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.
“If you want my opinion,” Plouffe ventured timidly, “I’d say—”
“Quiet,” snapped Angel. “He’s thinking.”
“Oh.”
Smith seized the phone, dialed a number. Angel relaxed. “McKenna?” she asked softly. He nodded, waiting for the connection.
“I still think,” Plouffe insisted, “that—”
“Quiet.”
Smith registered impatience while waiting. He looked worried. Finally he slapped the phone down and stood up. “They don’t answer,” he said curtly. “Let’s go.”
“Out there?” Angel asked.
“Yes! Don’t you see through it? McKenna’s car — first one man, then two — and a deliberate ticket? It’s plain as day!”
“Not to me it isn’t,” Plouffe complained.
Smith favored him with a scornful glance and went past him, grabbing at Angel’s hand as he jerked open the door. Plouffe followed, not knowing what else to do.
“If you’re thinking what I’m thinking you’re thinking,” Angel said on the way down the corridor, “I’ll bet my year’s pay that you’re wrong. It’s just your evil mind at work.”
“You mean it’s yours,” Smith retorted. “Mine’s way ahead of you. Come on, you two.”
McKenna’s house was a twenty-room affair with an acre of manicured lawn cut by a driveway and a colored fountain out front. Alvin McKenna, forty-nine, was a widower worth plenty.
The house was in darkness. The car crunched up the drive and stopped, and Smith jumped out. Before ringing the bell he tried the front door. It was locked. After ringing the bell he waited only a moment, then broad-jumped a flower-bed and hurried around the side. Every window he tried was locked.
He paused, baffled, and Angel caught up with him. “Sometimes,” she said pleasantly, “you surprise me, Philip. So athletic!”
He ignored her. To Plouffe he snapped: “How do we get in here?”
“You want to get arrested?” Plouffe gasped.
“I want to get in!”
“Well, it could be done easy enough, but—”
“Do it!”
Plouffe looked around, shaking his head, and then sidled to a window. It wasn’t easy but in a few minutes with a penknife he managed it. With a boost he was over the sill.
“I still don’t like this,” he complained.
Ignoring him, Smith leaned out and gave a hand to Angel. She climbed. Half-way over the sill she said, “Oh!” and when inside she looked down at her legs and said: “I’ll send you a bill for that. My best stockings!” Then she said soberly: “What do you expect to find here, Mr. Smith?”
“I don’t know. I’m just full of premonitions.” He produced a flash-light, drilling the darkness with a thin sliver of illumination. “I hope,” he said grimly, pacing forward, “I’m at least half wrong.”
It was a bedroom. With Plouffe and Angel trailing, he went down a long hall to the front of the house, through two huge living-rooms, along another hall to a library. The house was a tomb.
Its owner was in the library.
Smith’s light missed him at first. It played over the walls, yellowing rows of books, a small wall safe, a few large portraits. There was no need to illuminate the floor until he began to pace forward. Then he almost stepped on the thing because it lay just a few feet from the threshold.
He looked down, holding the light on McKenna’s face, and behind him Plouffe said explosively: “Hey!” Angel put a trembling hand on Smith’s arm and was silent. McKenna gazed at the ceiling.
He was a big man, wearing an expensive blue dressing gown over white flannel trousers and a white sport shirt. The white sport shirt was now a Jap flag, with its red moon of blood.
Smith stared a moment, then bent over him. “Shot,” he said softly. Then he straightened and focused the light on the wall to his left.
The tiny beam came to rest on the wall safe. Smith strode forward, looked at the safe, looked down at McKenna again.
“Have you a finger-print outfit at your office, Plouffe?”
Plouffe nodded solemnly.
“Take the car and go get it,” Smith directed. “Come back as fast as you can and don’t say a word about this to anyone.”
“But the cops oughta know about it! We’ll get in trouble!”
“They’ll know in due time. You do as I say.” Smith glared at him and he went out wagging his head, mumbling protests. Smith and Angel heard him fumbling along the hall in the dark.
“Who did it, Philip?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you know something, or you wouldn’t have come here.”
“I think I know who’ll be blamed for doing it. That’s all.”
“Who?”
“Burdick.”
She stood there in the dark, scowling at him. “But why?”
“It wasn’t McKenna who visited the Lester Hotel tonight,” Smith declared softly. “It could have been, of course, but it probably wasn’t. That’s where you had me wrong when you tried to read my mind, Angel. This isn’t any tencent clandestine love affair. Can’t be. Too many angles.”
“You think someone borrowed McKenna’s car?”
“And deliberately got a ticket.”
“Why?”
“Look. Burdick is missing. His wife goes to Plouffe for assistance. Guided by Plouffe, she takes a room at the Lester. Meanwhile this other thing — whatever it is — is moving on relentlessly to some kind of climax. Part of that climax is the planned murder of McKenna here. And McKenna’s murderers are clever, clever enough to plan the alibi before the crime. They swipe McKenna’s car, take it to the Lester, leave it parked where it’s bound to catch a ticket. No one can deny now that McKenna’s car was parked in front of Mrs. Burdick’s hotel; the proof is down in black and white. You see? McKenna visits Mrs. Burdick at hotel with a bad reputation. McKenna is found dead. Angry young husband is arrested for murder.”
“You’re guessing.”
“It’s the best I can do. We’ll know more when Plouffe gets back.”
She was silent a moment, and the silence of the big house crept in to take possession. Then she said, “Why the finger-print outfit, Philip?”
“Why is McKenna dead?” he countered.
“You mean the safe?”
“It’s possible.”
“A man as brainy as McKenna wouldn’t keep any big amount of money in a house like this.”
“Maybe not, Angel. But money isn’t the only thing worth stealing. You’re forgetting that McKenna was vice president of a chemical company.”
Angel voiced a little snort. “You’ll be telling me next that you’re a G-man, tracking down scurrilous agents of a mysterious foreign power!”
“I’m not, really. I’m waiting for a street car.”
Very shortly Plouffe returned, with a small black case wedged under his arm and a flash-light gripped in his left hand.
“You have any trouble?” Smith asked.
“Me? Oh, no.”
“Get to work then. What I want to know is this: Has anyone recently opened that safe, and if so, who.”
Plouffe opened his finger-print case and timidly stepped up to the safe. While he worked, Smith held the light for him, cupping it carefully to keep the glow from striking the room’s only window.
Plouffe was good at this sort of thing. In a few moments he said definitely: “It’s been opened all right. There’s fresh oil from the hinges smeared down the side. Not long ago, either.”
“I thought so.”
“You see, Plouffe,” Angel said sweetly, “Mr. Smith is really very smart. He sees all, knows all, tells nothing.”
“This here,” Plouffe declared, ignoring her and handing Smith a thin sheet of celluloid, “is a pretty fair thumbprint.”