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.
Nothing happened on the way to Lucerne Avenue except that Carmen stopped bubbling and giggling and went to snoring. I couldn’t keep her head off my shoulder. It was all I could do to keep it out of my lap. I had to drive rather slowly and it was a long way anyhow, clear over to the west edge of the city.
The Dravec home was a large old-fashioned brick house in large grounds with a wall around them. A grey composition driveway went through iron gates and up a slope past flower-beds and lawns to a big front door with narrow leaded panels on each side of it. There was dim light behind the panels as if nobody much was home.
I pushed Carmen’s head into the corner and shed her belongings in the seat, and got out.
A maid opened the door. She said Mister Dravec wasn’t in and she didn’t know where he was. Downtown somewhere. She had a long, yellowish, gentle face, a long nose, no chin and large wet eyes. She looked like a nice old horse that had been turned out to pasture after long service, and as if she would do the right thing by Carmen.
I pointed into the Packard and growled: “Better get her to bed. She’s lucky we don’t throw her in the can — drivin’ around with a tool like that on her.”
She smiled sadly and I went away.
I had to walk five blocks in the rain before a narrow apartment house let me into its lobby to use a phone. Then I had to wait another twenty-five minutes for a taxi. While I waited I began to worry about what I hadn’t completed.
I had yet to get the used plate out of Steiner’s camera.
IV
I paid the taxi off on Pepper Drive, in front of a house where there was company, and walked back up the curving hill of La Verne Terrace to Steiner’s house behind its shrubbery.
Nothing looked any different. I went in through the gap in the hedge, pushed the door open gently, and smelled cigarette smoke.
It hadn’t been there before. There had been a complicated set of smells, including the sharp memory of smokeless powder. But cigarette smoke hadn’t stood out from the mixture.
I closed the door and slipped down on one knee and listened, holding my breath. I didn’t hear anything but the sound of the rain on the roof. I tried throwing the beam of my pencil flash along the floor. Nobody shot at me.
I straightened up, found the dangling tassel of one of the lamps and made light in the room.
The first thing I noticed was that a couple of strips of tapestry were gone from the wall. I hadn’t counted them, but the spaces where they had hung caught my eye.
Then I saw Steiner’s body was gone from in front of the totem pole thing with the camera eye in its mouth. On the floor below, beyond the margin of the pink rug, somebody had spread down a rug over the place where Steiner’s body had been. I didn’t have to lift the rug to know why it had been put there.
I lit a cigarette and stood there in the middle of the dimly lighted room and thought about it. After a while I went to the camera in the totem pole. I found the catch this time. There wasn’t any plate-holder in the camera.
My hand went towards the mulberry-colored phone on Steiner’s low desk, but didn’t take hold of it.
I crossed into the little hallway beyond the living-room and poked into a fussy-looking bedroom that looked like a woman’s room more than a man’s. The bed had a long cover with a flounced edge. I lifted that and shot my flash under the bed.
Steiner wasn’t under the bed. He wasn’t anywhere in the house. Somebody had taken him away. He couldn’t very well have gone by himself.
It wasn’t the law, or somebody would have been there still. It was only an hour and a half since Carmen and I left the place. And there was none of the mess police photographers and fingerprint men would have made.
I went back to the living-room, pushed the flash-bulb apparatus around the back of the totem pole with my foot, switched off the lamp, left the house, got into my rain-soaked car and choked it to life.
It was all right with me if somebody wanted to keep the Steiner kill hush-hush for a while. It gave me a chance to find out whether I could tell it leaving Carmen Dravec and the nude photo angle out.
It was after ten when I got back to the Berglund and put my heap away and went upstairs to the apartment. I stood under a shower, then put pajamas on and mixed up a batch of hot grog. I looked at the phone a couple of times, thought about calling to see if Dravec was home yet, thought it might be a good idea to let him alone until the next day.
I filled a pipe and sat down with my hot grog and Steiner’s little blue notebook. It was in code, but the arrangement of the entries and the indented leaves made it a list of names and addresses. There were over four hundred and fifty of them. If this was Steiner’s sucker list, he had a gold mine — quite apart from the blackmail angles.
Any name on the list might be a prospect as the killer. I didn’t envy the cops their job when it was handed to them.
I drank too much whiskey trying to crack the code. About midnight I went to bed, and dreamed about a man in a Chinese coat with blood all over the front who chased a naked girl with long jade ear-rings while I tried to photograph the scene with a camera that didn’t have any plate in it.
V
Violets M’Gee called me up in the morning, before I was dressed, but after I had seen the paper and not found anything about Steiner in it. His voice had the cheerful sound of a man who had slept well and didn’t owe too much money.
“Well, how’s the boy?” he began.
I said I was all right except that I was having a little trouble with my Third Reader. He laughed a little absently, and then his voice got too casual.
“This guy Dravec that I sent over to see you — done anything for him yet?”
“Too much rain,” I answered, if that was an answer.
“Uh-huh. He seems to be a guy that things happen to. A car belongin’ to him is washin’ about in the surf off Lido fish pier.”
I didn’t say anything. I held the telephone very tightly.
“Yeah,” M’Gee went on cheerfully. “A nice new Cad all messed up with sand and sea-water... Oh, I forgot. There’s a guy inside it.”
I let my breath out slowly, very slowly. “Dravec?” I whispered.
“Naw. A young kid. I ain’t told Dravec yet. It’s under the fedora. Wanta run down and look at it with me?”
I said I would like to do that.
“Snap it up. I’ll be in my hutch,” M’Gee told me and hung up.
Shaved, dressed and lightly breakfasted I was at the County Building in half an hour or so. I found M’Gee staring at a yellow wall and sitting at a little yellow desk on which there was nothing but M’Gee’s hat and one of the M’Gee feet. He took both of them off the desk and we went down to the official parking lot and got into a small black sedan.
The rain had stopped during the night and the morning was all blue and gold. There was enough snap in the air to make life simple and sweet, if you didn’t have too much on your mind. I had.
It was thirty miles to Lido, the first ten of them through city traffic. M’Gee made it in three-quarters of an hour. At the end of that time we skidded to a stop in front of a stucco arch beyond which a long black pier extended. I took my feet out of the floorboards and we got out.
There were a few cars and people in front of the arch. A motor-cycle officer was keeping the people off the pier. M’Gee showed him a bronze star and we went out along the pier, into a loud smell that even two days’ rain had failed to wash away.