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.
“Sam’s getting up in the world,” the old woman answered.
“See him go into the Gaiety a while back?”
“Sam go into the Gaiety—” The old woman’s voice thinned into silence. She stared at McFee. “It wasn’t Sam I saw... It wasn’t Sam—” And then, vehemently, “I can’t be seeing everybody...”
McFee said gently, “You better go home, Maggie.”
He turned into the Gaiety alley, barked his shin against Maggie O’Day’s wheel chair. He tried the nearer exit door. It was unbolted. The door creaked as McFee pulled on it. He slipped inside.
The darkness fell all around McFee. It had a hot, smothering touch. It plucked at his eyeballs. He chewed a cigarette, listened. Vague murmurings were audible. The sort of noises that haunt old theatres. Dead voices... Sara Kendleton, Martin Thomas, Mrs. Fiske, Edwin South. But that sort of thing didn’t touch McFee. He knew the Gaiety for the rattletrap barn it was and waited, his hat on the back of his head and his ears wide open.
Suddenly he was on his toes.
The sound coming towards him was a human sound. It came down the side aisle from the stage end. It was a rustling sound, like dead leaves in a wind; then it identified itself as the slow slurring of a body dragging exhaustedly over a flat surface. Against a wall. Over a floor. It stopped. The taut quietness that followed throttled McFee. A groan flowed through the darkness, a low strangling cough. The slurring sound was resumed. It was closer now, but there was a bitter-end exhaustion in it.
McFee, chewing his cigarette, felt at the gun and the flashlight in his pocket. He took three steps forward, his arms spread wide.
The man pitched forward and fell against his chest.
McFee slid him down to the floor of the aisle. The man’s chest was wet. He felt a warm stickiness on his hands. He made light, spread it over the man’s face. It was Ranee Damon. His eyes were wide open, fixed in horror; his lips were bloodless. McFee felt at the heart.
Damon was dead.
McFee muttered, “He’s been a while dying.”
The hole was in the chest. A good deal of blood had flowed.
Damon was around thirty, a dark, debonair lad with straight hair as black as Maggie O’Day’s had once been. His bright eloquence, the bold ardor of his restless eyes, had stepped him along. The late Senator Gaylord (Senator by courtesy) had placed him in the District Attorney’s office. Damon had become a key man. You had to figure on him. But his mouth was lax.
“The boys’ll have to plant a new in-man,” McFee said. He sniffed the odor of gin. “Party, I guess.” And then, “Well, well! Rubbed out doing his little stunt!”
McFee had lifted Damon’s left arm. The fingers clutched a tangle of five-century notes. Ten of them.
A trail of blood spots on the aisle floor led backstage. The wall was smeared where Damon had fought his way agonizingly along it. McFee followed the sign, back of the boxes, up a short stair, through a door into the backstage. A dingy curtain shut him off from the house. He stood under the drops, among a bedroom set, and waved his light. Damon had crawled across the stage into the wing, where a final resurgence of life lifted him up.
Entering the dressing room from which Damon had come, McFee saw high, fly-blown walls that pictured the evolution of the burley-cue girl. He had appreciated it on previous occasions. A quart bottle of gin, two-thirds empty, stood on a rickety dressing table, two glasses beside it. He did not touch them. A table lamp lay on the floor, broken. Dancing costumes lay about. A rug was turned up.
Make-up material had been swept off the dressing table — powder, crimson grease paint, lipstick, eyebrow buffer. The tube of grease paint had been stepped on by someone, burst open. The stuff smeared the floor. It looked like coagulated blood.
Near the door lay a .32 automatic pistol. One shell had been ejected.
McFee went back to the aisle.
Irene Mayo was kneeling beside the body.
3
McFee said, “I’m sorry, sister.”
The cold beam of his torch made her eyes look enormous in her white, drawn face. Her mouth quivered. She pressed her hand against it, stifled a sob. But after a moment she said dully, “He would have been governor some day.”
McFee answered moodily, “Damon had the makings.” He stared down into the girl’s uplifted eyes, at the purple shadows beneath them. The emeralds at her throat blazed coldly. He added, “If it’s in a man’s blood you can’t stop him.”
“Unless you kill him.” The girl spoke passionately. “It’s in me, too, but there’s more than that in me. If it’s the last thing I do—”
McFee cut in, “You saw Melrose?”
“No—” The girl hesitated, her eyes hardening. “But Ranee saw him. Ranee said—” Her eyes fell apprehensively. “I don’t understand about that money—”
“Were you in love with Damon?”
“I don’t know.” She spoke slowly. “I liked him. He took me around a lot. He was a dear — yes, I did love him!” She rocked distractedly, said in a frenzy, “I’ll spend every dollar I have to get Melrose.”
“Good kid.”
“Are you with me, McFee?”
Instead of replying, McFee put out his flash, said softly, “There’s someone in the house.”
The girl stood up, moved close to him, her wrap drawn tightly around her body. Her breath fanned McFee’s cheeks. Neither of them moved. McFee pushed the girl flat against the wall.
“Stay here,” he whispered.
“McFee—”
“Easy, sister.”
McFee took off his shoes. He felt for his gun, went up the sloping aisle on the balls of his feet. A rustling sound became audible, quieted. He reached the top of the aisle, turned, felt his way towards the foyer. McFee sniffed. Perfume. Thick, too. He grinned, put away his gun. A door was on his right — the manager’s office. He turned into the room.
McFee stopped. Someone was breathing heavily. He heard a sob — suppressed. A floor board creaked. McFee thought he located the woman. He took three steps forward, his arms wide apart, as when he had gone to meet Ranee Damon. Caught the glitter of a necklace. As he flung one arm around the woman’s neck, he slammed the other against her mouth and shut off her scream. She fought, but McFee held her.
He said softly, “One yip and I’ll blow you in two.”
The woman became quiet. McFee removed his hand.
“Lemme go, McFee,” she said huskily.
“Leclair — swell! Anyb’dy else on the party?”
“Ranee Damon—” The woman leaned on McFee’s arm. “Oh, my God!” she wept. “Damon — that’s all—”
Mabel Leclair’s blond beauty was unconfined and too abundant. The petulant immaturity of her features ran at odds with the hardness in her round blue eyes. She presented a scanty negligee effect.
McFee asked, “That kind of a party?”
The woman’s hands and negligee were bloody. She looked down at them and went sick. McFee directed the light into her eyes. “Sit down,” he said. She fell moaning into a chair.
McFee snapped a desk lamp switch. The room contained a shabby desk, chairs, a safe, a water cooler and a couch. The dingy walls were a photograph album burleycue theme.