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.
As soon as she was outside the house, I went into my own plan. Down the stairs and out the front door, I ran along the tree-shaded sidewalk toward the next corner.
I saw Darlene, halfway down the cross-street, hurrying out of the alley way. She ran to a car waiting nearby. A long convertible, Rhea — the same flashy car that had waited for you!
I went back into the house almost blindly — resolved that the evil of you, Rhea, as it was living again in the body of Darlene, must be destroyed once and for all.
I would have it exactly as before. The normal course of incidents would go along this evening just as it had on previous evenings. Darlene and I would be in the living room, reading. I would finally rise and say, “Pretty sleepy. Good night now. Better get some rest yourself.”
Then I would go into my room.
Presently Darlene would come up to her room. She would lie down and doze. Making no noise at all, I would then silently go down to the vestibule for the umbrella. I would bring it up, wedge it in place just above the edge of the landing; then go noiselessly back to my bed.
I would wait to hear Darlene getting up. She would first sneak a drink, slip into a dress, then pad out in her stocking feet. I would follow the slight sound of her every step to the trap at the head of those steep stairs. Then—
At my first move, however, a small deviation occurred. When I finished reading the evening paper in the living room and said, “Well, I’m going up now, Darlene,” she did not respond as I had expected.
Instead she said, “I feel sort of jittery for some reason, Johnny. I think I’ll take a little walk, just down to the corner store and back.”
I asked with concealed grimness, “Want me to come along?”
“Oh, no,” she said quickly.
“All right, but hurry back, Darlene.”
I told myself that the slight delay she was causing would not matter at all. I went up to my room to wait.
I lay in bed, fully dressed, waiting. It seemed to me that Darlene was taking too long a walk, and then, after I heard her coming back into the house, I felt she was remaining downstairs unusually long. But finally there were noises on the stairs. And presently an early-morning quiet pervaded the whole house.
I rose, making no sound, and went down the stairs. Coming back with the umbrella, I braced it firmly in the same place that had proved so effective with you, Rhea. Then I returned to my bed to wait for a just wrath to destroy the guilty.
Soon I heard furtive sounds in the hall. They rustled along the hallway to the top of the stairs.
Suddenly there was the thump of a foot catching under the barrier and a sharp, long scream from Darlene.
Next the thudding fall of a body to the very base of the stairs — followed by a terrible silence.
I sprang up from my bed. Again I saw lights appear in the bedroom windows of the house next door. Just as your scream had done, Rhea, Darlene’s had wakened the Fraziers. This time I did not wait to speak to Marie. She had apparently seen me aroused from a sound sleep by the shriek, so now I let her watch me hurrying from my room in high alarm.
At the top of the stairs, seeing nothing else so far in the dark, I snatched the umbrella from its place. I ran down the flight hearing groans of mortal pain below. In the vestibule I put the umbrella in the stand with one hand and reached to the wall-switch with the other. The light brought a revelation that struck paralysis into my every fiber.
The victim of my trap lay huddled, helpless and bleeding at the base of the stairs.
But it was not Darlene, Rhea. It was Bruce Dallas.
What followed, Rhea, stays with me like a series of flashes from a nightmare.
Suddenly I found myself beating at Dallas with my fists, in a wild desire to destroy the last flicker of life in him. He lay limp and lifeless as I hit him, able neither to strike back or to feel the power of my blows. Then I looked up and saw Detective Jennings hurrying in the front door.
Darlene?
She was standing on the stair landing above, dressed as I had last seen her, held still by horror, both her hands pressed over her lips to stifle her cries.
In a moment of unfeeling selflessness, even of wonder, I watched her as she came slowly down the stairs. She moved past the dead body of Bruce Dallas — she seemed not to give me a glance — into the living room, gazing at the shining silver urn on the mantel, and her lips spoke.
I thought I heard her speaking to you, Rhea. She said, “Now both of them are paid, Mother, for what they did to you.”
They didn’t bring out the real truth at my trial, Rhea. They tried to prove that I had furiously quarreled with Bruce Dallas, and had deliberately thrown him down the stairs because I had caught him upstairs with Darlene.
Darlene testified — falsely, for your sake — that she’d known Dallas for some time, but hadn’t told me about it — that it was she who had been seen dancing with him at the Clover Club, and not you. She said that Dallas had had a flat tire down the street a ways that night and had come in and gone upstairs merely to wash his hands. That was when I had found him, had misunderstood and had flown into a rage.
We know better than this, Rhea, much better. I doubt that they could have convicted me on this story if Jennings, having suspiciously kept an eye on Dallas, hadn’t been waiting outside the house for Dallas to come out again. And then, hearing the scream—
Darlene?
I hadn’t dreamed how much Darlene had observed and planned. A deep one, that girl, Rhea, one needing to be watched. When she came here to the death house to visit me I accused her.
“You knew all along what had really happened to Rhea. Did you notice the umbrella was slightly bent? Did you find that the tip of it had left a scratch in the woodwork at the top of the stairs?”
She just gazed at me, Rhea, not smiling, not speaking. She was not so much like you anymore. She had stopped using your cosmetics and your perfume; her hair had returned to its own natural tint and her new clothes were her own.
No, she was not like Rhea at all now. And I could feel her thinking again as she sat there in silence gazing at me through the thick wire screen, Now both of them are paid back, Mother, for what they did to you.
She went away then, Rhea, and she has not come back since. I am sitting alone here in my cell, waiting for the sentence of death to be executed upon me within an hour, and I have stopped wondering whether Darlene will return to visit me for one last time. In my heart I know she will not come. I’m sure instead that tonight she is at home, alone there — except that she is with you.
Odds on Death
Don M. Mankiewicz
Don M(artin) Mankiewicz (1922–) was born in Berlin, Germany, and moved to Los Angeles as a child. He attended Columbia University, studying law, but went into the army and did not graduate. When the first short story he wrote (in an hour, he claims) sold to The New Yorker, he decided to write full-time. Although he wrote numerous short stories and nonfiction for magazines, and three novels, all crime stories, he is best-known as a successful motion picture writer and, to a greater degree, television writer. See How They Run (1951) was his first novel. His second, Trial (1955), was filmed by MGM with Mankiewicz’s screenplay; it starred Glenn Ford and Dorothy McGuire. His final novel was It Only Hurts a Minute (1966). Among his screenwriting credits are I Want to Live! (1958), for which he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, House of Numbers (1957), based on a Jack Finney novel, The Black Bird (1975), Sanctuary of Fear (1979), The Bait (1973), based on a Dorothy Uhnak novel, and The Badge or the Cross (1970). Among the television series he created are Ironside, Marcus Welby, M.D., Sarge, One Step Beyond, Lanigan’s Rabbi (based on the Harry Kemelman novels), and Rosetti and Ryan; he wrote numerous episodes for those and other programs, including Hart to Hart, McMillan & Wife, MacGyver, Star Trek, and Golden Age stalwarts such as Studio One, Playhouse 90, Lux Video Theatre, and Schlitz Playhouse of Stars.