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 was adding up tension toward the cracking point, Rhea. Darlene had also developed your trick of sneaking a smoke now and then, in just the way you used to do it, believing I didn’t know. Darlene was fully aware that I disapprove of women smoking, especially mere girls of her age — so she tried to hide her indulgence from me just as you used to hide it. But I could always smell the tobacco when I came into the house and I would find the butts stained with lip rouge, just like yours, in the trash basket.
This in itself was trivial, perhaps, except that Darlene had never before liked cigarettes. But now she was smoking in my absence, concealing it and undoubtedly becoming an addict.
Like mother, like daughter! Your evilness was your bequest to Darlene. Your sins were flowing in her blood, tainting it, cropping out of her now, more and more in hellish increase.
All these things were nerve-shattering. Darlene’s new way of waiting for me just inside the kitchen door, smiling at me, was almost the worst trial to endure.
But then came the worst of all, Rhea — the dereliction proving once and for all that Darlene was going the evil way of her mother. It came so soon that it left me dazed and appalled — inherited evil completely claiming Darlene. Almost before I was aware of it, it came so slyly, she was plunging into your own secretly fatal sin.
Chapter Three
The Night You Died
I never told you in life, Rhea, just how I discovered your unforgivable secret. At the time I judged it best to use your own tactics of silence and craft. You didn’t even suspect that I had learned — and perhaps you do not know even yet how I brought a righteous punishment down upon you.
The first sign of it, Rhea, was a strange new tenseness in you. Your cheerful, content manner was gone. You had become on edge, anxious. When I asked you what was bothering you, your answer was evasive. “I just seem to be a little nervous, Johnny, that’s all — probably because the weather is so unsettled.”
But after the weather changed, you stayed agitated. Coming home from work these afternoons, I found your customary greeting strained. The stench of tobacco was stronger in the house and more butts than usual were discarded in the trash basket. At night, too, you were restless — you tossed and squirmed in bed so endlessly that neither of us could sleep. That was when you suggested it might be better if you had a room of your own, so you moved into the second bedroom on the other side of the bath.
It did seem to help some, for soon your nervous tensions relaxed somewhat. In fact, you took on a new loveliness — there was a brighter flash in your eyes, a happier shine on your lips, and as you worked around the house you sang softly to yourself.
And I didn’t suspect the reason, Rhea. Trusting my wife as a husband should, I didn’t dream...
The first inkling of it came, with bitter irony, as the result of my husbandly concern for you, Rhea.
That night in bed I was also restive. Usually I sleep the sound sleep of a man whose conscience is perfectly clear, but on this night something caused me to waken. My first thought was of you, Rhea. I rose, wanting to make sure you were all right, and without turning on any lights, stepped through the connecting bath into your room.
A light had been left burning inside your closet. Thinking you had overlooked it, I reached in to turn it out — and then I saw the bottle.
On the shelf, Rhea, just barely visible behind a hat-box — a liquor bottle. You were keeping it hidden there. Only a few ounces of whiskey remained in it.
I stood there too stunned to move, Rhea — staring at that bottle as if at the suddenly dead face of a loved one. In a soundless thunderclap of revelation, it told me that all my years of loving patience and guidance had gone in vain. You had secretly deceived me, Rhea. The sweet, good wife I had known was gone, for she had yielded again to sinful weakness.
Heartsick, I turned my unbelieving eyes to look at you, Rhea, and then an even more staggering blow rocked me.
Your bed was empty.
Just in the nick of time I choked off a cry of pain. Darlene was asleep just down the hall, and the Fraziers’ open bedroom windows were no farther away than the width of the driveway. I could not bear to let them learn of my discovery.
The condition of your bed showed you had been lying there for a while, Rhea, but now you had left it. And the clock on your vanity said the time was 4:20 a.m.
In a stunned turmoil of conjectures — unwilling to believe this thing until I had made doubly sure — I quietly went down the stairs. It took me only a few moments to search the house. It was horribly true. You were gone. You had risen from your bed in the middle of the night, while your trusting husband slept, to sneak out of the house and away.
Where had you gone? How many times before tonight had you slipped out like this without my slightest knowledge? Did Darlene suspect, or the neighbors? I hoped to heaven they were as ignorant of it as I had been. I prayed that I could remain alone in my wretched wonder.
These questions would remain a torture in my mind even after they were answered. I resolved on the spot, in my heartsick dismay, that whatever the ugly truth about you might be, it must, at any cost, remain always concealed from our daughter and from our friends who thought so well of us.
Of one other thing I was instantly sure, Rhea. Whatever you were doing, I must stop you. You must be punished for your sins already committed, and I must not permit you to hurt me so ungratefully and so grievously with more of them.
First I must learn the dreadful truth. I went quietly back up the stairs. I left the bottle untouched on your closet shelf, the light burning just as you had left it. I closed the connecting door, leaving it as I had found it, and fell back into my own bed.
I lay there in acute wakefulness, listening and waiting.
Almost an hour later, just before dawn, I heard the sound of a car pausing in the street, then quietly rolling on. The faint sound of hurrying feet came down the dark, hedge-bordered alleyway behind the houses. You came into our home with such sly quietness that I could well understand why your secret prowlings had not disturbed me before.
All the while I lay still in my own room, letting you believe you were deceiving me again. Even when I heard you finally return to your bed, I kept my wretched silence — and planned.
The next night, Rhea, I was grimly ready to find the answers to the dark questions rankling in my mind.
At breakfast, to my secret amazement, you looked so fresh and unaffected. It showed your fine natural talent for sin, Rhea. As for me, I must confess finding it surprisingly easy to act as if nothing was wrong.
A shameful thing, Rhea, this mutual deception — but on my part it was justified.
Again when I came home that evening to receive your usual cheery greeting, the warmth of your kiss seemed an expression of your duplicity. I suspected liquor on your breath, too. But I pretended to notice nothing and was ready with a small deception of my own — one you had forced upon me.
“I came home by bus, honey, because I had a little clutch trouble with the car. Left it at the garage. Pick it up tomorrow.”
That wasn’t quite the fact, Rhea. Actually I had left the car parked down in the next block. I expected to have a special use for it during the night.
It wrung my heart to observe you during the evening, Rhea. Now I understood your nervousness. You were suffering pangs of guilt and remorse. You were tense with fear that I might somehow learn too much. Yet in your weakness you could no longer resist temptation.