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.
Edgerson, silent for a moment, said, “Would it be all right with you, Angel, if I did a little detecting myself for a change? After all, I’m president of Trouble, Inc.”
“You’re not a very ambitious president.”
“I might surprise you.” He turned the car onto a main street. “The McCullen Warehouse is on Canal Street, isn’t it?”
“Yes. Why?”
“We’re going there. Between your nutty curiosity and my interest in any guy who smokes black cigs like Dubitsky did...I’ll never believe that guy’s really dead.”
It was a huge red-brick building growing out of the damp, sticky smells of the waterfront. Smith went in alone and was gone a half-hour. Returning, he had a triumphant smirk on his angular face.
“They didn’t move out of town,” he said. “Their furniture is in storage, most of it. A studio couch, two easy chairs, a table and a large double bed — not twin beds, Angel — were trucked over to this address as soon as the van reached the warehouse.” He passed her a slip of paper.
She peered at it. “Gayland Avenue. That’s an apartment house district. Very snooty.”
“You know,” Smith said, putting the car in gear, “this is beginning to show signs of promise. Maybe your lovelorn wife was in trouble.”
Gayland Street was in a district of fancy dress shops, delicatessens and Pomeranians, and the figure on the slip of paper was the number of an imposing structure housing a nest of apartments. This time Angel refused to sit in the car while he investigated. She went with him up the gleaming steps into the hallway with its glittering brass mail-boxes, and she looked with him at the long list of names beside the long row of bells.
Bell number 17 had no name beside it, but Smith pushed it anyway. The studio couch, chairs, table and bed had been delivered to suite 17.
He pushed again and frowned. “They don’t answer.”
“I’ve been wondering something,” Angel said.
“Yes? What?”
“If you were a young man fresh out of a job, Philip, would you feel able to afford an apartment in this neighborhood?”
Smith shrugged. “If we wondered at all the queer things people do, we’d wind up in a chuckle college.”
“I’m serious, Philip.”
“So am I. They don’t answer.”
Angel looked annoyed. She walked up two white steps and tried the door and it was locked. She said, “Damn!” and stood there glaring at it. All at once her eyes widened; she turned quickly, beckoned with an outstretched hand and said, “C’m’ere, quick!”
At her side, Smith peered through the thick clear glass of the door and saw a man backing out of an apartment at the end of the hall. A suitcase lay beside the open door and the man was lugging out another. He closed the door and picked up both pieces of luggage and plodded down the corridor with them, staggering a little because they were heavy and he was a small, thin-legged, bald little lad without much strength.
Plouffe, by gosh! Plouffe, of all private dicks.
The little dick kept his head down until he reached the door, and by that time Smith had faded back on one side, Angel on the other. Plouffe put down his burdens, opened the door, held it open with a foot and picked up the suitcases. He squirmed out and the door clicked shut behind him. Then he saw Smith.
He dropped the suitcases again and said, “Well, my, my! Look who is here!”
Smith looked at the luggage. It was expensive but old. It was initialed.
“So you’re demoted to bellhop,” Smith said.
“Huh?”
“You make a very handsome bellhop, don’t you, Mr. Plouffe?” said Angel sweetly.
Nick Plouffe pulled a large moist handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his brow. He frowned, using his whole face, and said sourly: “At least I don’t have to give myself no fancy name like Trouble, Incorporated, to get business.”
“Of course you don’t,” Angel said.
“And I ain’t a bellhop, see?”
“Of course you’re not. You live here.”
“Me? Live here? Say, are you nuts?”
“We’re looking,” Angel declared solemnly, “for my aunt Agatha. Apartment eighteen. We have a key to Aunt Agatha’s apartment — she’s in Bermuda, you know — but no key to the door you’re leaning against. Could you let us in, maybe?”
Nick Plouffe blinked, registering suspicion. It was hard for him to register suspicion, or anything else, because his moist little face was small and V-shaped and not very elastic. He did his best, though, and then grumbled: “Well, all right.”
He fumbled for a key and unlocked the door.
“Thank you so much,” Angel cooed. “Come, John.”
She and John Smith paced down the hall without a backward glance at the suspicious Plouffe, and Smith said dryly, “There, my dear, is a scraping from the lowest stratum of the private detecting profession. Dumb but dangerous. A mouse, but a mean mouse. I met up with him on another case and caught him pretending to be a G-man. He asked me to promise not to tell on him. Did you note the initials on the two suitcases?”
“I did. M.A.B. and T.L.B.”
“The Burdicks.”
“Or a monstrous coincidence, because Plouffe came out of this apartment,” Angel declared, stopping beside a door, “and it happens to be suite 17.”
Smith glanced back, then, to make certain Plouffe had departed. Satisfied, he knocked. After a moment’s wait he knocked again.
“They don’t answer.”
“Perhaps we should tail Mr. Plouffe,” Angel suggested. “Or is it too late?”
Smith leaned against the door of apartment 17 and scowled at her. Scowled fiercely, because he knew from past experience that Miss Angelina Copeland — she had once been his secretary and had since become both the bane and the beacon of his existence — would talk him out of it unless he were savagely stubborn. “It’s too late,” he said firmly, “for absolutely everything except that drive into the country, that swim, and—”
“But tomorrow we start in again. Promise?”
“No!”
She rolled her eyes at the ceiling and tapped a toe on the tile floor. “No promise, no ride. It’s for your own good, darling. If I didn’t keep jabbing you, you’d turn into a Christmas card, and that would be such a waste of talent.”
She took his arm. Smith sighed and went with her, muttering under his breath.
Miss Miggsby, who wore large rimless glasses, placed a sheaf of papers on Edgerson’s desk and said, beaming: “We think, Mr. Edgerson, that these are simply delightful!”
Miss Miggsby had been Edgerson’s private secretary since the departure of Angel. She possessed some of Angel’s brains, none of Angel’s disturbing physical attraction, and was very, very easy on the nerves.
Edgerson gravely accepted the papers, glanced at them. The door of his private sanctum opened at that moment and he looked up. Looked up and groaned. He could tell by the grim little smile on Angelina’s lips that something had happened.
Miss Miggsby fled. Angel, radiant in something ultra modern and startlingly yellow, came around the desk and looked over Edgerson’s shoulder.
“Christmas?” she asked innocently. “Or just happy birthday to my ex-wife?”
He made sure that the door between Miss Miggsby’s office and his own was closed before he answered. Then he said firmly, “Whatever you’ve found out, it’s no go. I’m busy. I got in this morning with a prize hangover, thanks to your mania for daiquiris last night, and found enough work piled on my desk to keep three men busy for a week.”