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.
Benny worked rust-colored eyebrows into a scowl. “I at least expect a dame to live up to her contract with the guy that learned her how to hoof!”
She screamed something at Benny, Benny yelled something before she was through, and Farneye drowned them both out. “Tra-La wasn’t of legal age when she joined your act!”
O’Hanna waved the three of them to silence.
“O.K., O.K., I get it,” O’Hanna said. He peered at the young guy. “You found her in Denver, you took her on the stage, and she quit the act when she saw a chance to sign up with Mogul Films. So what did you figure you could do about it?”
Tra-La said: “He was going to louse up my chances today, damn him. He said I could either come back in his act, or he’d get up there and tell the crowd I was really a ringer.”
“So—?”
She shrugged bare shoulders. “What could I do? I had to shut him up, didn’t I? I brought him up here, and I thought I could give him the slip by going in the next room to change clothes.”
Benny said sourly: “She’s lying. She got me up here and pulled that gat on me!”
O’Hanna waggled the nickel-plated weapon. “Oh, this is yours, Tra-La?”
The blonde went wary. “Oh, it’s just an old prop. It’s to shoot blanks, see, in the act. What we had was one of those Apache numbers — you must’ve seen ’em? You know, I come on wearing one of those short French skirts and smoking a cigarette — and then Benny comes out. First he pretends to shoot the ciggy out of my mouth, then he knocks me down, then he picks me up, then he throws me down and walks over me, after that he throws me around by my heels. It’s done to music, so he calls it a dance—”
“Five times a day, and six shows Saturday,” O’Hanna finished it for her. “I was asking about the gun, remember?” The house dick broke out the cylinder, shook out the hulls. Darkly he queried: “You load in new police metal points, and it shoots out blanks? Bunk!”
Tra-La’s eyes made circles of surprise. “I didn’t know it was loaded!”
O’Hanna shook his head at the old classic line. “Coming from you, a screen-test ought to be good!” He half-turned at a sound of labored swallowing.
Harry Farneye was having throat trouble. “But, but,” the pinch-faced man babbled pallidly, “you don’t think Tra-La killed Gus Lambert?”
If she was acting now, the blonde maybe did have a career in pictures ahead of her. Her lovely features showed just the right shading of stunned incredulity. “Killed...what are you trying to give me?”
The casting man gave stiffly: “Lambert was shot dead a few minutes ago. They’re trying to pin it on one of the girls in the contest. The shot was fired from inside the hotel, too.”
The blond beauty seemed to soak Farneye’s words in slowly, and then they spelled a different meaning to her. She turned to Benny. “You stinking little rat. You pulled that job. That’s what I heard when I went in the next room here—”
Benny didn’t let her finish. He was on his feet and he was yelling. “You mean that’s what I heard when you went in the next room! How the hell could I shoot somebody? You had the gat, baby, I didn’t!”
“You dumb hoofer, why’d I want to take a potshot at Lambert?” Tra-La raged. “He was the man that was going to make me a star!”
Farneye said: “She’s right, O’Hanna. She wouldn’t have killed the goose before it laid the golden egg. Benny may have been packing a gun of his own. He could have thrown it out the window after firing the shot.”
The house dick’s eyes lighted up with speculation. “I’ll buy that. Anyway, I’ll take an option on the idea. It’s no sale unless we ultimately find the gun he threw away.”
Benny seemed unworried. He sneered: “Jeez, you birds are dumb. The doll opens her big blue peepers, and says daddy when you squeeze her, and you think she’s as sweet as she looks. That dame’s dynamite. She’d cut your throat for a dime.”
“Gus Lambert isn’t worth a dime to me dead,” the blonde countered.
“I don’t say you tried to kill him. You aimed to wound the guy, I figure.” The hoofer snapped his fingers. To O’Hanna, he said: “Hey, it plays perfect that way! Look what happened. I dragged her out of that pin-up parade. If she wasn’t in it, one of those other girls had to be named the winner of a Mogul movie contract. She couldn’t stop two hundred of them, but what she could do was wing the judge. The show couldn’t go on if Lambert was wounded, and that’s what she tried to do.”
“I’ll buy that, too.” O’Hanna’s grin was impartial; the wave of his hand included everybody. “We’ll all hustle downstairs. Tra-La can tell one of our public stenographers all the reasons she thinks Benny fired the fatal shot. Benny can tell a different stenographer why he thinks Tra-La is a murderess. While you two are having fun, Farneye can be figuring out a statement on this frame-up flesh show that won’t read too badly when it comes out in the newspapers.”
Downstairs, he distributed them. He left the blonde to dictate one statement in the cashier’s office, left Benny to dictate another in Endicott’s office. Harry Farneye he led into his own, smaller office. The pinch-faced man was worry-gnawed.
“O’Hanna, what you’re suggesting isn’t a bit smart at all. A statement about that frame-up won’t hurt Lambert, because he’s dead, but it will backfire on you and injure your hotel’s reputation.”
O’Hanna said: “I agree. That wasn’t what I really wanted of you. Look here.”
He tugged open a desk drawer, ransacked around in it, came up with a vial labeled naphth. sodium. From another drawer, he lifted a San Alpha envelope. He swung out the cylinder of the revolver, laid the gun aside, opened a penknife blade. With care, the house dick uncorked the vial, trickled a spill of white powder onto the blade, balanced it cautiously there while he used the other hand to lift the gun, barrel pointing down.
“I’ve only got two hands. Hold the envelope down here and catch this.” He tilted the knife blade, tried to run the white powder from the knife into the gun’s breech. It didn’t work too well, and he pursed his lips and blew at it. Most of it went down the barrel then, the rest settled in a miniature white cloud.
O’Hanna said: “O.K., seal the envelope. Write your name and the date across it.” He was tugging open a third drawer, stowing the weapon away in there.
“What the hell is it supposed to prove?”
O’Hanna said: “It’s a residue test. Tra-La claims that gun was used only for shooting blanks. Blank cartridge powder is pure guncotton mixed with an adhesive such as gum water. That’s why it goes off with a bang, whereas ordinary smokeless powder would merely fizzle without being confined behind a bullet. Smokeless powders contain nitroglycerin, and this white stuff we poured through the barrel is a harmless little chemical which reacts with nitrous residues by slowly turning blue. In other words, what we’re doing is finding out whether Tra-La’s gun was used to shoot anything besides blank loads.”
The pinch-faced man whisked out a handkerchief, mopped particles of clinging naphthionate of sodium from his fingers. “I see. You’re one of those scientific Sherlocks.”
“I’ll tell you something, Farneye. I don’t favor science at all. I’d really rather take my suspects down cellar and apply the rubber hose method.”
“You don’t mean it!”
“I can’t get away with it.” O’Hanna slammed and locked the desk drawers. “I can’t even get away with searching those rooms for concealed firearms, as you suggested. If I did that, probably a hundred paying guests would resent being suspected and they’d check out. At the minimum room rate, I’d be costing the management fifteen hundred bucks. And that’s just figuring this week-end. It makes no allowance for the fact that they’d never come back here again.”