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.
Shayne went on from his meeting with Myrna. He carefully studied the scene in Renaldo’s office, then jumped to Captain Samuels’ home on the bayfront. In secreting herself in the back of his car, slipping into the house without his knowledge, coming to his aid while Gentry questioned him, and finally in composedly stealing the log-book which she claimed to have found in a hiding place that another searcher had overlooked, had Myrna Hastings stepped out of character?
It was difficult to say. No one could guess what a young feature writer from New York was likely to do. She had left his apartment willingly enough and had gone directly to her room as he had told her to. Then she had been immediately escorted away from the hotel by two men vaguely described by the clerk as short and tall. Had she gone willingly, or been coerced? He had immediately suspected Blackie and Lennie of her abduction, but after the interview with them at Renaldo’s house he was inclined to believe they might not be responsible. It didn’t quite add up. Now that he was thinking along logical lines, he realized they would have to have trailed him back to his hotel and somehow learned of her departure via the fire escape in order to have followed her to the Crestwood. He saw it was necessary to determine whether the two men who had accompanied her out had been there waiting for her return or had followed her in and up to her room. If they had been waiting, it could not have been Blackie and Lennie — unless Myrna were involved in some way he knew nothing about. And that left the whole business of the missing murder clues up in the air. When she left the room they had been lying on the table. If she had come back to get them, she wouldn’t have known to look in the drawer. She might have searched the rest of the room first. She didn’t, in fact, know the table had a drawer.
He switched his thoughts from Myrna to Guildford. Had he told the truth about waiting for the captain to return? Or, granting that Blackie and Lennie had told Renaldo the truth about their venture, was Guildford the killer whom they had seen drive away after being closeted with the captain for half an hour? If Guildford were the killer, why had he drawn attention to himself by calling Will Gentry? It would have been safer and more natural to say nothing about his visit and leave the body to be discovered by chance.
What about the paroled convict, John Grossman? This seemed to Shayne the crux of the affair. He was certainly mixed up in the possession of smuggled cognac somehow. Had Captain Samuels worked with or for him in prohibition days? Did both men have knowledge of a cache of illicit cognac undisposed of at the time of Grossman’s arrest? If so, why had Captain Samuels waited fourteen years to put a case of it on the market — waited until he was weak from malnutrition? It seemed likely that the captain couldn’t get his hands on it while Grossman was in prison, since the first case appeared soon after Grossman had supposedly returned to Miami.
But it seemed definitely unlikely that John Grossman was in on the deal with Renaldo. The ridiculous price accepted by the starving captain showed that it must have been his own idea. Grossman was smart enough to learn what the stuff was worth in today’s market. It looked more as though the captain had put over a personal deal — one that for some reason he had been unable to put over while Grossman was in prison, one that Grossman might have resented even to the point of murder.
Shayne finished his glass of brandy and his musings at the same time. He needed more facts before he could do more than ask himself a bunch of unanswerable questions.
He heaved himself up from his chair and gritted his teeth against a wave of dizziness. The loose teeth pained sharply when he gritted them, and that dispelled the dizziness. He had lost his hat in the fracas at Renaldo’s, so he went out bareheaded, thinking the cool night air would feel good on his head.
Dick frowned and shook his head despairingly when he crossed the lobby, but Shayne pushed his swollen lips into the semblance of a grin and waved a derisive hand at the clerk. He got in his car and drove to Second Avenue.
The Crestwood was a small, moderately priced hotel, and the clerk was a thin-chested 4-F who tried to conceal his hostile amazement when Shayne showed his battered face at the desk. He shook his head firmly and began: “I’m afraid...”
But Shayne reassured him by saying: “I don’t want a room, bud.” He showed his badge and went on: “About a guest of yours, Miss Hastings.”
“Oh yes. Room 305. I’m afraid she isn’t in. There’s been—”
“I’m the guy who telephoned you about an hour ago. Can you describe the men she went out with?”
“I’m afraid I can’t. You see, I didn’t notice their faces.”
“Could one of them have been holding a gun on her?” Shayne demanded harshly.
The clerk began to tremble. “I really don’t know. I— Do you think something’s happened to her?”
“Do you know if they came in after she got her key and went up, or whether they were up there waiting?”
“I really don’t know. I didn’t see them come in after she got her key but I’m afraid I can’t swear whether they were upstairs waiting for her or not.”
Shayne nodded and went over to the elevator. There was only one elevator in the hotel and it was manned by a young Negro boy who stood very stiff and straight but couldn’t keep his eyes from rolling around toward Shayne’s bruised face.
Shayne stopped outside the elevator and asked: “Do you know the girl in room 305?”
“Yassuh. I know the one you mean. Checked in jes’ today.”
“Do you remember her coming in late tonight and then going out again almost immediately?”
“Yassuh. That’s what she did. Yassuh, I ’member.”
Shayne got out his wallet. “Try to remember exactly what happened. Did you bring her down in the elevator with two men?”
The boy’s eyes rolled covetously toward the five-dollar bill Shayne was extracting. “Yassuh. I sho did. Right after I’d done taken her upstairs.”
“How long afterward?” Shayne prompted. “Did you make many trips in between?”
“Nosuh. Not none. I ’member how s’prised I was when I stopped at the third floor on the way down an’ found her waitin’ with them two gen’lemen ’cause I’d jes’ dropped her off at three on my way up.”
“Are you sure of that? You didn’t take them up after you took her up?”
“Nosuh. How could I when I’d done taken ’em up prev’ous?”
“How much previous?”
“Ten minutes, I reckon.”
“Did you notice anything peculiar about the way any of them acted when they came down together?”
“How d’yuh mean, peculiar?”
Shayne said: “I’m trying to find out whether she wanted to come down with them or whether they made her come.”
The Negro boy chuckled. “I reckon she liked comin’ all right. She was sho all hugged up to one of ’em. The skinny one, that was.”
“Can you describe them?”
“Nosuh. Not much. One was skinny and t’other weren’t. I reckon I didn’t notice no more.”
Shayne said: “You’ve earned this.” The bill exchanged hands and he went out. He had learned something but he didn’t care much for it.
His next stop was at the Miami News tower on Biscayne Boulevard. An afternoon paper, the early hours of the morning were the busiest ones for the staff, and Shayne found Tim Rourke in one corner of the smoke-hazed city room pounding out copy with one rubber-tipped forefinger.
The reporter looked up at Shayne with a startled oath and then laughed raucously and gleefully. “I’m not the beauty contest editor. You go down that hall—”
“And you,” said Shayne bitterly, “can go to hell.”