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.
I lit a pipe.
“Jeeze,” he said. “Where you promote all that?”
“Connections. What’s the angle?”
He picked the wallet off the floor and moused around inside it with a couple of square fingers for a while, with his tongue sticking out between his thick lips. He finally got out a slim brown card and some crumpled slips of paper. He pushed them at me.
The card was in gold type, very delicately done. It said: “Mr. Harold Hardwicke Steiner,” and very small in the corner, “Rare Books and De Luxe Editions.” No address or phone number.
The white slips, three in number, were simple I.O.U.s for a thousand dollars each, signed: “Carmen Dravec” in a sprawling, moronic handwriting.
I gave it all back to him and said: “Blackmail?”
He shook his head slowly and something gentle came into his face that hadn’t been there before.
“It’s my little girl — Carmen. This Steiner, he bothers her. She goes to his joint all the time, makes whoopee. He makes love to her, I guess. I don’t like it.”
I nodded. “How about the notes?”
“I don’t care nothin’ about the dough. She plays games with him. The hell with that. She’s what you call man-crazy. You go tell this Steiner to lay off Carmen. I break his neck with my hands. See?”
All this in a rush, with deep breathing. His eyes got small and round, and furious. His teeth almost chattered.
I said: “Why have me tell him? Why not tell him yourself?”
“Maybe I get mad and kill the—!” he yelled.
I picked a match out of my pocket and prodded the loose ash in the bowl of my pipe. I looked at him carefully for a moment, getting hold of an idea.
“Nerts, you’re scared to,” I told him.
Both big fists came up. He held them shoulder high and shook them, great knots of bone and muscle. He lowered them slowly, heaved a deep honest sigh, and said:
“Yeah. I’m scared to. I dunno how to handle her. All the time some new guy and all the time a punk. A while back I gave a guy called Joe Marty five grand to lay off her. She’s still mad at me.”
I stared at the window, watched the rain hit it, flatten out, and slide down in a thick wave, like melted gelatine. It was too early in the fall for that kind of rain.
“Giving them sugar doesn’t get you anywhere,” I said. “You could be doing that all your life. So you figure you’d like to have me get rough with this one, Steiner.”
“Tell him I break his neck!”
“I wouldn’t bother,” I said. “I know Steiner. I’d break his neck for you myself, if it would do any good.”
He leaned forward and grabbed my hand. His eyes got childish. A grey tear floated in each of them.
“Listen, M’Gee says you’re a good guy. I tell you something I ain’t told nobody — ever. Carmen — she’s not my kid at all. I just picked her up in Smoky, a little baby in the street. She didn’t have nobody. I guess maybe I steal her, huh?”
“Sounds like it,” I said, and had to fight to get my hand loose. I rubbed feeling back into it with the other one. The man had a grip that would crack a telephone pole.
“I go straight then,” he said grimly, and yet tenderly. “I come out here and make good. She grows up. I love her.”
I said: “Uh-huh. That’s natural.”
“You don’t get me. I wanta marry her.”
I stared at him.
“She gets older, gets some sense. Maybe she marry me, huh?”
His voice implored me, as if I had the settling of that.
“Ever ask her?”
“I’m scared to,” he said humbly.
“She soft on Steiner, do you think?”
He nodded. “But that don’t mean nothin’.”
I could believe that. I got off the bed, threw a window up and let the rain hit my face for a minute.
“Let’s get this straight,” I said, lowering the window again and going back to the bed. “I can take Steiner off your back. That’s easy. I just don’t see what it buys you.”
He grabbed for my hand again, but I was a little too quick for him this time.
“You came in here a little tough, flashing your wad,” I said. “You’re going out soft. Not from anything I’ve said. You knew it already. I’m not Dorothy Dix, and I’m only partly a prune. But I’ll take Steiner off you, if you really want that.”
He stood up clumsily, swung his hat and stared down at my feet.
“You take him off my back, like you said. He ain’t her sort, anyway.”
“It might hurt your back a little.”
“That’s okay. That’s what it’s for,” he said.
He buttoned himself up, dumped his hat on his big shaggy head, and rolled on out. He shut the door carefully, as if he was going out of a sick-room.
I thought he was as crazy as a pair of waltzing mice, but I liked him.
I put his goldbacks in a safe place, mixed myself a long drink, and sat down in the chair that was still warm from him.
While I played with the drink I wondered if he had any idea what Steiner’s racket was.
Steiner had a collection of rare and half-rare smut books which he loaned out as high as ten dollars a day — to the right people.
II
It rained all the next day. Late in the afternoon I sat parked in a blue Chrysler roadster, diagonally across the Boulevard from a narrow store front, over which a green neon sign in script letters said: “H. H. Steiner.”
The rain splashed knee-high off the sidewalks, filled the gutters, and big cops in slickers that shone like gun barrels had a lot of fun carrying little girls in silk stockings and cute little rubber boots across the bad places, with a lot of squeezing.
The rain drummed on the hood of the Chrysler, beat and tore at the taut material of the top, leaked in at the buttoned places, and made a pool on the floorboards for me to keep my feet in.
I had a big flask of Scotch with me. I used it often enough to keep interested.
Steiner did business, even in that weather; perhaps especially in that weather. Very nice cars stopped in front of his store, and very nice people dodged in, then dodged out again with wrapped parcels under their arms. Of course they could have been buying rare books and de luxe editions.
At five-thirty a pimply-faced kid in a leather windbreaker came out of the store and sloped up the side street at a fast trot. He came back with a neat cream-and-grey coupe. Steiner came out and got into the coupe. He wore a dark green leather raincoat, a cigarette in an amber holder, no hat. I couldn’t see his glass eye at that distance but I knew he had one. The kid in the wind-breaker held an umbrella over him across the sidewalk, then shut it up and handed it into the coupe.
Steiner drove west on the Boulevard. I drove west on the Boulevard. Past the business district, at Pepper Canyon, he turned north, and I tailed him easily from a block back. I was pretty sure he was going home, which was natural.
He left Pepper Drive and took a curving ribbon of wet cement called La Verne Terrace, climbed up it almost to the top. It was a narrow road with a high bank on one side and a few well-spaced cabin-like houses built down the steep slope on the other side. Their roofs were not much above road level. The fronts of them were masked by shrubs. Sodden trees dripped all over the landscape.
Steiner’s hideaway had a square box hedge in front of it, more than window-high. The entrance was a sort of maze, and the house door was not visible from the road. Steiner put his grey-and-cream coupe in a small garage, locked up, went through the maze with his umbrella up, and light went on in the house.