The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps
- Автор: Anderson Lars, Barr Randolph
- Год: 2007
- Язык: английский
- Год: Vintage Books
- ISBN: 978-0-307-28048-0
- Жанр: Криминальные детективы
Электронная книга - «The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps». Краткое содержание книги:
Weighing in at over a thousand pages, containing over forty-seven stories and two novels, this book is big baby, bigger and more powerful than a freight train — a bullet couldn’t pass through it. Here are the best stories and every major writer who ever appeared in celebrated Pulps like Black Mask, Dime Detective, Detective Fiction Weekly, and more. These are the classic tales that created the genre and gave birth to hard-hitting detectives who smoke criminals like packs of cigarettes; sultry dames whose looks are as lethal as a dagger to the chest; and gin-soaked hideouts where conversations are just preludes to murder. This is crime fiction at its gritty best.
The outer door of the apartment lobby was open, and the wind made a sharp hurrying sound in the dark empty canyon of the street outside.
The pudgy man was sitting on the tiled floor of the lobby with his back against the wall, resting there, his stubby legs outspread in front of him. After a long time he began to move again, pushing his body away from the wall, turning very slowly and laboriously. His breath sounded short and sharp with the effort, but he made it and rested at last on his hands and knees.
He began to crawl toward the door and there was something inexorable about his slow stubborn progress. He opened the door wider, fumbling blindly ahead of him, and crawled out into the street.
The wind whooped down and slapped the folds of his long blue overcoat tight around his legs, pushed with impatient hands as if to hurry him. But he crawled down the steps very slowly, one by one, and reached the sidewalk and turned and made his inching patient way down the hill toward the wan glow of the street light on the corner.
Behind him, the apartment lobby was empty and cold, with the wind pushing at the half-open door and making the hinges complain in fitful little squeaks. On the wall at the spot where the pudgy man had leaned his back there was an irregular smear of blood, bright red and glistening with a sinister light all of its own.
Dave Bly had hurried as much as he could, but it was after six o’clock in the evening when he came in from the street and trotted up the long dingy flight of stairs to the second story of the office building.
Janet was still waiting for him and he could hear the tap-tap-tap of her typewriter. He whistled once and heard the typewriter stop with a faint ping, saw her slim shadow through the frosted glass as she got up from her desk and started to put on her hat.
Bly ran on up a second flight of stairs to the third floor, hurrying now, with the thought of the interview ahead making something shrink inside him. He went down the third-floor corridor toward the lighted door at the end. The letters on its glass panel were squat and fat and dignified, and they made the legend—
Bly opened the door and went into the narrow outer office. The door into the private office was open and J. S. Crozier’s harsh voice came through it.
“Bly, is that you?”
“Yes, sir.”
A swivel chair squeaked and then J. S. Crozier came to the door and said: “Well, you’re late enough.”
“I had to do quite a lot of running around.”
“Let’s see what you got.”
Bly handed him a neat sheaf of checks and bills and the typewritten list of delinquent debtors. J. S. Crozier thumbed through the bills and checks, and the light overhead made dark shadowed trenches of the lines in his face. He had a thick solid body that he carried stiffly erect. He wore rimless glasses that magnified his eyes into colorless blobs and a toupee that was a bulging mat of black hair so artificial it was grotesque.
“Forty-three dollars!” he said, throwing the sheaf of bills on Bly’s desk. “And half these checks will bounce. That’s not much to show for a day’s work, Bly.”
“No, sir.”
J. S. Crozier flicked his finger at the typewritten list. “And what’s the matter with this Mrs. Tremaine? She’s been delinquent for six weeks. Did you see her?”
“She’s had a serious operation. She’s in the hospital.”
“Well, why didn’t you try there?”
“I did,” said Bly. He hadn’t, but he knew better than to try to explain why. “They wouldn’t let me see her.”
“Oh, they wouldn’t! When will they?”
“Next week.”
“Huh! Well, you get in there to see her as soon as you can, and you tell her that if she doesn’t pay up her loan — plus the back compound interest and the delinquent collection fee — she might just as well stay in the hospital because she won’t have any furniture to come home to.”
“All right.”
J. S. Crozier grinned at him. “Haven’t got your heart in this, have you, Bly? A little on the squeamish side, eh?”
Bly didn’t say anything. J. S. Crozier kept grinning at him and he let his colorless eyes move slowly from Bly’s shoes, which were beginning to crack through the polish across the toes, up along the shabby topcoat to Bly’s face, pale and a little drawn with pinched lines of strain around his mouth.
“I can’t afford to be squeamish, Bly. Maybe you can.”
Bly didn’t answer, and J. S. Crozier said reflectively: “I’m disappointed in your work, Bly. Perhaps you aren’t suited to such a menial task. Are you contemplating a change soon?”
“No,” said Bly.
“Perhaps you’d better think about it. Although I understand jobs are very hard to find these days... Very hard, Bly.”
Bly was quivering with a feeling of sick hopeless anger. He tried to hide it, tried so hard that the muscles of his face seemed wooden, but he knew he wasn’t succeeding. J. S. Crozier chuckled knowingly. He kept Bly standing there for a full minute, and then he said with the undertone of the chuckle still in his voice: “That’s all, Bly. Good-night.”
“Good-night,” Bly said thickly.
J. S. Crozier let him get almost to the door. “Oh, Bly.”
Bly turned. “Yes?”
“This janitor at your place. This Gus Findley. He’s been delinquent for three weeks now. Get something out of him tonight.”
“I’ll try.”
“No,” J. S. Crozier said gently. “Don’t try, Bly. Do it. I feel that you have a responsibility there. He mentioned your name when he applied for the loan, so naturally I had confidence in his ability to pay. Get some money from him tonight.”
Bly went out and closed the door. Janet was waiting there, a slim small girl with her face white and anxious for him under the dark brim of her hat. She took his arm, and Bly leaned heavily against her, his throat so thick with the choking anger that gripped him that he couldn’t breathe. He pulled himself upright in a second and started walking because he knew J. S. Crozier would be listening for his footsteps and grinning. Janet walked close beside him. They went down the steps, and Bly’s anger loosened and became a sick despair.
“He knew you were there waiting, Janet. That’s why he talked so loud. So you could hear him bawl me out.”
“I know, dear. Never mind.”
“Every day he does something like that. He knows I wouldn’t do his dirty work for half a minute if I could find something else. I wouldn’t anyway — I’d starve first — if it weren’t for you and Bill and — and hoping...”
They were in the street now and she was standing small and straight beside him, looking up into his face. “We’ll go on hoping, Dave.”
“For how long?” Bly demanded bitterly. “How long?”
“Forever, if we have to,” said Janet quietly.
Bly stared down at her. “Thank you,” he said in a whisper. “Thank you for you, my dear.” He grinned wryly. “Well, I’m through crying in my beer for the moment. Shall we go squander our money on Dirty Dan’s thirty-five cent de luxe dinner?”
Chapter Two
The Blonde in 107
It was after ten when Bly got to the apartment building where he lived, and he had to use his key to open the entrance door. The air was thick and sluggish inside the small lobby, full of a wrangling jangle of sound made by a radio being played overly loud in one of the apartments upstairs.
Bly went on a diagonal across the lobby, rapped lightly on a door beside the staircase. He could hear limping steps inside coming across a bare floor, and then Gus Findley opened the door and peered nearsightedly at him.