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.
“Somehow when he got to town here he let it slip to Kline and Vogelsang, who must be old pals of his, who you were. He must have been bragging about the catch he’d made, counting his chickens before they’d hatched. But his two former pals decided to double-cross him and go after you for the reward.”
The girl was staring up at his face and trying to pull away from him, but he was holding her tightly and looking at me through slitted eyes. “You’re wet!” he said through his teeth, and somehow it sounded vicious, like a threat.
Mac was looking on, goggle-eyed, with his mouth hanging open. Louise Madden was listening too, but giving most of her attention to her brother, who was beginning to stir his arms and legs and mumble senselessly.
“So I’m wet,” I told the kid. Up to then I had been guessing, following a hunch. “But how about that blood on your right cuff?”
The kid was wearing a white shirt, and the starched cuffs extended about an inch below the sleeve of his torn jacket. The right cuff was stained with dark and crusted splatters of blood that I’d noticed before in Kline’s office. The kid glanced at it, stared up and said:
“So what? I got that in the fight with Vogelsang and Kline.”
I shook my head. “Oh, no. Those stains were dried and dark, just as they are now, when I saw you in Kline’s office. You’d got them before that. You got them when you stabbed Rufus Moore, that Swinnerton dick.”
“What do you mean?” he snarled. “I wasn’t in the Nude Ranch. I was outside.”
“You could have slipped outside in the confusion right afterwards,” I said. “When I mentioned the girl’s handkerchief and the clasp knife, Miss Ingraham here suddenly seemed very scared.” I switched my gaze to her. “Did you ever see a knife like that before, a clasp knife with a bone handle?”
She nodded fearfully, grimacing, choked out: “It was — his! I saw him in the Nude Ranch, left you and went over to where he was standing. I said, ‘Johnny!’ and he shushed me, then sent me outside to wait for him, told me he’d be right out. All the time he was talking he was looking over his shoulder and pushing me toward the door. I went out, and those other two came up and walked me away so fast I didn’t know what was happening.”
“Shut up!” the kid sobbed, gripping her by the shoulders and shaking her. “Are you crazy? You don’t know what you’re saying. I wasn’t there! What’s the matter with you?”
“Not much you weren’t there,” I said slowly. “You even tried to frame Miss Ingraham by swiping her handkerchief and using it to hold the knife and wipe the fingerprints off the handle, but that still didn’t stop his blood from getting on your cuff; the handkerchief was too small. You knew the Swinnerton dick was on your tail, knew he was after Hildegarde, and when she walked up to you, you knew the game was up unless you acted fast — a fortune was slipping out of your hands.
“So when he started to work his way toward you, you sent her outside, turned around and let him have it, covered by the gloom and the crowd who was all interested in the Nude Ranch gals. Probably the guy had been on your tail earlier in the evening at the Fair. You caught on he was following you, and deliberately lost the girl in the crowd and led him into the Nude Ranch, hoping to shake him there. But when she came in with us, that spoiled everything. You had to kill him. He must have been closing in for a showdown.”
The kid’s face was tight and white and murderous. He kept holding on to the girl’s shoulders, glaring at me. “Nuts!” he bit out. “That pack of wild guesses doesn’t prove a thing. What’re you trying to do, frame me so you can get the girl and the reward?”
“I don’t have to frame you,” I told him. “The girl’s testimony will send you to the gas chamber. The game’s up, bright boy, so relax. Let go of her.”
“Sure,” Buck Madden growled, sitting up on the floor in the arms of his sister. “Sure. I seen dat guy in the Nude Ranch, just before dat private eye was stuck wit’ da toad stabber. The eye was waltzing over to him and da guy just must of slipped him da shiv and then turned and ambled out.”
“That just about ties it,” I said. “Go call some cops.”
Madden did a double-take. “Who, me?”
The kid let his shoulders slump in apparent defeat, then jerked Hildegarde over in front of him and shoved her, sent her lunging straight for me and the gun in my hand. I tried to duck out of the way and keep him under the gun, but she slammed into me, falling, her arms hooking around me for support, dragging my gun arm down.
The kid was right behind her, his face a tight grimace of desperation. I couldn’t swing the gun and fire it without danger of hitting the girl. She was hanging on like a drowning swimmer, throwing me off balance so that I had to stagger sideways and brace myself to keep on my feet.
Seeing the spot I was in, the kid actually grinned, closed in fast and straight-armed the girl again between the shoulder blades. That did it. She sobbed and her feet got tangled up with mine. I started to go down and she carried me to the floor, lit on top of me. Mac was coming up behind the kid on tiptoe, the black-jack swinging from his wrist. But the kid was at the door, jerking it open.
I couldn’t roll free from the girl, but I wrenched around and stuck out my foot, making a longer leg than I thought I had. I got my toe hooked in front of his instep, jerked it up and back, tripping him as he plunged out the door. He went onto the porch in a headlong dive. I scrambled around frantically, fighting to get untangled and on my feet. By the time I made it, Mac was at the door and on through. I followed him out.
The kid had picked himself up and made it to the bottom of the steps. Mac took off from the top step and landed on his back, carried the kid forward so they both spilled on the walk and rolled off, struggling. Mac had the black-jack, but otherwise was no match for the kid’s strength, and the kid in jerking around had got hold of Mac’s right wrist, was twisting it.
They rolled across the lawn, a squirming, fighting vortex of movement in which neither figure was distinguishable. It was comparatively dark out here anyway after the inner brightness. I jumped down off the porch, yelling:
“Hold it, Mac! I’ve got him covered.”
Then I jerked the trigger and let a couple of shots fly over their heads and out into the sand dunes. A bellowing voice echoed the reports: “Hey! Quit it!”
I almost jumped out of my skin. Someone was out there in the dark, and I might have hit him. During the momentary distraction, Mac had stopped fighting, going stiff and rigid to give me a chance at the kid. But the kid didn’t stick around. He left Mac like a shot and was bounding away like a jackrabbit, making for the dunes and the cover of darkness.
“Stop!” I yelped. “You damn fool, stop!”
I didn’t want to shoot the guy even if he was a murderer, and besides, there was someone else out there in the dark whom I might hit if I missed the kid, and I wasn’t such a good shot that I couldn’t miss.
The kid was fading fast into the night and I lowered the heater. Then I heard a smack and a grunt, as if he’d run headlong into something solid. There was a brief threshing and a crunching thud of sound, then silence. Mac was on his knees and we waited, staring.
A figure loomed up out of the dark, a tall lean man in a gray topcoat and hat, walking toward us and dragging something behind him. He had hold of the back of the kid’s collar with one hand, and the kid was a limp, dead weight. He dropped him on the grass, said: