The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps
- Автор: Anderson Lars, Barr Randolph
- Год: 2007
- Язык: английский
- Год: Vintage Books
- ISBN: 978-0-307-28048-0
- Жанр: Криминальные детективы
Электронная книга - «The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps». Краткое содержание книги:
Weighing in at over a thousand pages, containing over forty-seven stories and two novels, this book is big baby, bigger and more powerful than a freight train — a bullet couldn’t pass through it. Here are the best stories and every major writer who ever appeared in celebrated Pulps like Black Mask, Dime Detective, Detective Fiction Weekly, and more. These are the classic tales that created the genre and gave birth to hard-hitting detectives who smoke criminals like packs of cigarettes; sultry dames whose looks are as lethal as a dagger to the chest; and gin-soaked hideouts where conversations are just preludes to murder. This is crime fiction at its gritty best.
But he didn’t have an ear for music; the siren song had got to him like Ulysses. And once they hear that... “Get away from the door,” he said, way down low. “I never raised a hand to you in my life, I don’t want to now.”
The last I saw of him he was passing the back of his hand slowly up and down his side, like he was ashamed of it; the valise was in the other one. I picked myself up from the opposite side of the foyer where he’d sent me, the place all buckling around me like seen through a sheet of water. I called out after him through the open door: “Don’t go, Chick! You’re heading straight for the eight-ball! Don’t go to her, Chick!” The acoustics were swell. Every door in the hall opened to get an earful.
He just stood there a split-second without looking back at me, yellow light gushing out at him through the port-hole of the elevator.
He straightened his hat, which my chin against his duke had dislodged — and no more Chick.
At about four that morning I was still snivelling into the gin he’d left behind him, and talking to him across the table from me — without getting any answer — when the door-bell rang. I thought it was him for a minute, but it was two other guys. They didn’t ask if they could come in, they just went ’way around to the other side of me and then showed me a couple of tin-heeled palms. So I did the coming-in — after them; I lived there, after all.
They looked the place over like they were prospective tenants being shown an apartment. I didn’t go for that; detectives belong in the books you read in bed, not in your apartment at four bells, big as life. “Three closets,” I mentioned, “and you get a month’s concession. I’m not keeping you gentlemen up, am I?”
One of them was kind of pash looking; I mean he’d washed his face lately, and if he’d been the last man in the world, well, all right, maybe I could have overlooked the fact he was a bloodhound on two legs. The other one had a face like one of those cobblestones they dug up off Eighth Avenue when they removed the trolley tracks.
“You’re Jerry Wheeler, aren’t you?” the first one told me.
“I’ve known that for twenty-seven years,” I said. “What brought the subject up?”
Cobblestone-face said, “Chick Wheeler’s sister, that right?”
“I’ve got a brother and I call him Chick,” I consented. “Any ordinance against that?”
The younger one said, “Don’t be so hard to handle. You’re going to talk to us and like it.” He sat down in a chair, cushioned his hands behind his dome. He said, “What time’d he leave here this evening?”
Something warned me, “don’t answer that.” I said, “I really couldn’t say. I’m not a train-despatcher.”
“He was going to Chicago with a dame named Ruby Rose Reading; you knew that, didn’t you?”
I thought, “I hit the nail on the head, he did help himself to his firm’s money. Wonder how much he took? Well, I guess I’ll have to go back to work again at one of the hotspots; maybe I can square it for him, pay back a little each week.” I kept my face steady. I said, “Now, why would he go anywhere with anyone with a name like that? It sounds like it came off a bottle of nail-polish. Come to the point, gentlemen. What’s he supposed to have done?”
“There’s no supposition about what he’s done. He went to the Alcazar Arms at eight-fifteen tonight and throttled Ruby Rose Reading to death, Angel Face.”
And that was the first time I heard myself called that. I also heard the good-looking one remonstrate: “Aw, don’t give it to her that sudden, Coley, she’s a girl after all,” but it came from ’way far away. I was down around their feet somewhere sniffling into the carpet.
The good-looking one picked me up and straightened me out in a chair. Cobblestone said, “Don’t let her fool you, Burnsie, they all pull that collapsible concertina act when they wanna get out of answering questions.” He went into the bedroom and I could hear him pulling out bureau drawers and rummaging around.
I got up on one elbow. I said, “Burns, he didn’t do it! Please, he didn’t do it! All right, I did know about her. He was sold on her. That’s why he couldn’t have done it. Don’t you see, you don’t kill the thing you love?”
He just kind of looked at me. “You go to bat for the thing you love too,” he murmured. He said, “I’ve been on the squad eight years now. We never in all that time caught a guy as dead to rights as your brother. He showed up with his valise in the foyer of the Alcazar at exactly twelve minutes past eight tonight. He said to the doorman, “What time is it? Did Miss Reading send her baggage down yet? We’ve got to make a train.” Well, she had sent her baggage down and then she’d changed her mind, she’d had it all taken back upstairs again. There’s your motive right there. The doorman rang her apartment and said through the announcer, ‘Mr. Wheeler’s here.’ And she gave a dirty laugh and sang out, ‘I can hardly wait.’
“So at thirteen past eight she was still alive. He went up, and he’d no sooner got there than her apartment began to signal the doorman frantically. No one answered his hail over the announcer, so he chased up, and he found your brother crouched over her, shaking her, and she was dead. At fifteen minutes past eight o’clock. Is that a case or is that a case?”
I said, “How do you know somebody else wasn’t in that apartment and strangled her just before Chick showed up? It’s got to be that!”
He said, “What d’you suppose they’re paying that door-man seventy-five a month for? The only other caller she had that whole day was you yourself, at three that afternoon, five full hours before. And she’d only been dead fifteen to twenty minutes by the time the assistant medical examiner got to her.”
I said, “Does Chick say he did it?”
“When you’ve been in this business as long as I have, you’d have their heads examined if any of them ever admitted doing anything. Oh, no-o, of course he didn’t do it. He says he was crouched over her, shaking her, trying to restore her!”
I took a deep breath. I said, “Gimme a swallow of that gin. Thanks.” I put the tumbler down again. I looked him right in the eye. “All right, I did it! Now how d’ye like that? I begged him not to throw his life away on her. When he walked out anyway, I beat him up to her place in a taxi, got there first, gave her one last chance to lay off him. She wouldn’t take it. She was all soft and squashy and I just took a grip and pushed hard.”
“And the doorman?” he said with a smile.
“His back was turned. He was out at the curb seeing some people into a cab. When I left, I took the stairs down. When Chick signaled from her apartment and the doorman left his post, I just walked out. It was a pushover.”
His smile was a grin. “Well, if you killed her, you killed her.” He called in to the other room, “Hey, Coley, she says she killed her!” Coley came back, flapped his hand at me disgustedly, said, “Come on, let’s get out of here. There’s nothing doing around here.”
He opened the door, went out into the hall. I said, “Well, aren’t you going to take me with you? Aren’t you going to let him go and hold me instead?”