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.
“Sure. But let me tell you, MacBride, that the first pup gets in my way or monkeys around my playground, I’ll start trouble and I don’t give a damn whose precinct it’s in. I’m sitting on top of the world in Richmond City and no guy’s going to horn in.”
“I’m telling you, Bonelio, walk lightly in my precinct. I’m giving you fair warning. I’m putting on the lid and I’m locking up any guy that so much as disturbs the peace. That goes for you and your gang as well as anybody else. You can sell all the booze you want. Much as I dislike you, I’ve never bothered your rum warehouses down by the railroad yards—”
“You were told not to. The big boys are my friends.”
“Don’t take advantage of it. I could be nasty if I wanted to. And I will, if you butt in my precinct.”
“Here’s hoping you get Duveen for the murder of Bedell.”
“Make sure you don’t try to!”
MacBride banged out, hopped into the flivver and Garret drove him back to the station-house.
Moriarity and Cohen were playing penny-ante, half-heartedly.
“What news?” asked MacBride.
“None,” said Cohen. “Duveen hasn’t been seen for the past week.”
“Hasn’t, eh? All right, we want him, then. Sergeant,” he called to the man at the desk, “ring Headquarters. General alarm. Chuck Duveen wanted. Ask Headquarters to spread the news and start the net working. I want Duveen before” — his lips flattened — “before somebody else gets him.”
4
Next day the papers carried big headlines. The sheets that were in sympathy with the current administration bellowed loudly and asked the public to consider the drastic measures used by the opposition to gain its own end. The others, among them the Free Press, employed a calmer, more detached tone, and pleaded with justice to get at the root of all evil. Both Anderson and Connaught, aspirants for the offices of State’s Attorney and alderman of the Sixth Election District respectively, deplored the tragedy and promised all manner of aid in running down the person or persons who had murdered their opponent, the late Alderman Bedell. State’s Attorney Krug promised quick action in the event the criminal was apprehended. Charges and counter charges ran rampant.
MacBride, having gone home at three in the morning, did not get back on the job until noon. He felt rested and his clean-clipped face glowed ruddily from recent contact with lather and razor. He had read the papers on the way in from Grove Manor with the attitude of a man who knows the inner workings of politics and news-paperdom. In short, a slight morsel of what he read was worthwhile, and the rest was bunk — salve for an outraged public.
The one item that drew his attention was anent the fact that Adolph Shanz was to run for alderman in place of the late Alderman Bedell. This made him chuckle bitterly. As committee-man Shanz had been, ever since he was elected, clay in the hands of Krug and Bedell. If elected for alderman, he would be one of Krug’s most pliable tools.
The police net was spread for Duveen. The city was combed up, down and across. But the man was not caught. The only information available, gleaned as it was from old familiar hangouts of the gang boss, showed that Duveen had not been seen for a week. A day passed, and then two and three, with the man still at large.
Wherefore, on the fourth day, Captain MacBride was convened for a solid hour with the Commissioner of Police, a man who ran the Department and gave quarter nowhere. The meeting took place in the morning, and before noon MacBride was back in the station-house. There he held a brief consultation with his assistants.
In conclusion, he said to the sergeant at the desk, “When Kennedy, or any other of his breed drifts in, tell him I have a statement for the press.”
Alone in his office, he drank his first bracer and started his first cigar of the day. He chafed his hands vigorously, paced the floor with a little more than his customary energy, trailing banners of excellent cigar smoke behind him. A beam of sunlight streamed through the open window. On the telephone wires that passed behind the old station-house, birds were swaying and chirping. MacBride’s eyes were keen and narrow with thought.
An hour later, when he was writing at his desk, a knock sounded on the door.
“Come in,” he yelled.
Kennedy came in. “What the hell’s this I hear about—”
“Sit down. Glad to see something can work you up and make you look as if you weren’t dying on your feet.”
“Come on, spill it, Mac!”
“My wife’s birthday.”
“Cripes—”
“Should see the new spring outfit I bought her. Kennedy, she gets younger every day. Well” — he cleared his throat with a serious comic air— “look who her husband is.”
“For the love o’ God, what’s the matter, are you batty?”
MacBride grinned — one of his rare, broad grins that few people knew, outside of his wife and daughter.
“All right, Kennedy,” he said. “I said I’d give you a break when I started broadcasting. I’m broadcasting. Tune in. Early this morning Detective Moriarity picked up a man for violating the state law regarding the possession of concealed weapons. This man was carrying an automatic pistol.
“He was cross-examined by Captain Stephen J. MacBride — don’t omit the J. Intense questioning brought out certain interesting facts, in the light of which Captain MacBride hopes to apprehend — and don’t insert ‘it is alleged’ — Captain MacBride hopes to apprehend the man who killed the late Alderman Bedell within the next twenty-four hours.
“For certain reasons known to the Department alone, the informant’s name will not be divulged for the present. Suffice it to say that during the course of the cross-examination it was learned that this man was the one who phoned anonymously to Captain MacBride about one hour before Alderman Bedell was murdered, warning him that the murder was prearranged.”
He rubbed his hands together. “How does that sound? Pretty good for a plain, ordinary cop, eh? And I never took a correspondence course, either.”
“But who’s this guy you picked up?” demanded Kennedy.
“You heard me, didn’t you? He’s under lock and key right here in the precinct. Put that in, too, Kennedy. He’s locked up at the precinct. But who he is — that’s my business for the time being. Headquarters is standing by me to the bitter end on that. Now pipe down and consider yourself lucky I’ve given you this much. Here, sink a drink under your belt and see that story gets good space.”
Still curious, Kennedy, nevertheless, went out. Within the hour other reporters got the story. It would be on the streets at four that afternoon.
Moriarity dropped in, when MacBride was alone, and asked, “Think it will work, Cap?”
“Man, oh, man, I’m banking everything on it right now. It’s a bluff — sure, a hell of a big bluff. And if it doesn’t trap somebody or give me a decent lead I’ll take the razz. Just now the underworld is stagnant, Jake. This will be the stone that stirs the water. We’re supposed to have somebody here who knows who killed Bedell. Whoever killed him, will make a move. What that move will be, I don’t know, but I’m ready to meet it.”
Moriarity was frankly dubious. “Dunno, Cap. Maybe I’m short on imagination. You’re taking a long chance giving out the news we got a mysterious somebody picked up and locked in.”