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.
Gentry stopped in front of him on widespread legs. “What kind of a run-around am I getting?”
Shayne said: “You’re giving it to yourself, whatever it is. I didn’t invite you out here.”
“No. Thought you were pulling a fast one. Covering up for a murderer to get a rake-off on a bunch of smuggled liquor. By God, Shayne, you can’t wiggle out of that one.”
Shayne took a pull from the bottle. “It’s mighty good liquor. Next time you send a stool to cover the switchboard on my hotel don’t use a guy with d-i-c-k written all over him.”
Gentry gulped back his anger. “I wondered who sent Tim Rourke to me with a tip there’d be fireworks. You can’t deny you brought along a couple of gunsels to wipe out Grossman and his gang and keep the stuff for yourself. If I hadn’t overheard the call and beat it out here you might have pulled it off.”
Shayne laughed and sank down on the couch beside Myrna. “How much of the deal do you know?”
“Plenty. I always suspected Captain Samuels was running stuff for Grossman when he lost his boat in ’30. That’s why Grossman killed him last night. Fighting over division of the liquor that was cached here when Grossman was sent up.”
“You’re fairly close,” Shayne admitted. “When you find Grossman—”
“He’ll talk,” Gentry promised.
“Want to bet on it?” Shayne’s eyes were very bright.
“I never bet with you. With your damned shenanigans...What’s this girl got to do with it?” Gentry pointed a stern finger at Myrna. “One of Grossman’s little friends?”
“She wanted to see a detective in action,” Shayne replied.
Shayne set the bottle on the floor and sat up straighter when a detective trotted in and reported excitedly: “We’ve searched the cellar and the whole house, Chief. Not another soul here.”
Gentry began to curse luridly. Shayne got up and interrupted him. “I don’t think your men knew where to look in the cellar. Let’s take a look.”
He went out to the hallway and found Rourke coming up the cellar stairs with a flashlight in his hand.
“No soap,” Rourke reported to Shayne. “He must have made his getaway when we left the house uncovered to see what the shooting was about.”
“Your fault,” Gentry said bitterly behind Shayne. “If we don’t pick him up I’m slapping a charge of obstructing justice on you.”
Shayne took the flashlight from Rourke. He led the way down into a small dank furnace room with a dirt floor. He flashed the light around, then walked over to a small rectangular area where the ground showed signs of having been recently disturbed. “Try digging here, but don’t blame me if Grossman doesn’t tell you the whole story when you find him.”
“There?” Gentry gagged over the word. “You mean he’s dead?”
“Unless he’s a Yogi or some damned thing.” Shayne shrugged and handed the flashlight back to Rourke. “Hell, he had to be dead, Will. Nothing else made any sense.”
“You mean nothing makes sense,” Gentry said perplexedly.
Shayne sighed and said: “I’ll draw you pictures. One question first, though. Did Guildford make a phone call between the time you checked for Miss Hastings at the Crestwood last night and before you came to my place looking for her?”
“Guildford?” Gentry’s tone mirrored his bewilderment. “The lawyer? What the hell has that got to do with it?”
“Did he?”
“Well, yes, I think he did, come to think of it. He called his home from the public booth in the Crestwood after we learned the girl wasn’t in. I suggested that we see you and he didn’t want his wife to worry if he got home later than she expected.”
Shayne nodded. “He said he called his wife. But you didn’t go in the booth with him and listen in on his conversation?”
“Of course not,” Gentry sputtered.
Shayne took his time about lighting a cigarette, then continued. “If you had, you would have heard him calling Pug or Slim at Chunky’s joint and telling them to hang around the Crestwood until Myrna Hastings came in — and then grab her. He was covering every angle,” Shayne went on earnestly, “after he discovered that empty hiding place in the captain’s bedroom. He knew the captain knew the location of the liquor cache after Samuels brought in a case and sold it for a hundred bucks to make a payment on the mortgage. And when the poor old guy died while he was torturing him, he must have been frantic for fear he’d never find the stuff.”
“Are you talking about Mr. Guildford? The attorney?”
Shayne nodded. “Leroy P. Guildford. Once a junior member of the firm of Leland and Parker, which specialized in criminal practice and defended John Grossman in 1930. He must have known of the existence of the liquor cache all the time, but it wasn’t worth much until the recent liquor shortage, and Captain Samuels wouldn’t play ball with him. After he killed Grossman, Samuels was his only chance to learn where the liquor was hidden.”
“Are you saying Guildford killed Grossman?”
“Sure. Or had Pug and Slim do the job for him. He brought Grossman out here last Tuesday, then went to Samuels and told him what had happened, and suggested that with Grossman dead they might as well split the liquor.”
“But Grossman talked to you over the phone just this morning,” Gentry argued.
Shayne shook his head. “I knew that couldn’t be Grossman. He had to be dead. The only other person it could be was Guildford, disguising his voice to lure me out here so he could get rid of the only two people who knew about the log-book and the liquor.”
“Why,” asked Gentry with forced calm, “did Grossman have to be dead?”
“Nothing else made sense.” Shayne spread out his big hands. “Captain Samuels knew where the liquor was all the time and he was practically starving, yet he never touched it. Why? Because he was an honorable man and it didn’t belong to him. Why, then, would he suddenly forget his scruples and sell a case? Because Grossman was dead and it no longer belonged to anybody.”
Gentry said gruffly: “My head’s going around. Maybe it’s this air down here.”
In the big room upstairs, Shayne knelt beside the bottles and straw. “Do you know where this came from, Myrna?”
“Certainly. Those men fished it up out of the lagoon this morning, all sewed up in canvas. They talked about it in front of me. I think they planned to kill me, so they didn’t care what I heard.”
“What did they say about it?” Shayne was shaking the bottles free of their straw casings and lining them up carefully on the floor.
“It’s all in the bottom of the lagoon. A whole boatload. Just where Captain Samuels and his crew dumped it overboard as he described in his log-book. That’s why the authorities could never find any liquor here when they raided the place, the men said.”
Shayne got up with a bottle dangling from each bony hand. He slipped them into the side pockets of his pants as Detective Yancy came hurrying in to tell Gentry excitedly: “We got the whole story from that man before he died. Grossman is dead, Chief. Buried in the cellar. And the real guy is—”
“I know,” said Gentry wearily. “Get to a telephone and have Guildford rounded up right away. Leroy P.,” he snapped.
“What are you doing?” he demanded, as he turned in time to see Shayne slide a third and fourth bottle into his hip pockets.
“Making hay while the sun shines.” Shayne stooped stiffly to get two more bottles from the floor. “With you horning in I won’t have any chance at all at that stuff underwater.” He put two more bottles in his coat pocket and stooped for two more, looking wistfully at the remaining bottles on the floor. “This is the only fee I’ll collect on this case.”