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 put my hat beside me and opened the top button of my coat and smiled at Marty.
“Well — I’m listening,” he said.
He stubbed his cigarette out, lifted the lid of the cigar box and took out a couple of fat cigars.
“Cigar?” he suggested casually, and tossed one at me.
I reached for it and that made me a sap. Marty dropped the other cigar back into the box and came up very swiftly with a gun.
I looked at the gun politely. It was a black police Colt, a .38. I had no argument against it at the moment.
“Stand up a minute,” Marty said. “Come forward just about two yards. You might grab a little air while you’re doing that.” His voice was elaborately casual.
I was mad inside, but I grinned at him. I said:
“You’re the second guy I’ve met today that thinks a gun in the hand means the world by the tail. Put it away, and let’s talk.”
Marty’s eyebrows came together and he pushed his chin forward a little. His brown eyes were vaguely troubled.
We stared at each other. I didn’t look at the pointed black slipper that showed under the curtains across the doorway to my left.
Marty was wearing a dark blue suit, a blue shirt and a black tie. His brown face looked somber above the dark colors. He said softly, in a lingering voice:
“Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a tough guy — just careful. I don’t know hell’s first thing about you. You might be a life-taker for all I know.”
“You’re not careful enough,” I said. “The play with the books was lousy.”
He drew a long breath and let it out silently. Then he leaned back and crossed his long legs and rested the Colt on his knee.
“Don’t kid yourself I won’t use this, if I have to. What’s your story?”
“Tell your friend with the pointed shoes to come on in,” I said. “She gets tired holding her breath.”
Without turning his head Marty called out:
“Come on in, Agnes.”
The curtains over the door swung aside and the green-eyed blonde from Steiner’s store joined us in the room. I wasn’t very much surprised to see her there. She looked at me bitterly.
“I knew damn’ well you were trouble,” she told me angrily. “I told Joe to watch his step.”
“Save it,” Marty snapped. “Joe’s watchin’ his step plenty. Put some light on so I can see to pop this guy, if it works out that way.”
The blonde lit a large floor lamp with a square red shade. She sat down under it, in a big velours chair and held a fixed painful smile on her face. She was scared to the point of exhaustion.
I remembered the cigar I was holding and put it in my mouth. Marty’s Colt was very steady on me while I got matches out and lit it.
I puffed smoke and said through the smoke: “The sucker list I spoke of is in code. So I can’t read the names yet, but there’s about five hundred of them. You got twelve boxes of books, say three hundred. There’ll be that many more out on loan. Say five hundred altogether, just to be conservative. If it’s a good active list and you could run it around all the books, that would be a quarter of a million rentals. Put the average rental low — say a dollar. That’s too low, but say a dollar. That’s a lot of money these days. Enough to spot a guy for.”
The blonde yelped sharply: “You’re crazy, if you—”
“Shut up!” Marty swore at her.
The blonde subsided and put her head back against the back of her chair. Her face was tortured with strain.
“It’s no racket for bums,” I went on telling them. “You’ve got to get confidence and keep it. Personally I think the blackmail angles are a mistake. I’m for shedding all that.”
Marty’s dark brown stare held coldly on my face. “You’re a funny guy,” he drawled smoothly. “Who’s got this lovely racket?”
“You have,” I said. “Almost.”
Marty didn’t say anything.
“You shot Steiner to get it,” I said. “Last night in the rain. It was good shooting weather. The trouble is, he wasn’t alone when it happened. Either you didn’t see that, or you got scared. You ran out. But you had nerve enough to come back and hide the body somewhere — so you could tidy up on the books before the case broke.”
The blonde made one strangled sound and then turned her face and stared at the wall. Her silvered fingernails dug into her palms. Her teeth bit her lip tightly.
Marty didn’t bat an eye. He didn’t move and the Colt didn’t move in his hand. His brown face was as hard as a piece of carved wood.
“Boy, you take chances,” he said softly, at last. “It’s lucky as all hell for you I didn’t kill Steiner.”
I grinned at him, without much cheer. “You might step off for it just the same,” I said.
Marty’s voice was a dry rustle of sound. “Think you’ve got me framed for it?”
“Positive.”
“How come?”
“There’s somebody who’ll tell it that way.”
Marty swore then. “That — damned little—! She would — just that — damn her!”
I didn’t say anything. I let him chew on it. His face cleared slowly, and he put the Colt down on the table, kept his hand near it.
“You don’t sound like chisel as I know chisel,” he said slowly, his eyes a tight shine between dark narrowed lids. “And I don’t see any coppers here. What’s your angle?”
I drew on my cigar and watched his gun hand. “The plate that was in Steiner’s camera. All the prints that have been made. Right here and right now. You’ve got it — because that’s the only way you could have known who was there last night.”
Marty turned his head slightly to look at Agnes. Her face was still to the wall and her fingernails were still spearing her palms. Marty looked back at me.
“You’re cold as a night watchman’s feet on that one, guy,” he told me.
I shook my head. “No. You’re a sap to stall, Marty. You can be pegged for the kill easy. It’s a natural. If the girl has to tell her story, the pictures won’t matter. But she don’t want to tell it.”
“You a shamus?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“How’d you get to me?”
“I was working on Steiner. He’s been workin’ on Dravec. Dravec leaks money. You had some of it. I tailed the books here from Steiner’s store. The rest was easy when I had the girl’s story.”
“She say I gunned Steiner?”
I nodded. “But she could be mistaken.”
Marty sighed. “She hates my guts,” he said. “I gave her the gate. I got paid to do it, but I’d have done it anyway. She’s too screwy for me.”
I said: “Get the pictures, Marty.”
He stood up slowly, looked down at the Colt, put it in his side-pocket. His hand moved slowly up to his breast-pocket.
Somebody rang the door buzzer and kept on ringing it.
XI
Marty didn’t like that. His lower lip went in under his teeth and his eyebrows drew down at the corners. His whole face got mean.
The buzzer kept on buzzing.
The blonde stood up quickly. Nerve tension made her face old and ugly.
Watching me, Marty jerked a small drawer open in the tall desk and got a small, white-handled automatic out of it. He held it out to the blonde. She went to him and took it gingerly, not liking it.
“Sit down next to the shamus,” he rasped. “Hold the gun on him. If he gets funny, feed him a few.”
The blonde sat down on the davenport about three feet from me, on the side away from the door. She lined the gun on my leg. I didn’t like the jerky look in her green eyes.
The door buzzer stopped and somebody started a quick, light, impatient rapping on the panel. Marty went across and opened the door. He slid his right hand into his coat pocket and opened the door with his left hand, threw it open quickly.