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.
“Must be a fire around here,” Bly observed.
“Naw,” said Doc. “Them’s police sirens. Fire sirens have a higher tone.” He put a paper sack on the counter. “Here’s your ’burgers, all wrapped up. Be careful of ’em. She don’t like ’em mussed up at all.”
“O.K.,” Bly said. He paid Doc with the change Patricia Fitzgerald had given him and went to the door.
The pudgy man was sipping at his coffee, but he was watching Bly calculatingly over the rim of his cup.
There were several cars parked in front of the apartment building and one of them was a blue sedan with a long glittering radio antenna strung across its sloping top. Bly no more than half noticed it, and its identity didn’t register on him until he unlocked the front door of the apartment house and very nearly bumped into a policeman who was standing just inside the entryway.
“What—” Bly said, startled.
“You live here?” the policeman asked. He was standing, spread-legged, as immovable as a rock, his thumbs hooked into his broad leather gun belt.
“Yes,” Bly answered blankly.
“You been in here before this evening?”
“Yes. I went out to get these hamburgers for the girl who lives below me in 107.”
The policeman’s expression was so elaborately disinterested that it was a dead give-away. “Dame by the name of Fitzgerald?”
“Yes. She asked me—”
The policeman came one smooth sliding step closer, suddenly caught Bly’s right arm by wrist and elbow.
Bly struggled unavailingly. “Here! What... what—”
“March,” said the policeman. “Right up those stairs. Get tough and I’ll slap you down.”
He steered Bly across the lobby and up the stairs. He went down the hall with Bly stumbling along beside him willy-nilly like a clumsy partner in some weird dance.
The door of Patricia Fitzgerald’s apartment was partially open and the policeman thrust Bly roughly through it and followed him inside.
“This is the bird,” he said importantly. “I nabbed him downstairs in the lobby.”
Bly heard the words through a thick haze that seemed to enclose his brain. He was staring unbelievably at Patricia Fitzgerald. She was lying half twisted on her back at the end of the couch. There was a bright thin line across the strained white of her throat and blood had bubbled out of it and soaked into the carpet in a pool that was still spreading sluggishly. Her eyes were wide open, and the light above her glinted in the brightness of her hair.
There were two men in the room. One was sitting on the couch. He was thick and enormously wide across the shoulders. He sat with his hands on his knees, patient and unmoving, as though he were waiting for something he didn’t expect to happen very soon. His eyes were blankly empty and he wheezed a little when he breathed.
The other man was standing in the center of the room with his hands folded behind him. He was small and shabby-looking, but he had an air of queer dusty brightness about him, and his eyes were like black slick beads. He had a limp brown-paper cigarette pasted in one corner of his lower lip.
“Name?” he asked, and then more loudly, “You! What’s your name?”
“Dave Bly,” Bly said. “Is... is she—”
“Claims he lives upstairs,” said the policeman. “Says he went out to get some hamburgers for the dame, here. I figure they was havin’ a party and he gave her the business and then run and got them hamburgers and came back all innocent, tryin’ to fake himself an alibi so—”
“Outside,” said the shabby little man.
The policeman stared. “Huh?”
“Scram.”
“Well sure, Lieutenant,” the policeman said in an injured tone. He went out and shut the door.
“I’m Vargas,” the shabby man said. “Lieutenant of detectives. This is my partner, Farnham. What do you know about this business here?”
Bly fought to speak coherently. “Nothing. Nothing at all. She was playing her radio too loud and I asked her to stop, and she said she would if I’d go get her a couple of hamburgers...”
The big man, Farnham, got off the couch slowly and ominously. He came close to Bly, caught him by the front of the coat. Effortlessly he pulled Bly forward and then slammed him back hard against the wall. His voice was thick and sluggishly indifferent.
“You lie. She was drunk and you got in a beef with her and slapped her with a knife.”
Bly felt a sinking sense of nightmare panic. “No! I didn’t even know her! I wasn’t here—”
“You lie,” Farnham droned, slamming Bly against the wall again. “You’re a dirty woman-killer. She got sassy with you and you picked up that knife and stuck it in her throat.”
Bly’s voice cracked. “I did not! Let go—”
The policeman who had brought Bly in was having some trouble in the hall, and they could hear him say indignantly: “Here now, lady! You can’t go in there! Get away from that door! Lieutenant Vargas don’t want nobody— Lady! Quit it, now! There’s a corpse in there — all blood...”
A thin querulous voice answered snappily: “A corpse! Phooey! My dear departed husband was an undertaker, young man, and I’ve seen a lot more corpses than you ever will, and they don’t scare me a bit. You want me to jab you right in the eye with this knitting needle?”
Evidently the policeman didn’t, because the door opened and a little old lady in a rusty black dressing-gown pushed her way into the room. She had a wad of gray hair perched up on top of her head like some modernistic hat, and she wore rimless spectacles on the end of a long and inquisitive nose.
“Hah!” she said. “I thought so. Bullying people, eh? My husband — dear Mr. Tibbet, the mortician — knew a lot of policemen when he was alive, and he always said they were extremely low-class people — rude and stupid and uncouth.”
Farnham sighed. He let go of Bly and went back and sat down on the couch again. The springs creaked under his weight, and he relaxed into his position of patient ominous waiting.
“Who’re you?” Vargas asked.
“Tibbet. Mrs. Jonathan Q, Tibbet — Q, for Quinlan — and you’d better listen when I talk, young man.”
“I’m listening,” said Vargas.
“Hah!” said Mrs. Tibbet. “Insolent, eh? And your clothes aren’t pressed, either, and what’s more, I’ll bet you drink. Go ahead and bully me! Go ahead! I dare you! My dear dead husband was a personal friend of the mayor, and I’ll call up and have you put in your place if you so much as lay a finger on me or this nice young man.”
“Lady,” said Vargas in a resigned tone, “I wouldn’t touch you for ten dollars cash, but this lad is a suspect in a murder case and—”
“Suspect!” Mrs. Tibbet repeated contemptuously. “Bah! Did you hear me? I said bah!”
“I heard you,” said Vargas.
Mrs. Tibbet jabbed a steel knitting needle in his direction like a rapier. “And why isn’t he a suspect? Because he has an alibi, that’s why! And I’m it. I was listening to this hussy carrying on in here. I saw this young man come and request her very courteously to stop playing her radio so loudly. I was watching right through my keyhole across the hall. He didn’t even go inside the room. And when he left I heard her laughing in here. There was another man in here all the time, and if you and your low-class companion on the couch weren’t so stupid and lazy you’d start finding out who it was.”
“Did you see this other gent?” Vargas asked patiently.
“Oh! So you’re insinuating I’d snoop and spy on my neighbors, are you? I’ll speak to the mayor about this. Mr. Tibbet laid out his first two wives, and they were very friendly all Mr. Tibbet’s life, and if I tell him that his drunken policemen are insulting and bullying me, he’ll—”