced alternately to right and left. Both adjoining houses were dark from cellar to garret.
“I’m Doctor Rolfe,” he told the woman with a cool smile. “We mustn’t disturb Mrs. Malloy — but come in, by all means! And... er... get your cup of sugar.”
His firm hand drew her unwillingly across the threshold. He took a good look at her in the light. She was fully dressed for the street: hat, coat, high-heeled shoes, gloves. Soaked with rain. Obviously out in the storm longer than it would take to run from an adjoining doorway. Pale angular face. Might be a Swede. Watching the suave stranger that she had not expected to run into with a puzzled, scared expression in her bovine eyes. That lump in the sagging pocket of her long coat was a gun bulge, or Jerry was crazy!
He lifted the lid of his kettle and peered professionally.
“Mrs. Malloy had a bad heart attack this afternoon. She’s upstairs in bed, barely conscious. I’m heating hot water now for a... ahem... parallelogram treatment.”
He smiled faintly.
“You no doubt know where she keeps the sugar. Help yourself.”
The woman’s eyes swept the cupboard helplessly. “I... I guess I won’t bother, Doctor. Thank you; I... I won’t stay.”
“Shall I tell Mrs. Malloy who called?”
“No, no. Don’t annoy her.”
She backed towards the kitchen door, swung it open and ducked out into the drumming rain. The minute the door closed Tracy ran noiselessly into the front room. With his eye carefully glued to a corner of the shifted shade, he saw the woman hurrying from the driveway to the sidewalk. She melted into the darkness towards Locust Avenue. A liar and a faker. As bad an egg as Tracy had ever smelled. Who was she? Did she know about the corpse upstairs? Could she be — his jaw tightened — an emissary of Señorita Lois?
He went back to the kitchen and turned out the gas flame under the kettle. He heard the pulsing hum of a motorcar with a thrill of satisfaction. The car turned slowly into the driveway from the street. It braked behind the cottage and a moment later the bell rang briefly. It was Butch.
Tracy yanked the startled big fellow into the kitchen and snapped an eager question at him. “See any sign of a woman walking along Locust Avenue?”
“Naw.” Butch snorted with derision. “On a night like this they ain’t nobody walkin’. Street’s as empty as a... a motorman’s glove. I mean,” he added hastily, with a silly grin, “a motorman without no hand.”
“Did you see a car parked anywhere along Locust?”
“Oh, sure. About four blocks down. Parked without lights. You tol’ me not to show me mug much, so I didn’t give it no gander.” He grinned. “Jeeze, let ’em park — I was young meself once!”
Jerry wiped the romantic grin off Butch’s thick lips with a curt sentence or two.
“Huh?” Butch gasped. “Moider? Right here? An’... an’ we’re gonna snatch the body?”
“Right. And I don’t want any mistakes.”
Less than ten minutes after Butch had arrived, the body of Phil Clement was carried discreetly out the back door of the cottage and stowed away in the rumble of the Chrysler. He made a tight fit — but he fitted. The adjoining houses were still dark. Tracy smeared the license plates with a handful of wet earth. He was climbing in alongside of Butch when he suddenly remembered his two bundles — the birthday cake and the candles! Swearing grimly, he hurried back into the cottage and got them.
Butch swung the car through the driveway and out to the rain-pelted street.
As they turned into Locust Avenue, Jerry’s eyes peered ahead through the slanting sliver of headlight-illuminated rain.
“Is that the parked car you saw?”
“Yeah.”
“Slow down a trifle when we go by. Don’t let ’em see your face. Cut in close and go right by ’em.”
“Okey.”
Butch ducked his head low over the wheel. Tracy, hunched beside him, gave the stalled car a lightning scrutiny from under the wet brim of his hat. Two of ’em — a man and a woman. The man’s back was turned; all Tracy could see was a very sporty, extremely gray topcoat — almost a white-gray. The woman was the dame who had called at Sweetie Malloy’s kitchen to borrow a cup of sugar.
Butch, who had glanced casually into the rear-vision mirror, gave a faint yelp. “Hey! They’re follerin’ us, Boss!”
“I know. Show ’em how fast you can go with a special engine job that cost me plenty of jack.”
Butch crooned with delight. “Fast as I like?”
“Sure. Lose ’em.”
Butch lost them in a straightaway mile of hair-raising speed along water-slippery concrete. He made doubly sure by two sneaking turns through the bumping darkness that brought the Chrysler to a parallel highway.
“We’re going to Brooklyn,” Tracy said. “We’re going to dump the body in a vacant lot at the corner of Pike and Pacific.”
The place registered instantly with Butch. “I getcha. The spot where the cops found Snipe Moretto last week.” His smile bathed Tracy with fond admiration. “Jeeze, you sure got brains in that little nut o’ yours. The cops’ll think it’s a gang killin’. They’ll think Snipe Moretto’s boys got hunk with the Peewee gang.”
The flitting Chrysler roared smoothly through the Bronx, crossed into Manhattan, went all the way down to Canal and across the Manhattan bridge into Brooklyn. It was barely nine o’clock, but the steady torrential rain had swept the streets clear of all but a driblet of traffic. No signs of pedestrians at all.