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.
While he was doing this I had passed him and gone to the top of the hill. I turned around there and went back and parked in front of the next house above his. It seemed to be closed up or empty, but had no signs on it. I went into a conference with my flask of Scotch, and then just sat.
At six-fifteen lights bobbed up the hill. It was quite dark by then. A car stopped in front of Steiner’s hedge. A slim, tall girl in a slicker got out of it. Enough light filtered out through the hedge for me to see that she was dark-haired and possibly pretty.
Voices drifted on the rain and a door shut. I got out of the Chrysler and strolled down the hill, put a pencil flash into the car. It was a dark maroon or brown Packard convertible. Its license read to Carmen Dravec, 3596 Lucerene Avenue. I went back to my heap.
A solid, slow-moving hour crawled by. No more cars came up or down the hill. It seemed to be a very quiet neighborhood.
Then a single flash of hard white light leaked out of Steiner’s house, like a flash of summer lightning. As the darkness fell again a thin tinkling scream trickled down the darkness and echoed faintly among the wet trees. I was out of the Chrysler and on my way before the last echo of it died.
There was no fear in the scream. It held the note of a half-pleasurable shock, an accent of drunkenness, and a touch of pure idiocy.
The Steiner mansion was perfectly silent when I hit the gap in the hedge, dodged around the elbow that masked the front door, and put my hand up to bang on the door.
At that exact moment, as if somebody had been waiting for it, three shots racketed close together behind the door. After that there was a long, harsh sigh, a soft thump, rapid steps, going away into the back of the house.
I wasted time hitting the door with my shoulder, without enough start. It threw me back like a kick from an army mule.
The door fronted on a narrow runway, like a small bridge, that led from the banked road. There was no side porch, no way to get at the windows in a hurry. There was no way around to the back except through the house or up a long flight of wooden steps that went up to the back door from the alley-like street below. On these steps I now heard a clatter of feet.
That gave me the impulse and I hit the door again, from the feet up. It gave at the lock and I pitched down two steps into a big, dim, cluttered room. I didn’t see much of what was in the room then. I wandered through to the back of the house.
I was pretty sure there was death in it.
A car throbbed in the street below as I reached the back porch. The car went away fast, without lights. That was that. I went back to the living-room.
III
That room reached all the way across the front of the house and had a low, beamed ceiling, walls painted brown. Strips of tapestry hung all around the walls. Books filled low shelves. There was a thick, pinkish rug on which some light fell from two standing lamps with pale green shades. In the middle of the rug there was a big, low desk and a black chair with a yellow satin cushion at it. There were books all over the desk.
On a sort of dais near one end wall there was a teakwood chair with arms and a high back. A dark-haired girl was sitting in the chair, on a fringed red shawl.
She sat very straight, with her hands on the arms of the chair, her knees close together, her body stiffly erect, her chin level. Her eyes were wide open and mad and had no pupils.
She looked unconscious of what was going on, but she didn’t have the pose of unconsciousness. She had a pose as if she was doing something very important and making a lot of it.
Out of her mouth came a tinny chuckling noise, which didn’t change her expression or move her lips. She didn’t seem to see me at all.
She was wearing a pair of long jade ear-rings, and apart from those she was stark naked.
I looked away from her to the other end of the room.
Steiner was on his back on the floor, just beyond the edge of the pink rug, and in front of a thing that looked like a small totem pole. It had a round open mouth in which the lens of a camera showed. The lens seemed to be aimed at the girl in the teakwood chair.
There was a flash-bulb apparatus on the floor beside Steiner’s out-flung hand in a loose silk sleeve. The cord of the flash-bulb went behind the totem pole thing.
Steiner was wearing Chinese slippers with thick white felt soles. His legs were in black satin pyjamas and the upper part of him in an embroidered Chinese coat. The front of it was mostly blood. His glass eye shone brightly and was the most lifelike thing about him. At a glance none of the three shots had missed.
The flash-bulb was the sheet lightning I had seen leak out of the house and the half-giggling scream was the doped and naked girl’s reaction to that. The three shots had been somebody else’s idea of how the proceedings ought to be punctuated. Presumably the idea of the lad who had gone very fast down the back steps.
I could see something in his point of view. At that stage I thought it was a good idea to shut the front door and fasten it with the short chain that was on it. The lock had been spoiled by my violent entrance.
A couple of thin purple glasses stood on a red lacquer tray on one end of the desk. Also a potbellied flagon of something brown. The glasses smelled of ether and laudanum, a mixture I had never tried, but it seemed to fit the scene pretty well.
I found the girl’s clothes on a divan in the corner, picked up a brown, sleeved dress to begin with, and went over to her. She smelled of ether also, at a distance of several feet.
The tinny chuckling was still going on and a little froth was oozing down her chin. I slapped her face, not very hard. I didn’t want to bring her out of whatever kind of trance she was in, into a screaming fit.
“Come on,” I said brightly. “Let’s be nice. Let’s get dressed.”
She said: “G-g-go — ter — ell,” without any emotion that I could notice.
I slapped her a little more. She didn’t mind the slaps, so I went to work getting the dress on her.
She didn’t mind the dress either. She let me hold her arms up but she spread her fingers wide, as if that was very cute. It made me do a lot of finagling with the sleeves. I finally got the dress on. I got her stockings on, and her shoes, and then got her up on her feet.
“Let’s take a little walk,” I said. “Let’s take a nice little walk.”
We walked. Part of the time her ear-rings banged against my chest and part of the time we looked like a couple of adagio dancers doing the splits. We walked over to Steiner’s body and back. She didn’t pay any attention to Steiner and his bright glass eye.
She found it amusing that she couldn’t walk and tried to tell me about it, but only bubbled. I put her on the divan while I wadded her underclothes up and shoved them into a deep pocket of my raincoat, put her handbag in my other deep pocket. I went through Steiner’s desk and found a little blue notebook written in code that looked interesting. I put that in my pocket, too.
Then I tried to get at the back of the camera in the totem pole, to get the plate, but couldn’t find the catch right away. I was getting nervous, and I figured I could build up a better excuse if I ran into the law when I came back later to look for it than any reason I could give if caught there now.
I went back to the girl and got her slicker on her, nosed around to see if anything else of hers was there, wiped away a lot of fingerprints I probably hadn’t made, and at least some of those Miss Dravec must have made. I opened the door and put out both the lamps.
I got my left arm around her again and we struggled out into the rain and piled into her Packard. I didn’t like leaving my own bus there very well, but that had to be. Her keys were in her car. We drifted off down the hill.