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.
Cansdale wondered suddenly if he had planned well. He wished he had read a few of the trashy detective magazines that Mazie was always buying. There might, perhaps, have been a plot in one of them that would have suited his purpose better. But he couldn’t imagine what it would be. The plot he had conceived was simplicity itself. No one would ever suspect a middle-aged, respectable high-school instructor of bludgeoning his wife to death.
He began to lash himself into a fury against Mazie to prepare himself for the actual deed. She stood in his way of complete happiness. She was stupid, insipid. But his mind could find no other flaws. She was as young, if not younger, than Evelyn. In her dark, southern way she was pretty. She had never denied him herself. Until he had met Evelyn they had been mildly happy. Even during the last two years she had been unsuspicious, undemanding. Her only other flaw, if it could be called a flaw, was the phobia she couldn’t help, her dislike of being alone.
She would be, Cansdale thought, as he turned off of Sheridan Road onto the side street on which he lived, alone for a long time. He parked his car a full three blocks from his house and, turning up the collar of his coat so that it almost touched his hat-brim, slunk through the shadows of the alley paralleling the street on which he lived.
Only four persons saw him. One was the delicatessen owner’s wife who caught a glimpse of his face in a lamp light as he crossed a street intersection. Another was the newsboy who happened to be late. A third was a neighbor emptying garbage who had chanced to pause a moment for a breath of air in the blackness by the alley gate. The fourth was a man named Kelly who was unlocking the side-door of his garage. Of the four he was the only one who wondered at the time why Cansdale was walking down the alley.
“He shouldn’t ought to short-cut through the alley,” Kelly thought ungrammatically. “What with all the stickups now-a-days he’s likely to get robbed.”
Cansdale saw none of them. His mind was intent on his business. He wanted it over with. The pounding of his heart was choking him. The actual act of murder was not as simple as it seemed. He paused at his own alley gate, almost tempted to go back.
“Well, of course, if you don’t love me enough to give me the things that a man who loves a woman usually gives her—”
Evelyn’s words hung suspended in the air just as she had left them.
“I can’t. I won’t give her up,” the little teacher thought in panic. “I’ve a right to happiness.”
He stared at the back windows of his apartment. Both the kitchen and the dining-room were dark. A light burned in the bedroom briefly, then it too winked out, leaving only a faint glow streaming out of the living-room into the hall.
Cansdale opened the gate and went in, groping in the darkness near the garbage can for the weapon he had decided he would use. The half brick was where he had thought that he had seen it. The inspiration had come to him during his last class. A half brick was the killer’s favorite weapon.
The garbage can, balanced precariously upon three bricks instead of four, toppled over slowly and the tin lid clattered on the walk forcing open a basement window in the janitor’s apartment.
“Scatt! Gott damn dogs! There should ought to be a law!”
Cansdale stood frozen where he was, half up the back steps to his porch until the clatter and profanity had ceased. Then the basement window closed and he began to breathe again. He wanted to retreat but didn’t dare. The janitor might hear him. He continued to the porch.
He had never known the night to be so full of sounds and smells. The detective’s mother in the next apartment was frying steak and onions against her son’s return. The couple in the flat above were fighting. Through the closed windows of his own apartment he could hear their radio blaring out the news. Mazie always kept it tuned so high it was a wonder the neighbors didn’t complain.
He remembered, tardily, that he had forgotten to put on his gloves. He laid the half brick on the window sill and did so, meanwhile listening to the news.
The foreign situation covered, the newscaster turned to the local pages, beginning with: “... While the police as yet have failed to apprehend the moronic killer who has preyed upon the housewives of Chicago for these last several months, the department is expending every effort to bring about his capture. Meanwhile housewives are warned not to open their doors to any suspicious strangers and to make certain that all first-floor windows, and windows leading off of fire escapes are locked...”
Cansdale cautiously tried the window with the broken lock that led from the porch to the kitchen. It slid up easily. Now that the actual moment had arrived his self-confidence was oozing back and he sniffed contemptuously. Mazie was a fool. She had no right to be so stupid and live. She was afraid to be alone. A moronic killer was at large. Yet she lay on a sofa in the living room listening to a newscast with a perfect entrance open to the killer.
He straddled the open window cautiously, the half brick in his hand. In the faint light streaming down the hall he could see that the back door was locked and bolted. He stepped into the kitchen making no noise, leaving the window open behind him.
The newscaster had finished by now and there was a blare of transcribed music from the front room. And, as usual, Mazie had two stations on at once. Back of the hi-de-hi-de-hi, ho-de-ho-de-ho of a boogie-woogie program, some woman heroine of one of the soap-chip operas to which Mazie was addicted was telling someone she called “honey” in no uncertain terms how much she loved him.
The man’s voice was gruff but eager and insistent. Sudden suspicion gleaming in his eyes, the little teacher paused in the center of the kitchen floor and listened closely. But either the program had signed off or the brass of the transcribed band had drowned it out. He smiled painfully with a guilty conscience.
“She hasn’t fire, or soul, or brains enough,” he thought. “I wish she had. I wouldn’t have to kill her then.”
The smile faded from his twisted lips as he thought of her insurance. He had to have the money. With the double indemnity clause, on which she herself had insisted, Mazie’s death would pay him twenty thousand dollars. He and Evelyn could take sabbaticals on that. They could spend the year in travel, live in the best hotels. In California, perhaps, they would be married. Or perhaps in romantic Old Mexico or Hawaii. The police would never suspect the insurance money as a motive. He carried even more insurance in her name.
The half brick clutched tightly in his hand, he stole quietly past the open doors of the dining-room and the bedroom to the front of the apartment.
“She’ll cry ‘John’ when she sees me,” he thought, “and run to me. Then I’ll hit her with the sharp edge of the brick and drag her into the bedroom just like the killer would do.”
His gloved hand clutching the brick felt hot and sweaty. He must remember to leave the brick behind for the police to find. He stepped into the lighted front room. The radio was blaring cheerfully. The shades on the windows were drawn. A box of chocolates lay opened on a coffee table convenient to the sofa. Mazie’s outrageously tight dressing-gown lay crumpled in a silken pool upon the floor. But Mazie wasn’t there. The living-room was empty. From where he stood, Cansdale could see that the front door was locked and bolted.
He felt slightly cheated but relieved as he turned back towards the bedroom. This would make it even simpler. He could kill her while she slept. She would never even know that he had been there. She would die believing in him and loving him. On the several occasions he had returned to find her sleeping, and the doors bolted had resisted his key, he had had to pound on the door like a mad man to arouse her. Only Mazie could sleep with a radio blasting in her ear. Still, he supposed, she did get tired of reading trash and had to pass her time some way.