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.
You clung to me, your lovely young body starting to shake with sobs, your eyes full of teary pleading. In them I saw goodness, Rhea. Reeking with liquor though you were, I told myself there was womanly sweetness in you waiting only to be brought out. I knew then, at that moment, that I must do everything in my power to save you from the evil into which you had fallen.
So romantic, wasn’t it, Rhea, the way I hustled you into my car, then brought you your clothes from that filthy dressing room, and how I stood on the sidewalk to guard you from ogling passersby while you dressed yourself as best you could? Then I brought you hot, black coffee and gently forced you to drink it. Next came a decent meal in a good restaurant.
You were actually past the verge of alcoholism already, Rhea. Your pretty face was already developing haggard lines and sags — but in you I saw goodness. At least I believed I saw it and knew I must devote myself wholeheartedly to your salvation. And best of all you really wanted to be saved.
“I’ve been a crazy-fool kid,” you confessed. “All because of a guy I fell for too hard. Until I met him, I’d never taken a single drink. He taught me to like the stuff, and then I went overboard trying to keep up with him.”
“That man should be jailed, except that jail is too good for him,” I said. “What’s his name?”
“Dallas,” you said. “Bruce Dallas. There’s no use trying to punish him, because I went along with him willingly enough. Anyway, he’s left town now — went to Chicago where the pickings are richer. The worst part is the tough time I’m having, trying to get over him. Maybe I never will. I’ve drunk more and more just trying to get him burned out of me. I hate it — what drink does to me. Please tell me how I can quit.”
“I’ll do better than tell you,” I said, putting my hand over yours. “I’m going to be right there at your side, leading you every step of the way along the path of rightness. That’s the goal for both of us — to make you the good woman you can be.”
But it was not easy, Rhea, was it? We both struggled — you against the yearnings of temptation, I to give you the strength you needed to resist. There were little slips and relapses, but we both knew the long effort would win out. That was when I watched you, Rhea, to make sure you wouldn’t weaken, even to the small extent of sneaking a single drink — because we both knew that that one taste, if you ever took it, would send you skidding straight toward hell again.
But we did it. My moral strength kept you good. Your health returned. You became sweeter and lovelier than ever. Indeed, Rhea, you were an angel on earth to me.
Our happiness was complete when we were married. When we moved into our little home on Laurel Street — the same home where you were later to meet such a sudden and tragic death — all the evil in your past was left far behind you. None of our friends and neighbors there dreamed you had once been an all-but-lost soul — a little alcoholic burlesque girl. You and I almost forgot it too in our simple blissfulness — you were so beautifully changed and purified, a model wife and mother.
It even made no difference at all, to judge from your visible reactions, when we later heard the news that Bruce Dallas had come back to this city, richer, smoother, an even hotter operator than before.
When Darlene was born, in the first year of our marriage, I had stopped watching over you for a possible relapse into sin. It had become unnecessary, your salvation was so complete. Now and then I would feel a twinge of fear that the seeds of evil might be lying dormant in you, and might come out in some moment of stress.
At times too I wondered whether certain tendencies to evil had passed from you to your daughter...
Alone in our living room, I was casting about in my mind for an explanation of that incident at the kitchen door. Darlene had gone upstairs. I became aware of busy noises as she moved about. Puzzled, I went up the stairs and found her, not in her own room, Rhea, but in yours.
Darlene had gone into your room, Rhea, directly next to my own, with the connecting bath in between. She had seated herself at your vanity mirror and was quietly applying lacquer to her fingernails. She paused to gaze at me — looking so much like you, Rhea, that I felt my nerves squirming in my flesh.
“What are you doing, Darlene? Have you forgotten I’ve never permitted you to use paint on your nails? You’re still too young.”
She gazed at me with another of those new, quiet smiles. She had never smiled just that way before. Something in Darlene was changing. She seemed more knowing; she had grown a little bolder. There was an audacity, almost a challenging shine in her eyes as she answered:
“Perhaps you haven’t noticed, Johnny, how much older I really am now.”
She went on smiling and quietly applying the enamel to her nails, taking it from the bottle left on your vanity. She left me feeling strangely helpless. What could I do about it, Rhea? Darlene was quietly defying me and really there was no way I could force her to stop.
Moreover it was true, as she had just reminded me, that she was, somehow, suddenly grown up — too grown up.
“I really am older than you seem to realize, Johnny,” she said softly.
In a shaken but stern attempt at discipline I retorted, “That’s another thing, Darlene — your calling me Johnny. You never did that before this afternoon. Please don’t do it any more. It doesn’t show the proper respectful attitude which a daughter should feel toward her father.”
“But I liked so much the way Mother called you Johnny,” Darlene answered. “I thought that if I called you Johnny in the same nice way, it would help to make it seem that Mother isn’t really gone.”
“But she is gone,” I said flatly. “She’s gone never to come back. I will always love the memory of her, Darlene, and of course you are very dear to me, too, but in quite a different way... That blue dress you have on is another thing — it’s one of your mother’s. You shouldn’t have touched it, at least not so soon. And what do you mean by coming into her room like this? It should be kept closed out of proper respect—”
“But, Johnny, I’ve always wanted this room,” she broke in eagerly. “I love being amid Mother’s things because they’re all so very much like me and now they’re all mine.”
“Darlene!”
It struck me so deeply, Rhea, that my sense pinwheeled. Overstrained as my nerves were, I was hardly aware of leaving. Then I discovered that I was no longer in your room, Rhea, but in my own. I had a sleepless nightmare of a night...
When I came home early the next evening, Rhea — after an interminable day at the office — I brought the engraved silver urn containing your ashes.
With the urn in my hands I turned from the garage toward the house, and paused, staring apprehensively at the kitchen door. Then I went to it slowly, watching at every step. Thank heavens that the incident of yesterday was not repeated. Entering that door, in fact, I found the kitchen deserted. But there were sounds overhead, indicating that Darlene was upstairs, and her voice carried down gayly,
“Welcome home, Johnny!”
Unable to answer, I carried the urn into the living room and placed it on the center of the mantel. Left there in plain sight, I hoped it would serve as a constant reminder to our daughter that Rhea would continue to be present in this house only as a handful of gray dust reposing inside that silver vessel.
But only the next day I came home, numbly tired again, to find that in one more detail Darlene had caused herself to resemble you even more closely. She had had her hair bleached a shade or two, to the shade yours had been.