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.
“What am I offered for this?” he said almost apologetically. “Lovely little trinket box, give it to your best girl or your wife or your mother, to keep her ornaments in or old love letters.” He knocked the veneer with his knuckles, held it outward to show us the satin lining. Nothing in it, like in a vaudeville magician’s act. “Do I hear fifty cents, just to clear the stand?”
Most of them were getting up and going already. An over-dressed guy in my same row, across the aisle, spoke up. “You hear a buck.”
I took a look at him, and I took a look at the box. “If you want it, I want it, too,” I decided suddenly. “A guy splurged up like you don’t hand a plain wooden box like that to any woman that he knows.” I opened my mouth for the first time since I’d come in the place. “You hear a dollar and a quarter.”
“Dollar-fifty.”
“Two dollars.”
“Five.” The way he snapped it out, he meant business.
I’d never had such a strong hunch in my life before but now I wanted that box, had to have it, I felt it would do me some good. Maybe this overdressed monkey had given it to her, maybe Burns could trace where it had been bought...
“Seven-fifty.”
“Ten.”
“Twelve.”
The auctioneer was in seventh heaven. “You’re giving yourself away, brother, you’re giving yourself away!” I warned my competitor silently.
We leaned forward out of our seats and sized each other up. If he was giving himself away, I suppose I was too. I could see a sort of shrewd speculation in his snaky eyes, they screwed up into slits, seeming to say, “What’s your racket?” Something cold went down my back, hot as it was under all those mazdas.
“Twenty-five dollars,” he said inexorably.
I thought: “I’m going to get that thing if I spend every cent of the money Burns loaned me!”
“Thirty,” I said.
With that, to my surprise, he stood up, flopped his hand at it disgustedly, and walked out.
When I came out five minutes later with the box wrapped up under my arm, I saw him sitting in a young dreadnaught with another man, a few yards down the street.
“So I’m going to be followed home,” I said to myself, “to find out who I am.” That didn’t worry me any; I’d rented my room under my old stage name of Honey Sebastian (my idea of a classy tag at sixteen) to escape the notoriety attendant on Chick’s trial. I turned up the other way and hopped down into the subway, which is about the best bet when the following is to be done from a car. As far as I could make out, no one came after me.
I watched the street from a corner of the window after I got home, and no one going by stopped or looked at the house or did anything but mind his own business. And if it had been that flashy guy on my tail, you could have heard him coming from a block away. I turned to the wrapped box and broke the string.
Burns’ knock at my door at five that afternoon was a tattoo of anxious impatience. “God, you took long to get here!” I blurted out. “I phoned you three times since noon.”
“Lady,” he protested, “I’ve been busy, I was out on something else, only just got back to Headquarters ten minutes ago. Boy, you threw a fright into me.”
I didn’t stoop to asking him why he should be so worried something had happened to me; he might have given me the right answer. “Well,” I said, “I’ve got him,” and I passed him the rosewood jewel case.
“Got who?”
“The guy that Chick’s been made a patsy for.”
He opened it, looked in, looked under it. “What’s this?”
“Hers. I had a hunch, and I bought it. He must have had a hunch too — only his agent — and it must have been his agent, he wouldn’t show up himself — didn’t follow it through, wasn’t sure enough. Stick your thumb under the little lock. Not over it, down below it, and press hard on the wood.” Something clicked, and the satin bottom flapped up, like it had with me.
“Fake bottom, eh?” he said.
“Don’t be an echo. Read that top letter out loud. That was the last one she got, the very day it happened.”
“ ‘You know, baby,’ ” Burns read. “ ‘I think too much of you to ever let you go. And if you ever tired of me and tried to leave me, I’d kill you first, and then you could go wherever you want. They tell me you’ve been seen going around a lot lately with some young punk. Now, baby, I hope for his sake, and yours too, that when I come back day after tomorrow I find it isn’t so, just some more of my boys’ lies. They like to rib me sometimes, see if I can take it or not.’ ”
“He gave her a bum steer there on purpose,” I pointed out. “He came back ‘tomorrow’ and not ‘day after,’ and caught her with the goods.”
“Milt,” Burns read from the bottom of the page. And then he looked at me, and didn’t see me for once.
“Militis, of course,” I said, “the Greek nightclub king. Milton, as he calls himself. Everyone on Broadway knows him. And yet, d’you notice how that name stayed out of the trial? Not a whisper from beginning to end! That’s the missing name all right!”
“It reads that way, I know,” he said undecidedly, “but there’s this: She knew her traffic signals. Why would she chuck away the banana and hang on to the skin? In other words, Milton spells real dough, your brother wasn’t even carfare.”
“But Militis had her branded—”
“Sure, but—”
“No, I’m not talking slang now. I mean actually, physically; it’s mentioned in one of these letters. The autopsy report had it too, remember? Only they mistook it for an operation scar or scald. Well, when a guy does that, anyone would have looked good to her, and Chick was probably a godsend. The branding was probably not the half of it, either. It’s fairly well known that Milton likes to play rough with his women.”
“All right, kid,” he said, “but I’ve got bad news for you. This evidence isn’t strong enough to have the verdict set aside and a new trial called. A clever mouthpiece could blow this whole pack of letters out the window with one breath. Ardent Greek temperament, and that kind of thing, you know. You remember how Schlesinger dragged it out of Mandy that she’d overheard more than one guy make the same kind of jealous threats. Did it do any good?”
“This is the McCoy, though. He came through, this one, Militis.”
“But, baby, you’re telling it to me and I convince easy, from you. You’re not telling it to the Grand Jury.”
I shoved the letters at him. “Just the same, you chase out, have ’em photostated, every last one of them, and put ’em in a cool, dry place. I’m going to dig something a little more convincing to go with them, if that’s what’s needed. What clubs does he own?”
“What clubs doesn’t he? There’s Hell’s Bells—” He stopped short, looked at me. “You stay out of there.”
“One word from you...” I purred, and closed the door after him.
“A little higher,” the manager said. “Don’t be afraid. We’ve seen it all before.”
I took another hitch in my hoisted skirt, gave him a look. “If it’s my appendix you want to size up, say so. It’s easier to uncover the other way around, from up to down. I just sing and dance. I don’t bathe for the customers.”
“I like ’em like that,” he nodded approvingly to his yes-man. “Give her a chord, Mike,” he said to his pianist.
“The Man I Love,” I said. “I do dusties, not new ones.”