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 us even, slug,” I said, but he didn’t answer. He didn’t even move. He’d taken a quick trip to dreamland, stretched out peacefully on the rug.
There was a short, anguished cry in the room. I looked up. The small aristocratic-looking brunette from the Nude Ranch — Louise Madden — was standing in an arched doorway wearing a quilted black robe. Her eyes were wide and stricken with shocked horror. She cried in a strained voice:
“What have you done to him? Who are you? What do you want?”
“We want the girl you’re holding here,” I said.
“Oh!” Her eyes jerked as she recognized me, then she came running across the room and went to her knees at the gorilla’s side, held his head up to her breast. She looked up at me again. “Take her. I didn’t want Buck to keep her here anyway, but they made him. She’s in the back bedroom and she hasn’t been hurt.”
We were in a small, low-ceilinged living-room that was neat, but looked bare, it contained so few pieces of furniture. The kid was across the room at another doorway, had stopped there when this girl had appeared. Now he plunged through the doorway, toward the back of the house, and I nodded to Mac to follow him. Mac had come in behind me and closed the front door, and when he was gone after the kid, I asked the girclass="underline"
“Who made you keep her?”
Her delicate face was marred by a deep and bitter shadow of anxiety. “A man named Art Vogelsang, and Jonathan Kline. I’ve been trying to keep Buck going straight, but they have something on him and they try to use him when they can.”
“Then he’s really your brother,” I said.
“Yes.” She nodded with her face turned down toward his. She was jiggling his head, massaging the back of his neck. “Buck... Buck...!”
“Don’t worry,” I told her. “He’ll be all right. You couldn’t hurt a mass of muscle like him.”
She was on the verge of tears as she glanced up, her fine mouth quivering. “I suppose he had it coming to him. I’m sorry he hit you when you were following us. Who is this girl you’re after?”
I felt my eyebrows go up in surprise. “You don’t know? She’s that missing Hildegarde Ingraham. You know, the runaway daughter of the Chicago meat-packer. For a while I thought you might be her; that’s why I was following you. That fur coat had me fooled, and you’ve got class, sister.”
She let go of a bitter little laugh, shook her head hopelessly. “You surely don’t think I’d be working at the kind of a job I have now if I were this Hildegarde Ingraham. The coat is just a relic of better days, the only thing I have to wear. The only reason we rent a place way out here is because it’s cheap. I... I hope we don’t get into any trouble over this. Buck has a record. He doesn’t like to live on what I make, but he can’t get an honest job. Nobody’ll trust him.”
“That’s tough,” I said, really feeling sorry for the kid. “But don’t worry. And maybe we can work it so he’ll get a split of the reward that’s offered for finding this Ingraham babe.”
She didn’t look up or answer. Her shoulders moved convulsively and I knew she was crying silently. For some reason I felt like a heel. I was actually sorry I’d hit her brother, because when he’d clouted me he’d probably thought he’d been protecting his sister or something. Just then Mac and the kid came back with the other girl.
Her doll-face was blank, and her big doll-eyes looked a little bit more dazed than usual. But she didn’t seem much the worse for wear. Somewhere along the route she had lost her hat with the feather in it, but she hadn’t been mussed up any. Under the lights I noticed at the part in her hair there was a dark line where the unbleached hair had grown out a little in its natural color.
The kid had his arm about her protectingly, was wearing a resentful scowl. “They had her tied to the bed!” he complained.
The girl had looked over the room, blinking her large blank eyes, and now gazed up worshipfully at the kid’s face. “Oh, Johnny!” she breathed ecstatically. “I knew you would come for me. You’re wonderful!”
She was giving him the needle. It was pretty sickening, but the kid went for it. His scowl smoothed out and he looked soulfully down into her eyes, said softly: “Come on, honey.”
They started for the front door. Little Mac blinked and his Adam’s apple raced up and down before he could get out a weak yelp of protest: “Hey!”
I stepped in front of the door. “Where do you think you’re going?”
The kid stared indignantly at me. “Out,” he said. “I’m going to take her away from here. She’s had all she can stand.”
I shook my head, smiling. “Oh, no, you’re not.”
His jaw crept forward and his brows came down. “Why not?” he asked belligerently.
“Because,” I explained. “This little lady is worth money in our kick and it’s share and share alike. We want to be sure we get ours. Besides that, there is a little matter of a murder to be cleared up. I want to find out where Hildegarde was when Rufus Moore was killed. The knife was held in a girl’s handkerchief.”
“Knife?” the girl said blankly, batting her eyelashes. “Who was killed?”
“A Swinnerton dick was killed in the Nude Ranch,” I said. “I think he was on your trail at the time, and right after the murder I looked around and you’d disappeared. You’d been there just a minute before, because you came in with us. A clasp knife with a six-inch blade sounds like kind of an unusual weapon for a girl, but it’s possible you could have used it. So suppose you just tell us where you were at the time.”
The kid was glowering at me, and the girl was suddenly pale and weak and stammering, floundering for words. She said, “But... but I wasn’t there! I went outside — before that. I didn’t know anything about it. Those men took me. That fat one and the other one, the same ones that you made release me before.”
I nodded. “They must have, because they brought you here, but it seems funny that they could come back and drag you away on a brightly lighted place like the Gayway. But maybe you wanted to go with them. Maybe you could use the fact that they abducted you as an alibi later. It’s very odd that you just happened to go outside at that time, after being so anxious to stay with us when we went in the Nude Ranch. Why?”
“I... I...” She shot a glance up at the kid’s face, seemed numb with fear. The kid growled:
“Leave her alone, and let us out of here.”
“In a minute,” I told him. “I want to get a few things cleared up before you take this gal off and marry her. I want to be sure she knows who you are.”
His eyes tightened and his face became very expressionless. The girl was batting her eyelashes at me again, looked as if she were gasping for breath.
“Where’d you meet this kid?” I asked her.
“In Reno.” She gulped. “He drove me here, last week.”
“And he told you he was Johnny Foster — the Johnny Foster, scion of the Foster sugar millions?”
She nodded dumbly, swallowing.
“Well, I don’t believe it,” I said. “I thought he was too, when I first saw him, but I stopped thinking so when it struck me as odd he knew just where to go after you when you disappeared — to Art Vogelsang and Jonathan Kline. He knew who they were, when I told him Vogelsang had been after you. He’s had some connection with them before, and it seems funny a guy like Johnny Foster would have anything to do with a couple of chiselers of their stripe.
“I think your boy friend here is an imposter, a gigolo, one of those guys who hang around Reno posing as wealthy playboys and preying on divorcées with dough. The way I’ve got it figured, he was looking for a catch and thought he’d found one when he discovered who you were, so he decided instead of turning you in for the five-grand reward to run away with you and talk you into marrying him. That way, even if the marriage were later annulled by your father, he’d be in a position to chisel a handsome settlement.