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.
Our double pretense went on through the evening until our usual time to retire to our separate rooms — and then the deceit became double-edged with a vengeance.
This time it was I who sneaked out of the house. Of course you didn’t dream of such a move on my part, Rhea. While you lay awake or dozing in your room, giving me time to fall into my usual deep sleep, I slipped silently out of my room.
I managed it with great care and justified cunning, Rhea, and you never knew. You had no notion I had eased soundlessly out of the house and down the dark street to my waiting car.
Sitting behind the wheel, I pictured your covert actions. I could visualize you getting up very quietly. Perhaps before making a second move, you would fortify your evilness from the bottle hidden on the closet shelf. Then you might listen at my door, and, feeling sure I was sleeping as soundly as usual, you would sneak down the stairs and out the back door.
Then?
My intention tonight was to see for myself where my good and faithful wife went from there.
Sure enough, Rhea, you soon appeared. Having placed my car in the shadows of the maples to permit me to watch the mouth of the alleyway, I saw you hurry out. You turned to another car that was waiting there in the side street, a long convertible, gleaming new. I saw its door opened for you from inside. I watched you disappearing into it — and for moments of miserable suffering, I pictured you in the arms of the man you had met.
Finally the convertible lights gleamed on, its motor purred and it breezed into the boulevard.
You must not have noticed my car following you, or if you did you thought nothing of it. Many cars cruised that way, to the end of the boulevard, then along Rendezvous Road. I trailed you all the way, Rhea, until the shiny convertible pulled into a special parking space outside the Clover Club.
Yes, the Clover Club, that notorious road house. I saw you leave the car with the man who had met you — the man with whom you must have come to this noxious place night after night. I recognized his handsome face, Rhea — with a blinding flash of realization.
Bruce Dallas. The same man you had loved so eagerly and so evilly years ago. Now you had gone eagerly and evilly back to him. Abandoning all the sweetest things of your life, you had gone back.
How did it come about, Rhea? Where and when did your meeting with Bruce Dallas occur? Even now I don’t know the details, my sweet. But my own feeling is that he happened to see you again somewhere — to see how sweet and good you were, and how amazingly like the young girl you had been — and then he sought you out.
From the darkness I watched you going into this garish resort which Bruce Dallas himself operated. I saw you both appear at a window upstairs, in one of those private dining rooms. I saw a drink in your hand and heard shrill laughter on your lips before the venetian blinds were closed, mercifully to shut the sight of you, up there with Dallas, from my stinging eyes.
Then I turned back, Rhea, laden with a great sickness of the heart, fired with a resolve that a just punishment must be meted out to you.
Before you sneaked back home again that same night, I did something, Rhea, which you may never have realized.
Thinking and planning in my silent, anguished resolve, I closely inspected the head of the stairway. Darlene was asleep in her room then, also unaware of what I was about. As you have excellent reason to know, Rhea, those stairs are very steep — I was always careful to caution you about going down them.
The post on the one side of the landing, and the molding on the wall on the opposite side, were ornately carved. I saw how it would be possible to brace a rod of some sort firmly across the top of the steps, a few inches above the edge of the landing, so that anyone moving onto the stairs would surely trip over it.
I tried it then and there, Rhea, using a tool of a completely innocuous sort. Bringing an umbrella up from the stand in the vestibule directly below, I found it was of exactly the right length to be placed in position. A slight bit of forcing kept it firmly in place. Black, it would be completely invisible in the dark.
I replaced the umbrella in its vase, undressed, got into bed and actually dozed off without waiting to hear you sneak back in. Because now my plan was complete. I could be confident that guilt would be punished. Tomorrow night I would set the trap of a just vengeance...
I recall so clearly, Rhea, the night you died.
That evening, the normal course of incidents went along as it had on many other evenings. You didn’t imagine I had learned of your deceit, and much less could you dream I had definitely arranged that you would pay for it within a few hours. Nor did you realize, Rhea, that you would never see Bruce Dallas again — that you had already held your last mortal rendezvous with him.
At her usual time, Darlene went upstairs. I heard her close her door — that door which could be counted on to stick shut for a few minutes when she tried to open it again. Soon I heard her bed bounce and knew she would be sound asleep within minutes.
These were your last living hours, Rhea.
You were reading a women’s magazine, remember? — and waiting with secret impatience for me to go to bed.
I finished reading the paper, quite deliberately prolonging it a little. Finally I rose and said, “I’m turning in now, honey. Pretty sleepy. Good night.”
You may have thought it a little strange that I placed my good-night kiss on your forehead this time, not on your lips. I could not bear to think of kissing the once-sweet lips which Bruce Dallas had defiled.
You said, “I’m tired, too, Johnny. Be up in a minute.”
I climbed the stairs, entered my room, closed the hallway door, got ready for bed and lay down. All this was entirely routine, except that tonight I had no intention of sleeping. I waited until you came up to your room and went through the same process. Then, once you were settled down for a brief doze, I rose in silence.
I went down to the vestibule to get the umbrella, brought it up and wedged it across the edge of the landing, in just the right position, as I had tested it last night. Then I went back to bed and waited.
Waiting, scarcely breathing, I soon heard your furtive sounds. First a motion of your bed as you got up. Then a stealthy squeak from the cork of your hidden bottle. Then a few more moments while you got back into a dress. Next you were almost soundlessly leaving your room.
Then your scream, Rhea!
Next the thumping fall of your body to the very base of the stairs.
I saw a light come on in a bedroom window of the house next door. Your scream had been loud enough to waken our nearest neighbors. Seeing Marie Frazier putting her head out the window beside her bed to stare across, I made the clever move of turning on my bedroom light also and going directly to my own window to speak to her.
“What was that, Marie?” I asked quickly. “Something wrong over there?”
“It was a frightful scream, John,” she said. “But it didn’t come from here. It came from your own house. I thought it must be Rhea’s voice.”
“But it can’t be Rhea,” I answered. “She’s sound asleep.”
Through the windows Marie Frazier watched me hurrying first into your room, Rhea, then into the hall. Darlene had also been awakened by your shriek but she hadn’t yet appeared from her room. As I had expected it to do, her door was sticking shut.
I hastened to the head of the stairs, dislodged the umbrella, ran down, then snapped on the lights.
You were lying huddled on the floor on your back, your head oddly twisted over one shoulder. Your eyes were staring up into mine. You were not yet dead then, Rhea. Your neck was broken and you were paralyzed. The terrified light in your eyes seemed to show you knew what I had done — and why. I lifted you a little in my arms. At that moment Darlene succeeded in yanking open the door of her bedroom.