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.
The house dick hooped his eyebrows. “You’re paying him an allowance? I don’t get it. If you’re supporting him, how come he can forbid you to enter a bathing beauty contest?”
“He’s got me over a bicycle.”
O’Hanna stared. “You mean, like over a barrel?”
“I mean a bicycle. My grandfather was a manufacturer of bicycles back during the nineties. Uncle Jerry ran away to Africa — he says to become a missionary, but I don’t believe it. Neither did Grandfather. Grandfather wrote him a furious letter, called him a wastrel and a moron, and declared he was cutting Uncle Jerry out of his will. However, he did enclose fifty shares of the bicycle company stock. This was in 1895, the year Grandmother died, and the fifty shares were ones she had bequeathed to Uncle Jerry. Somehow, I suspect Grandmother never did get along too well with Grand—”
O’Hanna cut in. “Somehow, Grandma doesn’t interest me. Let’s get back to the bicycle business.”
The girl said: “Grandfather became interested in gasoline motors. He took out a patent on a little novelty called the horseless carriage. You can guess the rest. The patent was an asset which made the bicycle company shares immensely valuable.”
“Including Uncle Jerry’s shares?”
“Exactly, but we all assumed Uncle Jerry was long since dead. You can imagine my surprise when he turned up fifty years later with Grandfather’s old letter and that bundle of faded stock. At a conservative estimate, he has half a million in accumulated dividends due him.” Selena Walther shook her platinum hairdo helplessly. “The hell of it is, we buried the family’s financial genius in Grandfather’s grave. My father mismanaged the company horribly. I inherited little more than a pile of debts. I’d be hopelessly bankrupt if Uncle Jerry took his claim to court. Originally, I told him the excess profits tax would eat up the value of his stock if he forced the company to liquidate immediately. So far, I’ve been able to stall him along with a pension check now and then. I’m afraid I can’t get away with it much longer. He’s a moron in financial affairs, just as Grandfather said, but even he must know the excess profits tax has been repealed. He’ll hire a lawyer and take my last dime. Probably he’ll pay me an allowance then — provided I wear long dresses, stop smoking, cut out the cosmetics, and wait on him hand and foot. His ideas haven’t changed since fifty years ago, when men were men and women were washing machines.”
“And you figure that’s a fate worse than death,” O’Hanna summed up. His eyes narrowed. “Why spill the deep, dark secret to me?”
Selena Walther said: “It all leads back to my insistence that this beauty contest go through on schedule. I’ve got to find a job of some kind when things explode. I’d like a job in the movies. I’ve got brains, a nice body, and a fair singing voice. I’m sure I can win this contest, get a contract, and make good. Then I can tell Uncle Jerry to sue and be damned.”
“It’s lucky you told me. I know just the guy for you to see.” The house dick snared her arm. “His name’s Harry Farneye, and we’ll find him in suite 318.”
Harry Farneye was in 318, and he remembered Selena Walther. The pinch-faced man welcomed: “Oh, yes, you were on the platform when the shooting happened, weren’t you,” and guided the platinum-haired girl to an armchair.
Selena sat down, said, “Ouch!” and jumped, fast.
Farneye squinted through the one good lens of his pince-nez. “Good God, O’Hanna, look at this!”
The blued-steel hammer of a gun stuck up between the cushioned seat and the upholstered back of the chair.
O’Hanna came over, looked, asked: “Yours?”
“No, it isn’t mine! I don’t own a gun.” Farneye’s voice climbed. “O’Hanna, I was right! I told you Benny undoubtedly owned a gun! The damned little rat planted it here after he shot Lambert. I’ll bet anything there’s an empty shell—”
O’Hanna caught the casting man’s dropping arm. “Don’t touch. Fingerprints.” He stepped across the room, plucked a decorative scarf from a desktop, covered his hand with that to fish up the weapon.
“Belgian,” he said. “Shoots a .38 load.” He sniffed at the gun’s snout. “Shot recently, too.” He wrapped up the gun, tucked it under his arm. He said: “But it isn’t the murder I’m here about at all.”
The pinch-faced man stared.
O’Hanna said: “It’s about Miss Walther. It seems she’s a hard-luck heiress. To be frank about it, she needs a job acting in the movies so she can support herself in the style she’s accustomed to. I thought you wouldn’t mind arranging for her to have a screen-test, giving her a headstart toward the career she craves.”
Harry Farneye looked horrified. He said: “Good Lord, man, a movie career doesn’t start with a screen-test. Anyway, the day is long past when stage-struck Cinderellas can break into pictures on their looks alone. Nowadays, it takes voice lessons, dramatic coaching, months and months of preliminary training. Miss Walther might go through all that at her own expense, and still not find a studio interested enough to spend the thousand dollars it costs before a camera can roll on a testing stage. I’d advise her to take up something practical, like stenography or—”
“That’s what I thought when you gave me your spiel about Tra-La Brown,” O’Hanna stemmed the other’s flood.
The casting man tightened up. “Tra-La’s different.”
“Like hell she’s different. She’s a nice-looking blonde, I’ll admit. But she’s got a voice like a saw cutting pine-knots. Her theatrical experience consists of being manhandled to music by that cheap hoofer, Benny.”
“You’re discussing my business, snooper.” Farneye was trying the quick-freeze method. “I think I’m the one who’s qualified to judge Tra-La’s talents.”
O’Hanna said: “You’re in the business, but I think you do a little wolfing on the side. Tra-La was dumb enough to devour that old line that you’d make a star of her. I don’t doubt you gave her a screen-test — but that’s as far as you could go without Lambert’s O.K. Her test was nothing you’d dare show him, though. And she was demanding results. She was even toting around a .32, and it wasn’t loaded with blanks. I say she packed that rod for you. I say you were going to wind up a wolf with lead poisoning mighty quick.”
The quick-freeze was thawing, coming out in sweat on the pinch-faced man’s forehead. “If that little tramp told you this, she lied!”
“You lied to her, Farneye. The contest hadn’t been fixed so Lambert would let her win. For Gus Lambert, this show was strictly for publicity. Some girl would get thirteen weeks work as an extra, and Mogul Films would get a scrapbook full of favorable newspaper clippings. You simply gambled that only a handful of contestants would show up, and Tra-La would be an easy, walk-a-way winner.”
“You can’t prove that, O’Hanna.”
The house dick grinned. “I can’t prove that this Belgian gat is your gun, either, and you yourself parked it there!”
“I never saw it before in my life!”
“That’d better be true, Farneye, because naphthionate of sodium doesn’t happen to be a test for smokeless powder. It’s really a stop-thief powder,” O’Hanna said happily. “I keep a supply on hand to discourage petty picking up of other folks’ property. The stuff doesn’t wash off, and the tiniest trace of it shows up under ultra-violet light. If you’ve naphthionate on your fingers, you’re a trapped wolf.”
Farneye threw his pince-nez and caution aside with an angered-bull headshake. He sprang at the house dick. He thought, possibly, O’Hanna could only use one hand, since the telltale gun was being treasured under the sleuth’s right arm. If he thought so, he was right. O’Hanna licked him with one hand, with one punch, a left hook to the chin.