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.
“It’s a tough life you lead.”
“You haven’t heard the half of it. I’ve only got an hour before Sheriff Gleeson and the county coroner take this thing out of my hands. I’m racing against time with my feet hobbled. I’m desperate for a quick clue.”
The house dick thrust his fingers through his hair, twice, irritably. “Furthermore, I’m not so damned sure this bathing beauty contest isn’t sliced herring. Maybe somebody just grabbed a nice, confusing opportunity to take a shot at Gus Lambert. Tell me, he had enemies, surely?”
Farneye’s thin lips grinned. “Every Hollywood producer has enemies, O’Hanna. But picture feuds aren’t fought out with guns. There are so many more refined ways to knife a man in the ribs, and they’re all on the safe side of the law.” He toyed with the broken pince-nez. “I don’t think it was that — any more than it was the note, for instance.”
The sleuth went open-eyed. “What note?”
“It isn’t important. Just some crank propped a crazy letter up against Lambert’s door, so he’d find it when he came back from lunch.”
O’Hanna asked: “Why doesn’t somebody tell me these things? What became of it?”
“You’ll probably find it in the wastebasket; that’s where he threw it.”
Chapter Three
Kill Riddle
Lambert’s was a fourth-floor suite, a de luxe layout on the building corner, with window exposures facing two views. The Mogul producer had had the big shot’s habit of taking his office with him when he traveled and the suite’s sitting room was littered with scripts, sketches, and such incidentals of the cinema industry. O’Hanna walked into a quiet little wake, where the news cameraman was tapping Gus Lambert’s box of Corona-Coronas, the sound man was tapping Lambert’s supply of Scotch, and the male secretary was talking long-distance on the phone. Obviously, none of the three were shedding any tears.
The note lay balled up at the wastebasket’s bottom. O’Hanna smoothed it out, saw a sheet of the San Alpa stationery the management supplied in all the paying guests’ rooms. My dear Mr. Lambert, the scrawled script began politely enough, but from there on the going got rough shod: It’s fiends in human form like you that are responsible for juvenile delinquency in this country! What is the use of parents trying to raise our younger generation to be respectable when men of your ilk put a public premium on immorality? Shame on you for luring young girls by dangling the bait of a movie career in front of them! Now, you either put a stop to this carnal exhibition, or I’ll take steps myself. This was signed, I. M. Disgusted. Then came a P.S.: Think of the good effect you will have, standing up and denouncing the idea of girls winning fame and fortune by shedding off their clothes. They might catch cold and sue you, too.
O’Hanna folded this away into his pocket, stepped over and tapped the secretary’s shoulder. The secretary said: “Go away, I’m talking to the front office—”
“Talk them into sending us a print of Tra-La Brown’s screen-test,” the house detective requested.
He had no more than set foot out of the elevator into the congested lobby than Endicott rushed him. The manager was pallid. “Great Judas, Mike, where have you been? Haven’t you located that Tarkey girl yet?” He came close, said thinly: “There’s another one now — I told you she’d strike again.”
“Another bod—”
“Hush, hush!” Endicott’s head jerk was for the crowded lobby. “They don’t know about it yet. It’s outside — out in the bushes beside the golf course. One of the gardener’s helpers found it while he was picking up that wastepaper on the grounds. Raymond’s down there now.”
O’Hanna headed out past the swimming pool again, this time swinging wide of the chalets. For the utmost in privacy, the chalets had been landscaped into the mountain slope, tucked into the natural cover of pines and black mountain oak. Then came the manzanita, head-high treelets of native shrub, a tangle of misshapen, red-barked boughs and branches. The groundskeeper stood by a gunnysack half stuffed with paper he had speared up on his spiked pole. He gestured with the pole as O’Hanna approached. “It looked to me like a paper napkin that had blowed in there, so I fished for it, and I started pulling out cloth — kay-ripes, with blood on it!”
O’Hanna thrust his way into the tangle, joined Doc Raymond over the No. 2 corpse. There had been a hasty effort at concealment, a shallow trench scraped among the manzanita roots, soil and decaying leaves scattered over the body.
“Strangled,” the medico muttered, “and then beaten to hell and gone just to make sure.”
O’Hanna peered at the battered features, at the beach-wrap the groundskeeper had speared and dragged from the body. His guts bucked, he tasted salt and acid in his throat. “Endicott can quit worrying about Eva Tarkey running amok,” he said. “This is Eva.”
Striding back through the black oak and pines, he found he could swallow the salty, retching taste — and he found it condensed into something else, a cold inner weight that was deadly, and not very logical. Gus Lambert’s death hadn’t affected O’Hanna like this. Lambert was a man, an elderly man to whom life had been immoderately kind. You could figure death had been kind, too, so instant he had probably never known what hit him. Eva Tarkey was only beginning to live her life, and her dying had been an anguish of choking horror. There was the feeling, too, that Gus Lambert had been a chess-master, and the girl had been merely a pawn on the board lured into this contest that hadn’t been a contest at all, snatched off the board because she had got in the way of the killer’s move.
He took the cold wrath up A-10’s steps with him. Selena Walther had changed from the improvised bandanna swim-gear to form-fitting black. Her platinum hair fell down to her shoulders; her throat was roped with pearls. The black dress left her arms bare, was v’d down to the swell of her breasts in front, ended in a fish-tail train around her high, spiked heels. She said: “Don’t look so startled. This is my costume for tonight. I’m taking no chances on Uncle Jerry repeating that little trick he pulled this morning.”
O’Hanna was genuinely startled. “You expect the beauty contest to go on tonight in spite of all?”
“Why not? You know the old saying — the show must go on. Mogul Films can’t welch on that offer of a movie contract. It was a legal offer, an inducement to two hundred girls to invest their time and money in this thing.” She was as solemn as a Supreme Court decision. “If you’ve come here to try to talk me out of it, you’re wasting your breath.”
“I came here to see your uncle.”
“Uncle Jerry has taken to his bed. The excitement proved more than his doddering constitution could bear.”
“Then maybe you can tell me.” The house dick delved into his pocket. “Did he write this?”
Selena Walther scrutinized the anonymous missive. “It sounds like his brain child, but unfortunately his handwriting looks more like drunken rabbit tracks than anything else. I’ll show you a specimen.” She crossed into one of the chalet’s bedchambers, returned with a green oblong of canceled bank paper. “That’s his signature on the back.”
O’Hanna peered at the trembling Jeremiah Walther that wiggled lamely over the check. He turned it over, caught a quick peep at the face. The draft was for one thousand dollars, was signed Selena Walther and bore the notation, Pension to date in full.