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.
“I can’t wait an hour. I want to see her now.”
Garcia’s chuckle seemed a bit strained. “Ah, no, no... Why not wait, have a few dreenks — see for yourself thees glorious dance she makes with thees glorious body, no?”
“You mean she doesn’t want to talk to me?”
“Tonight she is a leetle bit upset.”
“Sick, eh?” Tracy’s tone was sharp.
“No, no. Worried, per’aps. Maybe a leetle temperament. Ha, ha! She snarl and she snap. She weel talk weeth no one.”
“Tell her Jerry Tracy wants to see her.”
Garcia shrugged, scowled, departed. When he returned his message was brief.
“She say—” He gulped. “She say how you lak to go to hell in a tin bucket?”
“I see. Got an envelope and a small hunk of paper?”
“But surely.”
Tracy cupped the paper behind his left hand, scrawled a brief sentence, sealed the envelope. “Take her this.”
In three minutes Garcia was back. There was incredulity in his black eyes, a faint overlay of perspiration on his olive forehead.
“You are indeed a magician, Señor Tracy. She see you. Come weeth me.”
Tracy threaded his way past crowded tables, paid no attention to the whispered buzz of comment his presence excited. He crossed a shining expanse of open floor, ducked under a curtain of heavy brocaded material and climbed a flight of wooden stairs to a closed door.
“Beat it,” he told Garcia.
He opened the door without knocking, clicked it shut behind him.
“Hello, Toots.”
His note was still in her hand. She had thrown a light robe over her shoulders but the thing gaped candidly and Tracy, in spite of the hard anger that gripped him, was forced to admit to himself that this kid was strictly the goods.
It was hard to say which was uppermost in her swimming dark eyes: rage, or a bright, overmastering fear.
“Listen, you wise little newspaper heel! If you’re trying one of your celebrated snoop acts, pulling a cheap bluff—”
“Shut up!” He was not an awful lot taller than the dancer, but he seemed to loom a foot higher as he tramped slowly towards her. “As far as I’m concerned, Toots, you’re a two-bit strip act — and I’m doing you a favor to sneeze at you. I never fool and I never bluff. I asked you how you’d like to push a bubble around in a death cell. Think it over, Miss Malloy.”
“You — damn you... Who said my name’s Malloy?”
She sprang at him without warning, caught both his shoulders in a nail-digging frenzy. Her flimsy robe trailed but neither of them was aware of anything but their locked double glare. Tracy kept his lips compressed, gave no indication whatever that the pointed nails of the dancer were hurting him like hell.
He flung her backward a step.
“If you don’t talk — and talk plenty, Toots! — I’m gonna nail that kalsomined shape of yours to the cross. I’m calling you Malloy because you’re Sweetie Malloy’s daughter.”
He heard the sharp hissing of her breath. There was a moment of utter silence in the room.
“Well? So what if I am?”
“I want to know why you’re so damned scared tonight. Are you waiting to hear the newspaper extras that your mother has been pinched for murder?”
Her rouged face was as white as the notepaper that fluttered to the floor at her bare feet. “You’re nuts. You’re absolutely insane.”
“Am I?” He stopped and placed the paper in his pocket. “If I’m insane, let out a scream and have me pinched for annoying you. I’d love to tell the cops why Sweetie Malloy could not have killed Phil Clement, your manager.”
“Is Phil — dead?”
“You know damn’ well he is... You’re the one that killed him. How about going straight back to your apartment and talking this over?” His glance was like the flick of a whip. “Well?”
“Let’s go,” she gasped.
She clutched at his hand, wrenched the door open. Barefooted, panting, she sprang down the wooden staircase, her left hand dragging the startled columnist. A chorus girl, ascending the narrow stairs, flattened herself against the banister as the almost nude dancer and the columnist swept on past her.
“Well, for Gawd’s sake...”
“Hey, wait a minute!” Tracy growled. He pulled the fluttering robe tight, knotted the silken cord securely. “Where’s your shoes? You can’t go out barefooted, dope!”
There was almost an insane blaze in Lois’ eyes. She jerked him forward, pattered through a darkened corridor, swung open a door. There was a paved alley outside and a parked limousine.
“Yours?” Tracy snapped.
“Yes.”
“Swell.” He swung her up in his arms with a sudden heave and carried her through the rain. A sleepy chauffeur in a plum-colored uniform flung open the automobile’s door, gaping stupidly.
Tracy bounced Lois in on the cushioned seat, crawled in beside her. “Tell this lad it’s okey. Tell him home, James.”
The chauffeur had recovered his scattered wits. He had the door open again, a wrench hefted menacingly in his gauntleted hand.
“It’s... it’s all right, Peter,” Lois whispered fiercely. “I’m... I’m not feeling well. Drive us home.”
“And toss that overcoat of yours back here!” Tracy snapped at him.
Lois Malloy jerked the speaking tube to her tremulous lips. “I won’t need you any more tonight after we get there, Peter. You can put up the car and go home.”
“Yes, Miss.”
The apartment building was a swanky stone hive that went up and up through the rain like the side of a terra-cotta cliff. It had a canopy, a doorman, a rubber carpet to the curb and an umbrella ready to be snicked open for milady.
Tracy shoved all the hubbub away with a sweep of his arm. He grinned at the startled doorman. He was just beginning to realize that he was bareheaded and coatless himself. And the bubble dancer’s appearance was enough to make any respectable doorman gulp.
Jerry carried Lois Malloy to the silver and onyx elevator. She wriggled loose and slid to her feet as the car ascended. Jerry didn’t mind that a bit; it had been quite a trick to carry her with that numb left arm of his. Her eyes, he saw, were free of terror; they were colder now, wary, self-possessed.
“I haven’t my key with me,” she told the stolid elevator man. “Will you get a duplicate, please?”
“Yes, Miss.”
She padded barefooted to her penthouse door and waited with Tracy while the elevator man descended.
“Maid out tonight?” Tracy suggested.
“Yes.”
“What’s her name?”
“Does it matter?”
“I think so.”
“Her name’s Selma.”
“Selma what?”
She whirled at him suddenly. “How the hell do I know? Just plain Selma!”
The doorman appeared, inserted a key, opened the door, vanished. They went into a gorgeous living-room and Tracy said mildly: “Nice dump you’ve got.”
Lois’ bare feet made quick, meaty sounds on the floor. She jerked out a cabinet drawer, slammed viciously about with a gun in her hand.
“Listen, you! Stand right where you are. What do you know about my... my mother? And what do you know about Phil Clement?”
“I know why Clement was killed — and where,” Tracy bluffed.
“Yes?” Her voice grated. “He was killed because my mother was dumb enough to take him on as a lover. And if you think you can drag me into her mess, you’ve got another think coming.”
Tracy nodded a little. “I’ve seen and touched a lot of lice in New York,” he said in a slow whisper, “but you’re the first dame I’ve run into who tried to dodge a murder rap by jamming her own mother into the electric chair.”