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.
“That makes it just swell,” I muttered, “for the killer.”
A doctor came first and shook his head over the corpse, pronounced it dead. Then more Fair cops, and plainclothes men stationed on the grounds. Finally the coroner and homicide squad from San Francisco.
From papers and identification in his pockets, the corpse was found to be one Rufus Moore, a Swinnerton operative from Chicago. Swinnerton Investigation Service has offices in every large city, is one of the largest private dick agencies in the world. But Rufus Moore had come all the way here from Chi, and I thought I knew why: The Swinnerton agency had been hired to trace Hildegarde Ingraham by her father in Chicago, and Moore had come here on her trail.
I didn’t tell the cops that, though. For some reason I kept it to myself when we were all herded into a back room and taken aside singly for questioning. I knew white-haired Chauncey O’Toole, the inspector in charge, from my old days on the Trib, and so I got off pretty easy, furnishing McGillicuddy with a straight alibi.
The cops had found a blood-stained, plain linen handkerchief on the floor under Moore, and figured it had been used to hold the knife when the killer used it. So I was pretty sure there weren’t any fingerprints on the knife handle, though they didn’t say, and an expert was working on it. But a funny thing about the handkerchief — it was the small size used and carried by girls and women of all ages, and not by any of the kind of men I know.
No one of the audience could name the killer. It had been too dark for them to notice, and practically everyone had come in to get his money’s worth, so was concentrating his attention on the Nude Ranch gals. The cops held the little guy with the ugly battered face who had pushed Moore and got blood on his hand, and three other known petty crooks who were in the audience, took names and addresses and let the rest of us go, one by one.
It was almost two a.m. when Mac and I got out of the place. The Nude Ranch had closed down, of course, but there was a mob hanging around out front, being kept back by a squad of the Exposition cops. None of the other attractions on the Gayway was getting any kind of a play. Word had got around about the killing, and practically everyone left on the Fair grounds had gathered here.
We were collared by a bunch of newshounds, my old pals of the fourth estate, who wanted to know who, what, where, why and how. I told them we didn’t know from nothing but not to quote me and, fickle characters that they are, they left us to swoop down upon the next guy the dicks had let out of the place. I lit a cigarette and we were moving out of the limelight to become part of the crowd, when a voice said in my ear:
“I beg your pardon, but do you know if the police are keeping a girl inside — a blond girl?”
“Who!” I said, twisting my head to look at the man at my side.
His face was young and clean-cut and worried. He smiled apologetically. “I’ve been looking all over for her. We became separated earlier in the crowd and I can’t find her anywhere. She isn’t outside here now, so she must be inside. I saw you coming out and I thought maybe you could tell me if she’s in there.”
I lifted my brows at him, took the cigarette from my mouth and said slowly: “You mean as a customer, and not as one of the — uh, attractions?”
“Of course.” He wasn’t quite as tall as I was, but he was well built and you could tell he was wearing quality clothes. He looked like money, but there was nothing flashy about him. He had a good jaw, a cleft chin, crisp dark hair. “She’s small and blond,” he said, “and is wearing a dark suit, a hat with a feather in it.” He used a gesture to illustrate the length of the feather.
“Her name wouldn’t be Daisy May Huggins, would it?” I said.
He hesitated a moment before nodding his head and answering yes. There was an odd questioning gleam in his eyes.
“She isn’t in there,” I told him. “She was, but she’s not there now.” Then I explained how I happened to know her name and told him about Vogelsang and his fat stooge trying to take her with them.
Mixed thoughts and emotions were chasing themselves all over the kid’s good-looking face. “My God,” he breathed. “Maybe they’ve got her again!”
“They could have come back,” I admitted, realizing that one of them might have followed us into the Nude Ranch, and slipped out with the girl in the confusion just after Moore had been stabbed. I added, “You’re Johnny Foster, aren’t you?”
He looked at me in a blank, startled way; then his face got very expressionless. “No,” he said shortly, turned on his heel and walked off, shouldering through the crowd.
He hadn’t even bothered to thank me. He was too worried for that, and I was beginning to get an idea about Daisy May. On impulse, I fished out my car keys, shoved them at Mac, who had been standing silently beside me.
“Tail that guy, keed,” I told him. “He’s heading for the parking grounds, so that means he has a car. I’ll ride a cab into town. Phone me at Ricopetti’s as soon as he lights.”
Mac looked puzzled when he grabbed the keys, but he didn’t ask any questions. He said, “Right, boss. But you keep an eye out for that girl, huh?” Then he was gone, after the kid who had denied being Johnny Foster.
I was becoming more and more interested in the missing Hildegarde Ingraham and the possibility of knocking off a hunk of that five-grand reward. The Swinnerton dick getting knifed out and gasping what sounded to me like her name couldn’t be just coincidence. And any part of the reward would come in very handy indeed in keeping the wolf from my door, as I did not have any particular prospects of a job and did not particularly relish the idea of work anyway since I’d got used to a life of ease and trailer tramping. Five thousand clackers was something worth gambling for, and what could I lose?
Right then I was really more worried about what had happened to Daisy May, but while on the spot I thought I ought to find out what I could about the dark-haired gal in the Nude Ranch that McGillicuddy had pointed out to me. The gals were still inside. The cops were questioning them too, to see if any of them had noticed anything in the audience at the time of the killing that might help them to tab the killer. They weren’t off duty till two anyway, so I planned to hang around until they came out.
There was a back door and chances were they’d use that. I had to go up to the corner and around the building that held the Incubator Babies, and cut back along behind the row of buildings. It was darker back here and there wasn’t as much of a crowd, only a scatter of the curious who were watching the building from the rear. I took up a position against the wall near the rear door, got another cigarette going and settled down to wait.
It wasn’t long before the door opened and the gals started to drift out, mostly in pairs or groups chattering about the murder. There was a single bulb burning above the door, so when the one I was waiting for came out under it I spotted her without any trouble. She was alone and she was hatless and she was wearing a coat of dark sleek fur that matched her hair. That was something — a thirty-five-dollar-a-week nudist wearing a fur coat in mid-summer, a coat that looked like kolinsky, and you can’t get kolinsky for peanuts.
She sent a quick searching glance from side to side as she passed under the light, then started to walk past me. I stepped up even with her and touched her arm.
“Pardon me, miss. May I speak with you a minute?”
She shied away from me like a frightened filly, her delicate face white and strained.
“Don’t be afraid,” I told her easily. “I’m harmless. I’m not going to hurt you. All I want is to ask you a couple of questions.”