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.
John Smith, president of Trouble, Inc., carefully folded the letter and passed it back. “Do you get many like that, Miss Kaye?”
She frowned at him. Her name was not Katherine Kaye any more than his was John Smith. Her name, when she was not opening letters from love-sick wives at her desk in the Star office, was Angelina Copeland. Angel to her friends.
“You think it’s a rib, Philip?”
“As phony, Angel, as some of the sentiments I’m guilty of perpetrating.”
“I don’t. I think it’s on the level. I’m going out there. After all, Philip, you’ve bored me to death for months about that fool professor who smoked black cigarettes and here we have a guy who—”
“You know the address?”
She took from her purse an envelope which matched the letter. “Spencer Street, 154. You could drive me out there,” she said. “Otherwise I’ll have to go by trolley.”
Edgerson heaved an elaborate sigh. It was a hot, sticky afternoon. From nine to twelve he had faithfully perspired through his duties as president of the Edgerson Greeting Card Company, watching the clock and looking forward to a long, cool drive into the country with Angel, a dip in some shady lake, dinner and dancing at some quiet roadhouse far from the city’s heat.
Now he was to be John Smith again. It was inevitable.
He disliked this silly Margaret Arnold Burdick intensely. He resented the fact that she had found it necessary to mention a large foreign person who incessantly smoked long black cigarettes. Because, after all, the thing was ridiculous. Dubitsky was dead. Dubitsky had been dead for at least four months. The Dubitsky whose strange death had intrigued him was gone forever. Margaret Burdick’s foreigner would turn out to be a wrestler or a man selling carpets. Or a myth.
“I’ll drive you,” he said sourly, “but you’ll regret it. Mark my words, Angel, you’ll regret it.”
At least half a dozen times since the birth of Trouble, Inc., Edgerson had been on the verge of closing the tiny office in the Mason Building and chucking the whole thing to the dogs. On each and every one of those occasions, Angelina had popped up with something “hot.” It was she, not he, who kept his hobby, Trouble, Inc., going. He half suspected that the Trouble idea had been hers in the first place anyway.
When they reached Spencer Street on the outskirts of town, and found the house, he was relentlessly gleeful. He pointed to the sign in the window and said: “You see? I told you so.”
The sign said, “For Rent.”
Angel frowned at it. The frown was most becoming to her beauty. Edgerson gently patted her shoulders. “We still have time for the ride into the country, the swim, the—”
“Apply at 27 Brook Street,” Angel said.
“What?”
“That’s what it says. ‘For rent. Apply 27 Brook.’ That’s the next street over, Philip.”
He said nothing, merely groaned and put the car in gear. Angel was silent, too, until he stopped the machine in front of a small brown cottage on Brook Street. “The trouble with you, Mr. Smith,” she said then, sweetly, “is that you give up too easily.”
He followed her up the walk, between beds of marigolds. She rang the bell. In a moment the door was opened by a plump female in a flowered apron.
“How do you do?” Angel said in her nicest Sunday voice. “I’m Mrs. Smith. This is my husband.”
The woman said, “How do you do?” wonderingly, and glanced at Edgerson and stared at Angel. Women usually stared at Angel. And envied her her slimness, her remarkable blond hair and her more than pretty face.
“We noticed a house over on Spencer Street, for rent,” Angel said.
“Oh, yes.”
“Is it occupied at present?”
“No.” The woman shook her head. “We had a nice young couple living there, but they’ve moved out.”
Edgerson, recovering from his shock at so casually being called “my husband,” smiled slyly. He was John Smith now, and John Smith was at times a pretty fair detective. Angel, fishing for information about the nice young couple on Spencer Street, was going to encounter difficulties. The plump lady in the flowered apron was obviously not a talker.
“We’ve looked so long for a house,” Angel said, “that I really don’t know what I want. You know how it is, I’m sure. You go from one place to another and simply get all worn out.”
The woman nodded sympathetically. There were chairs on the porch and she moved toward them. “Won’t you sit down, Mrs. Smith?”
“Thank you,” Angel breathed. “Thank you so much!”
“It’s really a very nice house,” the woman said. “My husband and I built it ourselves and lived in it four years. Then last year Mr. and Mrs. Burdick, the nice young couple I mentioned to you, moved in.”
Angel looked thoughtfully at the tips of her fingers. “They didn’t stay very long, did they?”
“No, they didn’t. It wasn’t because of the house, though. Mr. Burdick worked for the Glickman Company and lost his job. He had to go to another city to find work.”
“Oh,” Angel said. “That’s too bad. And they’d only been married a year?”
“Only a year.”
Angel widened her large brown eyes and looked soulfully at Edgerson. “You know, dear,” she said, sadly shaking her head, “when you hear of the misfortunes that beset other married people, it makes you realize how terribly fortunate we’ve been.” She turned the soulful eyes on the woman again. “Married only a year, and so in love with each other! I just know they were!”
“Well,” the woman said dubiously, “well, yes, I guess they were.”
“And are they coming back some day? To visit you?”
“Well, I don’t know. Theodore, that’s Mr. Burdick, said they were moving to some place near Boston. Margaret went last Wednesday to put things in order, and he went Saturday, with the furniture truck. They may come back, but of course I couldn’t hold the house for them. Now if you’d like to look at it, Mrs. Smith...”
But Angel was looking at her “husband” again. “You know, darling, perhaps Mrs. — er—”
She glanced helplessly at the woman who said, “My name is Crandall.”
“Perhaps Mrs. Crandall could recommend someone to move our furniture. Those last people we had were simply unbearable. I’ll just never forgive them for ruining our twin beds.”
Edgerson gulped.
“Could you recommend someone, Mrs. Crandall?” Angel cooed.
“Well, we like the Hartley people ourselves. If you’re just moving a short distance, that is. The Burdicks used the McCullen Warehouse people.”
“You saved her a lot of trouble,” Edgerson thought. “She was going to ask you that in a minute. Twin beds! Of all things, twin beds!”
Angel stood up. “Would you like to look at the house now, dear, or come back tomorrow? It’s quite late, and we did promise to meet the Burrs.”
“Tomorrow,” Edgerson said.
“Will that be all right with you, Mrs. Crandall?”
“Well, yes,” Mrs. Crandall agreed.
“Then we’ll see you tomorrow...Come, darling. I really think we’ve accomplished something!”
In the car, Edgerson drew a slow deep breath and said, “You little hellion!”
She grinned. “It worked, didn’t it?”
“It worked, but I’ve a mind to put you across those mythical twin beds and spank you.”
Gnomes and pixies would have danced to her laughter. But then she was suddenly sober.
“This thing sounds ugly to me, Philip.”
“Why?”
“First, that letter. I received it Wednesday, the day she left. She must have written and mailed it Tuesday. Then, more important, why the sudden departure? If she’d known that they were leaving the city, she wouldn’t have written the letter at all. I never answer letters personally. When people write to my lovelorn column they expect to see the replies in print.”