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.
Jules strode towards the door from which the three had come. The fat man who had been hurled to the street sat up and held his head in his hands. For five seconds he sat there, then reeled to his feet. His fat quivered with the speed of his flight. A boy bounded out of his way, staggering blindly towards Tremaine. Jules caught the boy with one arm and set him gently aside. He did not stop. His lips were pressed in a thin hard line, and a path opened before him among the thickening crowd. He entered the dark doorway.
Halfway to the second floor he was taking the steps two at a time. On the third floor he thrust through an open door and stopped and stood, his right hand gripping the end of the keyboard and holding in place the guitar on his back. The air was acrid with burned gunpowder. A single yellow light bulb dangled from the center of the ceiling by a twisted wire. It threw a glare on walls that had been scrubbed until they were streaked gray. Jules kept his eyes on them for a moment; then he looked down.
There were two bodies on the floor. One had crumpled near him, a knee drawn up towards its belly. That was Antonio. From under him a dark liquid pool spread. Angela lay over by a door beyond which the kitchen gleamed. She lay on her back, hurled close against the wall by the six-hundred-foot-pound impact of .45-calibre bullets. Her head was thrown back and her throat was a white sweet line and there was a blue hole between her wide, frightened eyes. Jules saw there were two pieces of confetti in her hair, one white and square, the other a pink star shape.
Jules’ right hand was on the keyboard of his guitar. There was a snap as a white ivory peg broke and he stooped slowly and picked it up and looked at it. The peg was smooth and cold in his fingers and it had broken off just under the head. In the street a brassy whistle skirled. Jules dropped the peg in his pocket and the right corner of his mouth twisted so that a single sharp incisor showed. Heavy feet pounded on the stairs and mounted swiftly. Jules shook his head sharply, glanced once around the room, then plunged through the door. He saw the policeman at the head of the stairs, and ran for the dark back hall.
“Halt!” the policeman shouted. “I’ll shoot!”
A pistol glinted in the dim light.
Jules moved slowly towards the policeman, his hands raised well above his head and the guitar bumping against his right side. His eyes were narrowed, watchful.
“I’m just a street singer,” he said. “I heard the shooting and came to see if Angela and Antonio were all right. They were friends of mine, and—”
“Shut up!” the cop ordered.
His heavy fingers clamped on Jules’ shoulder and whirled him about and he patted his hips and sides and under his arms.
“Threw your gun away, did you?” he said. “That won’t do you no good.”
Jules allowed himself to be shoved back into the room where Angela and Antonio lay.
“You louse!” the cop rasped. “You shot the girl, too!”
Lights blazed before Jules’ eyes and blackness followed.
Tremaine had only partly recovered his senses when he was roughed into the patrol wagon. The rush of air as it sped with a softly whining siren back to the station-house largely restored him, but he staggered as he was booted into the white square office of the captain. The breath of his captor was harsh and fingers vised on his shoulder.
Jules measured the captain under heavy lids. The man was fat and his white hair was pomaded into a smooth pompadour. He ran a hand over it.
“Well, well, what have we here?” he asked, and his voice was fat and oily.
“O’Reilly caught him running away after them two was bumped,” said the patrolman, his hand still on Jules’ shoulder. “He’d throwed his gun away.”
“Running away, eh?”
The captain was seated in a swivel-chair tilted back before his desk. He leaned forward and rubbed white, puffy hands up and down his thighs. Then his mouth opened in a little pink “O” of surprise; his small black eyes went flat.
“—!” he said. “It’s Jules Tremaine!”
The captain straightened, stumbled to his feet and slid a chair out from the wall.
“Sit down, Mr. Tremaine,” he said. “I’m sorry about this. O’Reilly didn’t know you.”
Jules heard the patrolman behind him gulp and the hand flinched away from his shoulder.
“Jeeze, Cap’n, did we pull a boner?” the man asked.
“Get out!” the captain yelled, and the door opened and closed quickly. The fat man in the dark blue suit looked at Tremaine and smoothed his pomaded hair and blinked.
“I’m sorry about this,” he said.
Jules continued to stand. He balanced his guitar carefully on the chair, eased off his black felt hat and fingered the back of his head. He winced and his lips pressed hard together.
“I think you said O’Reilly was the cop’s name?” he asked softly.
“He’s just a dumb flatfoot,” the captain spoke hurriedly. “He don’t know no better. I’ll take it out of him.”
“Don’t bother, Captain,” said Jules gently. “Don’t you bother at all.”
He placed his hat on the chair beside his guitar and looked about the office slowly.
“I want to wash up a bit,” he said.
The captain skipped his fat sides across the room, swung open a door with a flourish and revealed gleaming white tile. Jules doffed his coat and doused his face and head with cold water. The welt left by the cop’s gun on his scalp stung. Jules cursed softly as he stroked his black hair to smoothness with a thin comb from his pocket. He pointed his mustache, shrugged into his coat and strolled back into the office. He adjusted his hat jauntily and slung the guitar over his shoulder.
The captain regarded him with troubled eyes. He opened his mouth and closed it again like a goldfish drinking air. He said: “You didn’t see anything up there, did you, Mr. Tremaine?”
Jules revolved on his heel and looked up into the small black eyes. The captain shoved a puffy hand over his hair.
“I saw a boy and a girl had been murdered,” he said, biting off the words. “Then O’Reilly slammed me over the head with his gun.”
The captain frowned at his fingernails, though they were perfectly polished.
“You know how these young cops are,” he murmured.
“Yes, I know,” said Jules, and left.
A taxi weaved uptown with him and stopped at an address in the East Fifties where a dead-pan butler opened the door. Tremaine surrendered a gingerly removed hat but held on to the guitar, padding deliberately up the deep carpeted steps.
“That you, Jules?” a resonant voice boomed.
Jules retraced his way without answering, walked back through the dim, dusty-smelling hall and at its end entered a door to the right. The room was ten feet square and its walls were shelves of brown-backed law books. In its center was a desk, a reading lamp and a face that had the curious effect of floating disembodied in the air. Presently Jules could make out the spread shoulders of the man seated at the desk.
“Ah, it is you, Jules,” came the resonant, slightly mocking voice.
Jules’ face was expressionless as he studied the cadaverous countenance. A few strands of black hair had been oiled and laid carefully side by side across a bald dome-like forehead that lengthened the thin face extraordinarily.
“Who’s the captain at the Houston Street station?” Jules asked.
The mouth corners of the man’s face made creases like parentheses and strong white teeth showed momentarily.
“Going to use my influence at last?”
“No. The louse recognized me as a Tremaine. I was afraid I was beginning to look like you. My fears, I see, were groundless.”