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.
She was pressed against the wall of the building, staring at me. “What — who are you?”
She spoke in a whisper and I kept my voice down too. “I’m curious,” I said. “I saw you inside and you don’t belong in a place like this. What are you doing here?”
“That,” she said tensely, “happens to be my business.”
“Maybe I can get you a better job,” I lied. “Would you mind telling me your name?”
The fear had gone suddenly out of her and she straightened up away from the wall, tilting her chin. “I most certainly would.”
Behind me a rough voice said, “Who is dis slug?”
I turned and looked at a hard-faced mug with a barrel chest who was fully six-feet-four and built like Slapsie Maxie Rosenbloom. The red knot of his necktie was on a level with my eyes and I had to look up to see his face, and even then his chin was in the way so I couldn’t see most of it. His jaw stuck out like the prow of a battleship, and he had big black shaggy eyebrows that seemed to hang down over his eyes. He had been one of the customers in the Nude Ranch before and after the killing.
“I don’t know,” the girl told him. “I’ve never seen him before. I didn’t see you when I came out and he stopped me and started talking to me, tried to find out my name.”
“One of them kind of guys, huh,” the gorilla growled. “What’s da idea, slug, annoying a lady? I oughta hang one on you. Beat it, before I pop you one. On your way, on your way!”
He was pointing a thumb like a sausage over one shoulder, jiggling it. He was one of those the cops had questioned and let go, and I wasn’t sure they hadn’t made a mistake in letting him go, seeing as how he knew this girl. If she were actually Hildegarde Ingraham... I remembered he’d been standing close to the spot where Rufus Moore had fallen with the knife in him, and he’d been the one who’d told Moore to stop shoving, before the man had dropped.
“Don’t scare me like that,” I told him, getting ready to jump — the other way. “Who are you to order me around?”
I thought that might make him tell me who he was, but it didn’t. And when he put his slab of jaw down on his big chest and started for me with his long arms swinging, I knew I’d met my Waterloo. I retreated and got out of his way. He didn’t follow, just stopped and snorted, sneering at me. Then he swung back to the girl, said, “Come on, babe. Let’s go.”
She let him take her arm and they strode off, looking almost comical together like that, due to their difference in size. I let them go, as I didn’t want to ask her any questions anyhow with the gorilla around to overhear. That would just be inviting mayhem, and I have a very well-developed instinct for self-preservation.
I’d been going at things the wrong way. If I’d been smart, I wouldn’t have stopped the girl at all, but would have followed her home, where I could pick my time and see her alone. Another single girl had come out through the door and was walking past me.
“Hello,” I said.
She looked at me blankly. She had a heart-shaped painted face and was wearing a miniature straw hat on top of glittering platinum hair. She had on a white sweater that clung to her full breasts, and a pleated skirt. I didn’t remember her as one of the Nude Ranch girls, but maybe she looked different with her clothes off, and she suddenly smiled at me.
“Hello,” she said. “Do I know you?”
She said it hopefully and I told her, “Sure, but we ought to get better acquainted.” I was standing close to her. I nodded up in the direction where the gal in the fur coat and her gorilla boyfriend were walking away. “Who’s that screwy girl that just came out — wearing a fur coat in weather like this?”
They were still in sight when the painted blonde took a slant at them, but she would have known who I meant anyway because of the fur coat. She sniffed. “That’s Louise Madden. She just wears that coat to show off. She’s only been working here a few days and she thinks she’s better than the rest of us girls.”
“Yeah?” I said. “And who’s that missing link with her?”
“Oh, that’s her brother. Or so she says.”
“The hell it is,” I said. “Well, thanks.”
I tipped my hat and backed away and she looked startled, said disappointedly: “But I thought—”
“Some other time, baby,” I promised, turned and walked away.
The gorilla drove the girl over the bridge into San Francisco in a small and ancient coupé. I followed in a cab. The coupé swung off the bridge approach and went out Mission two or three miles, turned into a district of old frame apartment buildings. There wasn’t much traffic at that hour, but I took a chance on being spotted and had the driver take the cab into the side street after the coupé.
The side street was dark and deserted, except for the coupé, parked at the curb in mid-block with its lights burning. As we went by it, the lights blacked out and, looking back, I saw the gorilla and the girl getting out before a dark three-story apartment building. I told the driver to turn left at the next corner and stop, where I paid him off.
When he drove away, I went back to the corner, peered around. It was even more dark and silent and deserted than before. Somewhere down on Mission a truck was making a grinding racket, but the rest of the world seemed sound asleep. I stepped into the side street, moving along it on the opposite side from the coupé.
Nothing stirred in the deep shadow of the recessed apartment house doorway as I passed it. I didn’t pause, but went on up to the corner, crossed over and came back. I had some idea of examining the cards on the mail boxes outside the door to see if two Maddens were listed — if the two did live together as brother and sister, or if I could count on the gorilla going away and leaving the girl alone.
But when I came even with the building, the coupé door swung open and the gorilla came out and up from the floorboards, where he’d been crouched, waiting for me; he and the girl had got back in the car when I was up around the corner. I just had time to swing around and set myself when he was on top of me. I didn’t have a chance to duck or dodge. He got a big fistful of the front of my vest and jerked me toward him, growled:
“What’s da idea, tailing us?”
I was suddenly mad, not at him but at myself for being so dumb and careless. They’d spotted me tailing them and had suckered me neatly into a trap. I pulled back one foot and aimed a kick at his shin. It connected and he said, “O-ow!” in a very surprised and hurt tone of voice, at the same time flinching back and giving ground. As he stepped back I let go with my right fist and buried it in his solar plexus.
Delivered right, a punch like that can bend a man double and paralyze him for a minute or so. I guess my delivery was wrong, because he only grunted and my fist bounced back as if his belly muscles were made of spring steel. He didn’t even let go of me and give me a chance to high-tail it away from there.
Instead, he muttered, “You ast for it, slug, now take it.”
Then he hit me. His fist felt like a cannon-ball when it slammed into my jaw. It jarred me down to my toes and from the coupé I heard the girl cry out: “Buck, don’t! Buck!”
And the sidewalk came up and kissed me. The last thing I remembered was the dim roar of the coupé’s motor, which got fainter and fainter in the distance. I don’t know how long the knockout lasted, but when I came out of it I was all alone and Buck and the girl were gone.
Ricopetti’s is a hole-in-the-wall bar and restaurant on Columbus in the old Barbary Coast district. They know me there — too well. There was a phone message waiting there for me when I arrived — from Mac, telling me where to meet him, which was at the corner of Kearney and Jackson, only two or three blocks away.