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.
Selena Walther, wide-eyed and wordless up to this point, said now: “Was that contest fixed? If it was, I want to kick his teeth out.”
O’Hanna said: “Nurse him back to health, then when he comes to, remind him you witnessed all of this. If you play it right, you might get that screen-test. But make him put the promise in writing.”
Downstairs, Endicott was fretful. “Judas Particular Priest, Mike, the sheriff’s due here any minute. You’ve found nothing—”
“I found this.”
The manager snatched the Belgian gun. His thin features worked. “Thank God, it’s been fired. That means—”
“It means nothing. Farneye followed a little hint of mine. He removed a slug from a cartridge; then probably he wrapped the gat in a towel and fired a virtually soundless shot. He’s trying to cover up by framing Benny. Actually, what he’s done is prove they’re both innocent.”
Endicott displayed outraged emotions. “Mike, that’s wonderful. The possession of firearms makes them innocent, I suppose!”
“You suppose right,” said O’Hanna. “They don’t seem to know it, but a high-velocity load of the kind that killed Gus Lambert would make a mighty ruptured duck of any pistol.”
He crossed the grounds, went back once more to chalet A-10. Without knocking, this time, he entered and tiptoed his way to the second rear bedchamber. Uncle Jeremiah Walther was peacefully bedded down, whiskers pointed ceilingward, chest lifting the coverlet in rhythmic rise and fall. O’Hanna stepped into the room, began opening bureau drawers.
Uncle Jerry sat up abruptly. “What the tarnation are you up to, young man?”
“I’m just looking for something to read.” The house dick spread his hands, smiled. “To be frank about it, my job is often downright boring. Whole days pass when nobody commits a murder or steals a diamond necklace. Sometimes, just to kill time, I even read good books such as Mencken’s classic on the American language. You ought to read that one yourself.”
The white-whiskered man waved aside the covers, laboriously engineered his legs out of bed. He sat there, swathed from neck to ankle in an old-style striped-flannel nightshirt. “Cops have changed since my day,” he complained. “You don’t make sense to me.”
O’Hanna said casually: “The language has changed, too. The word ‘moron’ is one Grandfather Walther couldn’t possibly have penned in a letter dated 1895. It’s a coined word, coined nearly ten years later. I’m forced to conclude that letter is a rank forgery.”
Jeremiah Walther shrank inside his nightshirt as the sleuth swung to the bedside. O’Hanna scooped up the gold-rimmed spectacles from the bedside table, glanced through them, said: “These are window glass. I’ll bet your beard is bleached, too. Everything about you is phony.”
He stepped to the clothes closet, hauled out a pair of suitcases. Tossing them on the bed, he said: “Correct me if I’m wrong, but your name can’t really be Jeremiah Walther. You’re merely a shrewd operator who tumbled to the fact a member of the Walther family had disappeared fifty years ago. You boned up on the family genealogy, forged the letter to identify yourself, and forged some shares of stock. Confronted with a facsimile of her long-lost uncle Jerry, you figured Selena would make a quiet, out-of-court settlement.”
The white-whiskered man gained his feet angrily. “If you’re looking for any such letter, I have it in a bank box.”
“The letter isn’t really important to me. You’d never have dared submit it or the stock certificates to a showdown test.” O’Hanna finished with one suitcase, found the next one locked. He paused, said: “You were bluffing, but so was Selena. You assumed she meant she’d actually have the company legally liquidated. That’s why you tried to kill her.”
“I tried to—!”
“Yeah. You tried to kill her. As the only other relative, you’d get the dough without any lawsuits. That’s so clear that you had to try and make this mess look like the work of some lamebrained fanatic. It explains that phony note parked at Lambert’s door, and the silly theft of a swim-suit and a bra-top from the girls’ dressing-room. That was all build-up for killing Selena during the contest.”
The other scorned: “Perfectly preposterous. You know I did my level best to keep Selena out of that show.”
“Phooey. You knew she’d do her level best to get in it, regardless. She’d beg, borrow, or make herself a costume, and you counted on it. Then, after she’d been shot dead, you could say you didn’t even know she’d be there on the stand.”
The bearded man protested: “But Selena wasn’t shot.”
“She wasn’t — because Gus Lambert jumped into your line of fire.” O’Hanna drummed his fingers impatiently on the locked suitcase. “Do you want to give me a key, or shall I break this thing open?”
“You touch that and I’ll sue the hotel—”
O’Hanna whipped out his penknife, sank the blade into the leather. He slashed, plunged two fingers into the opening, wrenched.
A gun lay tucked in there, diagonally, from corner to corner. To make it fit, the rifle barrel had been hack-sawed down to carbine length; the stock had been dismounted. Above the bolt action, a ’scope fitted the metal.
“A wildcat .25,” O’Hanna said. “You carry it to plink butterflies, huh?”
“It’s... it’s a souvenir of my African hunting days.”
“You’re a liar. You ran back to the chalet, opened a window, and took a potshot intended for Selena. Squinting through the ’scope, you failed to see Gus Lambert and the Lofting girl.” O’Hanna’s Irish-gray stare grew bitter. He intoned harshly: “Now comes the really stinking part. Eva Tarkey had heard it said you’d cornered the local swim-suit supply. Tired of waiting, she came down here to demand one of them. The poor kid walked in just as you fired the shot. You strangled her, and later, you carried the body off into the bushes. It was risky, but not as risky as explaining a corpse in your chalet.”
The other frowned. His voice was edgy. “There’s only one answer to this rigmarole.”
“Yeah, you’re guilty as hell.”
“Nonsense. The answer is, literally hundreds of people heard that shot. They’ll all testify it came from the hotel.” The white-whiskered man stepped over to the clothes closet door. “Now, if you’ll kindly leave the room, I’ll get dressed. I’m going to see Mr. Endicott and complain about your insulting behavior.”
O’Hanna said: “You can get dressed, but you’re going to see the sheriff. It happens that nobody in the path of a high-velocity bullet ever hears the gun go off. What they hear is something else, the bow-wave report of the slug traveling faster than sound. It isn’t a whizz or a whine; it’s a sharp crack of the slug splitting the air. It drowns the actual shot and causes an auditory illusion. The fact that everybody ‘heard’ the shot come from the hotel proves the gun was off at a different angle. A ballistics shark can measure the distance and figure the angle—”
The white-whiskered man whirled from the closet doorway, and he had the gold-headed cane in his fist. He had suddenly lost a third of his supposed seventy years, and he was cat-fast as he slammed the cane at O’Hanna’s skull. The house dick ducked back, barely in time. There was plenty of muscle wrapped up inside that nightshirt, too. The cane head cracked down on the suitcase-bedded rifle, broke in pieces. The man tried to stab O’Hanna with the piece left in his hand. O’Hanna weaved away from that one, lashed out a punch. It was no one-handed tussle this time. The pair traded a dozen wallops before O’Hanna got in the finisher.