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.
Inside, the building was divided into two sections by a glass screen that ran down the center. The audience, mostly of men, was on one side of the glass behind a railing, and the Nude Ranch girls were on the other side of the glass under lights in a simulated outdoor setting.
As you came in, you walked the length of the building along an aisle formed by the glass on your left and the railing on your right. Then you went around and stood behind the railing and could stay as long as you liked. I’d been in there an hour or so before and I’ll swear I recognized some of the same faces lining the rail now, where the lights from the other side of the glass hit them.
The place was pretty well filled even if it was getting late, and we found a place at the rail near the far end, where McGillicuddy pointed out the girl he thought was the missing Hildegarde Ingraham, whispering hoarsely: “That’s her!”
She was small and brunette and she was playing Ping-Pong at a table close to the glass screen. Other girls were playing horseshoes and badminton, practicing on an archery range, twirling lariats and taking turns riding a burro. They all wore bandannas knotted loosely around their necks, G-strings, boots, cartridge belts and holsters containing imitation six-shooters. Some wore sombreros and some didn’t. Some were only passable, but most were built very nicely, the brunette with the large mole on her left arm included in the last category.
But she was different than the others in more ways than one, I had to admit that. In the first place, where all the other girls allowed their bandannas to hang down the back where they would be out of the way, she kept the triangle of the bandanna at the front, an inherent modesty apparently at work on her. She seemed to be acutely conscious of the many watching eyes while pointedly ignoring them.
She had an air of breeding about her, a way of carrying her head, and her face had a genteel intelligence that was out of place here. Her skin was like smooth ivory. Small-boned, almost dainty, she had a youthful, boyish figure, with slender hips and small budding breasts that the bandanna did not quite hide. It was a fact that she didn’t look more than eighteen — the Ingraham girl’s age.
“What’d I tell you, boss?” Mac breathed eagerly in my ear.
“It’s screwy,” I muttered, keeping my gaze on the girl as she and her partner batted the little white ball back and forth. “But could be. Could be.”
We couldn’t hear the girls on the other side of the glass when they spoke to each other, and they couldn’t hear any of the conversation that went on among the customers. The glass screen was enough to deaden ordinary sounds.
I swung away at a sudden disturbance in the audience. Someone had grunted explosively above the murmuring voices, as though he’d been hit in the belly with a fist. A rough voice growled, “Hey, quit shoving!”
When I turned my head to look I realized that Daisy May wasn’t with us any more, and I couldn’t recall when she’d left us. There was a surging scuffle in the thickest part of the crowd up along the rail, but I couldn’t see what it was all about at first because the only lights in the place were on the other side of the glass and they were like footlights, focused on the girls. The only illumination on the audience side was the back-glow and that didn’t amount to much.
Someone said disgustedly, “Just another drunk.”
The crowd parted, falling back away from a stocky, middle-sized man so that I could see him. He was almost chubby and he wore a gray fedora. He was staggering, lurching about with his hands pawing for support and his mouth working; but only senseless glugging sounds came from his throat.
He fell against a little guy with an ugly battered face and the little guy snarled, pushed him away viciously. The man tripped over his own feet, went down, with those in the way scrambling to get out from under.
“Migawd!” the one who’d shoved him squawked sharply. “The guy’s all bloody!”
He was holding up the hand that he’d pushed the man with, staring bug-eyed at the glistening red stain across it that looked like a bright splash of fresh scarlet paint.
“Jeepers!” McGillicuddy croaked at my side, and just then overhead lights flared on.
The girls behind the glass had stopped their desultory game playing and were staring out at the audience for a change. Two of the barker guys in the Lone Ranger outfits were coming from the door, one shouting above the sudden babble:
“What’s the matter? What goes on here?”
Slapping a quick look over the audience, which was pressing back in a ring away from the man on the floor, I still didn’t see Daisy May. There were only a few women in the audience, and one of these screamed:
“He’s been stabbed! Look!” Then she keeled over too and the guy with her caught her.
“Where’s the girl that was with us?” I asked Mac, and he shook his head, his mouth hanging open loosely.
“I dunno. I ain’t seen her since we came in here. Cripes, what’s happened to that guy? Let’s broom outa here!”
“Nix,” I said and shoved forward, fighting my way through to the front part of the ring. The stocky man was on his back on the floor, one of the cowboys kneeling beside him. The other one was bellowing:
“Get back! Get back! Give this guy air.”
“He needs a doctor more than anything else,” I yelled, grabbing his arm. “Get one and some cops in here.”
He looked at me, then nodded and shoved off. The man on the floor had the long bone handle of a clasp knife protruding downward from just under his wishbone. At its base, his vest was sodden with a slowly spreading stain of blood. The blade, at least six inches long judging from the handle, was slanted inward and up toward the heart, had been driven in that way by an underhand blow that had at first knocked the wind out of the man.
Now he lay with his head supported on the arm of the attendant, his chubby face beaded with sweat and convulsed with pain as he gasped for breath. He was a middle-aged, nondescript man with hair beginning to gray. He opened his eyes and stared upward, looking around almost desperately. His jaws opened and closed. He gasped something that sounded to me like, “Hilda-glug Ing—” and then the blood came, thick and frothy, pouring from his mouth.
It ended in a liquid rattling in his throat as he relaxed and died.
My insides turned over and I retched, swung away to keep from being sick. The hush that had fallen over the crowd was broken by one of the women with a shrill, hysterical scream. And there was a sudden stampede for the door, that was met and stopped by a couple of special cops in their fancy Fair uniforms.
But I was staring at the girls behind the glass then, wondering if the man had been trying to say, “Hildegarde Ingraham” as he died.
The girls were huddled together just opposite me, staring out. All but one — the brunette with the mole on her left upper arm. She stood aloof and alone, at one end of the Ping-Pong table, half leaning on it for support with one arm. Her patrician face was unnaturally white and strained, and her knees were bent a little as if they were about to give way and she might collapse.
The cops were forcing the audience back into the room, gradually restoring some semblance of order out of the chaos. Uneasy and murmuring, some frankly sick, the customers were being lined up between the railing and the glass. And all backs were turned to the glass now; the almost nude girls behind it had ceased to be the main attraction. I made sure again that little Daisy May wasn’t among those present, worked my way to the side of the cowboy who had been on duty at the door.
“Did anyone go out of here,” I asked him, “just before this happened?”
He was tall and pale and thin, all the sap knocked out of him by what he’d seen. He shook his head in a half-dazed way. “Judas Priest, I don’t know. I came in here to see what was wrong, and anybody could have slipped out behind me then.”