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.
MacBride sat in his office at Police Headquarters. He sat at his shining oak desk, in a swivel chair, smoking a blackened briar pipe, with the latest copy of the Richmond City Free Press spread before him. In one corner a steam radiator clanked and hissed intermittently. There were a half dozen chairs lined against the wall behind him. The floor was of cement, the ceiling was high and, like the walls, a light, impersonal tan. About the room there was something hollow and clean and efficient. About the borders of the two windows at MacBride’s left there were irregular frames of snow left by a recent blizzard. But the room was warm and, except for the clanking of the radiator, quite silent.
Reading on, MacBride sometimes moved in his chair or took his pipe from his mouth to purse his lips, it seemed a little grimly and ironically. Once he muttered something behind clenched teeth, way down in the cavern of his throat. Presently he let the paper drop and sat back, drawing silently on his pipe and letting his eyes wander back and forth over the collection of photographs tacked on the bulletin board on the wall before him — photographs of men wanted for robbery, murder, and homicide. One of the telephones on his desk rang. He took off the receiver, listened, said, “Send him in.” Then he leaned back again and swung his chair to face the door.
It opened presently, and a man neatly dressed in a blue overcoat and a gray fedora strolled in. A cigarette was drooping from one corner of his mouth. He had a young-old face, a vague smile, and the whimsical eyes of the wicked and wise.
“Hello, Cap.” He kicked the door shut with his heel and leaned against it, indolently, as if he were a little weary — not in his bones, but with life.
“Hello, Kennedy,” nodded MacBride. “Sit down.”
“Thanks.”
Kennedy dropped into a chair, unbuttoned his overcoat, but did not remove it.
MacBride creaked in his chair, looked at the newspaper on his desk and said, with a brittle chuckle, “Thanks for the editorial.”
“Don’t thank me, Mac.”
“Your sheet’s trying to ride us, eh?”
“Our business is to ride everybody we can.”
“M-m-m. I know.”
Kennedy knocked the ash from his cigarette. “Of course, it’s tough on you.” He smiled, shrugged. “I know your hands are tied.”
“Eh?” MacBride’s eyes steadied.
“You heard me, Mac. This little boy knows a lot. Y’ know, you don’t run the Department.”
MacBride’s lips tightened over his pipe.
“You,” went on Kennedy, “would like to put the clamps on this dirty greaseball, Cavallo. Now wouldn’t you?”
MacBride’s eyes narrowed, and he took his pipe from his mouth. “Would I?” His hand knotted over the hot bowl of the pipe.
“Sure you would. But—” Kennedy shrugged — “you can’t.”
“Listen, Kennedy. What did you come here for, to razz me?”
“I don’t know why I came here. It was cold out, and I know you keep it warm here. And... well, I just thought I’d drop in for a chat.”
“You thought you’d get some inside dope. Go ahead, come out with it. Well, Kennedy, I’ve got nothing to say. News is as tight here as a drum-head. What a bunch of wise-cracking eggs you’ve got down in your dump. Gink Cavallo’ll laugh himself into a bellyache when he reads it. The lousy bum!”
“Something’s got to break, Mac. When a bootlegging greaseball starts to run a town, starts to run the Department, something’s got to break.”
“He’s not running me!” barked MacBride.
“The hell he isn’t! Don’t tell me. I’m no greenhorn, Mac. Maybe not you personally. But your hands are tied. He’s running somebody else, and somebody else is running somebody else, and the last somebody else is running you.”
“You’re talking through your hat, Kennedy.”
“Oh, am I? No, I can’t lay my hands on it all, but I can use my head. I know a few things. I know that Gink Cavallo is one of the wisest wops that ever packed a rod. He’s a brother-in-law to Tony Diorio, and Diorio is president of the Hard Club, and the Hard Club swings two thousand sure votes and a thousand possible votes. And, you know, Mac, that these wops stick together. Most of the bohunks in the mills are wops, and they’ve sworn by the Hard Club, and — get this, Mac — it was the Hard Club that put Pozzo in for alderman and Mulroy for state’s attorney. And it’s the state’s attorney’s office that’s running the Department — the rottenest administration in the history of Richmond City. It’s just putting two and two together.
“You can’t move, Mac. You’ve got your orders — hands off. What can you do? You’re a captain. You’ve been with the Department for eighteen years. You’ve got a wife and a kid, and if you were kicked out of the Department you’d be on the rocks. I know you hate Cavallo like poison, and I know you’re just aching to take a crack at him. It sure is a tough break for you, Mac.”
MacBride had not batted an eye-lash, had not shone by the slightest flicker of eyes or expression, how he took Kennedy’s speech. He drew on his pipe meditatively, looking down along his beak of a nose. It was in the heart of MacBride that seas of anger were crashing and tumbling. Because Kennedy was right; he had hit the nail on the head with every charge. But MacBride was not the man to whimper or to go back on the Department. Loyalty had been ground into him long years ago — loyalty to his badge.
His voice was casual, “Finished, Kennedy? Then run along. I’m busy.”
“I know, Mac. Kind of touched you on the quick, eh? It’s all right, old-timer. Your jaw’s sealed, too. You’d be one hell of a fool to tell Steve Kennedy how right he is. Well.” Kennedy got up and lit a fresh butt. “It’s all right by me, Cap. But when the big noise breaks, don’t forget yours truly. It can’t go on, Mac. Somebody’ll slip. Some guy’ll yap for more than his share. I’ve seen these rotten conditions before — ’Frisco, Chicago, New Orleans. I’m hard-boiled as hell, Mac, and there’s no one pulling any wool over my eyes. I’m just standing by and laughing up my sleeve.” He took a pull on his cigarette. “There’s one wild Mick in your outfit who’s very liable to spill the beans, get himself shoved out to the sticks and maybe poked in the ribs with a bullet, besides.”
“You mean—?”
“Sure. Jack Cardigan. S’ long, Mac.”
“Good bye, Kennedy.”
When the door closed, MacBride let go of himself. He heaved to his feet, spread-legged, his fists clenched, his eyes narrowed and burning intensely.
“God, Kennedy, if you only knew how right you are!” he muttered. “If I was only single — if I hadn’t Anna and Judith. I’m tied all around, dammit! Home — and here!” He sank back into his chair, his head drooping, age creeping upon him visibly.
2
He was sitting there, in precisely the same position, fifteen minutes later. And fifteen minutes later the door swung open swiftly, silently, and Jack Cardigan came in. A tall, lean, dark-eyed man, this Cardigan, rounding thirty years. Men said he was reckless, case-hardened, and a flash with the gun. He was.
“You look down at the mouth, Steve,” he said, offhand.
“I am, Jack. Kennedy—”
“Oh, that guy!”
“Kennedy dropped in to pay me a call. Sharp, that bird. Pulls ideas out of the air, and every idea hits you like a sock on the jaw.”