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.
Plouffe mopped his face. “She has a husband, see? And he stays out late at night, and sometimes he doesn’t come home at all. She says to me, he is keeping bad company and will I look into it? So help me that’s the whole story.”
“The bell-hopping was just your own idea, eh?” Smith said.
“Huh?”
“If that’s all there is to it, Plouffe, why’d you move her from a swank apartment house to a frowsy dump of a hotel?”
“She... she couldn’t pay the rent them vultures was asking.”
“Maggots, Plouffe, are apt to make you hellishly sick.”
“Well,” Plouffe muttered, avoiding Smith’s steady gaze, “I had to get some dough out of this business somehow, didn’t I?”
“Meaning what?”
“She pays me to tail her husband. There wouldn’t be no dough in that even if I could locate the husband, which I can’t. So I have to tell the dame something, don’t I? Would you want me to let her down and have her get a wrong idea about the private detective business?”
“The light begins to dawn,” Angel murmured.
Plouffe looked at her gratefully and forced a grin. “Sure. She wanted service, so I gave it to her. There wasn’t no harm in that, was there? All I told her, I checked up on her husband and found out he was mixed up with some tough mobsters, and things looked pretty bad, and her own life could easily be in danger unless she put herself in my care for a few days until I got things straightened out.”
“And she believed you?” Smith asked.
“Sure she believed me.”
“And to make it more realistic, you moved her out of the apartment and obtained a room for her at the Lester.”
“Yeah. Hell, if these dumb dames want adventure, Nick Plouffe sells it to ’em. Why not?”
Smith stood up. “I’m hiring you, Plouffe.”
The gray little eyes grew to twice their normal size. “Huh?”
“You say you tried to locate Burdick and failed. Is that right?”
“Sure I tried.”
“Hard?”
“I done all I could,” Plouffe insisted. “I checked every lead the dame gave me.”
“And you couldn’t find him. Very well, Plouffe, he’s missing. Something has happened to him. And if we’re not careful, something may happen to the girl. Therefore, I’m hiring you to keep an eye on her.”
“Listen,” Plouffe said. “This don’t make sense.”
“It might, later. You’re to watch the girl and keep in touch with me, report to me every move she makes. I’d do it myself, Plouffe, but I’m going to be busy. Very busy. So is Miss Copeland. And our staff at Trouble, Inc., is limited.”
“Say, what’s back of all this?”
“A certain crack someone once made,” Angel replied quickly, flashing a smile, “about twin beds.”
“Huh?”
“You wouldn’t understand, Plouffe. Don’t worry about it. Someday Mr. Smith is going to write a treatise on it. Then you’ll know.”
Smith turned to open the door. “You can get in touch with me, Plouffe, at Trouble, Inc. If I’m not there, Miss Copeland will be. And I’ll expect your first report about an hour from now.”
Outside, Angel said sweetly: “What I like about you, Mr. Smith, is your uncanny faculty for persuading people to work for you — for nothing. Including,” she added, taking his arm, “me.”
Smith was busy the next day. Visiting the university, he spent two hours investigating the history of Professor Benedetto Dubitsky and another hour on the records of Mrs. Burdick’s Teddy. To his work as president of Trouble, Inc., he applied the same tenacity which had made him president of a prosperous greeting card concern.
He then visited the Glickman Company’s huge chemical plant and learned that Mr. Theodore Burdick, formerly employed there, had been hired in the first place because of flattering recommendations tendered by the university.
It dovetailed nicely. Just what it meant, Smith was not sure.
With Angel, in the tiny office of Trouble, Inc., he had a dinner which consisted of cold lobster and ginger ale, purchased at a delicatessen.
Angel was dressed, Smith thought, more like a devil. She had on a handsome evening dress that gleamed under a brilliant red opera cape. Its tiny hood was made to be drawn over her sleek hair.
“Why the fancy set up?” he asked.
“I thought you were going to buy me a dinner and dance. Instead I get this and a ride, I guess.”
About that time Nick Plouffe, who had been calling every hour to make his report, phoned in again.
Nick Plouffe was excited. “Only two minutes ago,” he wailed, “she give me the slip! I was watchin’ the Lester, see? Like I been doin’ right along. I’m standin’ there earnin’ the salary you don’t promise me, and all of a sudden she comes out with a couple of guys, and they get into a car.
“This car is parked in front of the Lester ever since around eight o’clock, and there’s a ticket on it. I myself see the cop put the ticket on it. So they get into it, Mrs. Burdick and these two guys, and I pile into a taxi and tail them. And I lose them. On account of the taxi driver is dumb as all get-out, I lose them. Up around Mitchell Street and the Avenue is where I last see them.”
“You get the number of that car?” Smith snapped.
“Yeah, sure. C-3145.”
“Where are you now?”
“In a drug store on Mitchell.”
“Get into your cab,” Smith ordered, “and come over here as fast as you can. You may be needed.” He cradled the phone and gazed solemnly at Angel. “C-3145, Angel. Think you can find out to whom that car is registered?”
“I can try.”
She called her newspaper and four minutes later reported: “The car belongs to Alvin McKenna, 92 Follett Street, vice president of the Glickman Company. Something?”
Smith, at his desk, wrote the name and address on a pad and stared at them, clicking the pencil along his teeth as a small boy would rattle a stick along a picket fence.
“McKenna — the Glickman Company — a ticket for parking,” he mused. “And two men. Not one man, Angel, but two. Dammit, what’s keeping Plouffe?”
There was a knock at the door. Angel opened it and Plouffe entered, out of breath.
“I got here quick like you told me, Mr. Smith.”
“Now let’s have it all, Plouffe. Slowly. Begin with the car. Did you see it pull up?”
“Sure I seen it.”
“Two men in it?”
“Now that’s funny,” Plouffe said. “When the car drove up there was only one guy in it. I was standin’ right there and I couldn’t’ve made no mistake. The guy parks the car in a one-hour space and goes into the Lester.”
“What kind of a car?”
“A Packard coupé.”
“A man as wealthy as McKenna,” Angel declared, “would have more than one car, Mr. Smith.”
“I realize that. Now, Plouffe, how long was that car there?”
“More’n two hours.”
“And when the two men came out, with Mrs. Burdick, there was a ticket on it?”
“That’s right.”
“One of those men was the driver?”
“Yep. One was the guy who parked it there.”
“Did you get a good look at Mrs. Burdick? Did she look scared?”
“Without bein’ no authority on women’s looks, I would say she did. Definitely I would say she was at least uneasy.”
Smith stared into space and drew meaningless circles and triangles on a desk calendar. The Smith brain was hard at work; you could tell by the roadmap of wrinkles that spread away from his eye-corners. He reached suddenly for the phone book, ran a finger down the long line of McKennas and impulsively snatched up the phone. Then slowly replaced it, shaking his head.