The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories
- Автор: Adams Cleve F., Babcock Dwight V.
- Год: 2010
- Язык: английский
- Год: A Vintage Crime/Black Lizard
- ISBN: 978-0-307-45543-7
- Жанр: Криминальные детективы
Электронная книга - «The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories». Краткое содержание книги:
Black Mask was the apotheosis of noir. It was the magazine where the first hardboiled detective story, which was written by Carroll John Daly appeared. It was the slum in which such American literary titans like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler got their start, and it was the home of stories with titles like “Murder Is Bad Luck,” “Ten Carets of Lead,” and “Drop Dead Twice.” Collected here is best of the best, the hardest of the hardboiled, and the darkest of the dark of America’s finest crime fiction. This masterpiece collection represents a high watermark of America’s underbelly. Crime writing gets no better than this.
“Whisky sour,” the big man said.
We had whisky sours.
“You know where Beulah is?” the big man asked the barman impassively, licking his whisky sour down the side of the thick glass.
“Beulah, you says?” the barman whined. “I ain’t seen her roun’ heah lately. Not right lately, no, suh.”
“How long you been here?”
“ ’Bout a yeah, Ah reckon. ’Bout a yeah. Yes, suh. ’Bout—”
“How long’s this coop been a dinge box?”
“Says which?”
The big man made a fist down at his side, about the size of a bucket.
“Five years anyway,” I put in. “This fellow wouldn’t know anything about a white girl named Beulah.”
The big man looked at me as if I had just hatched out. His whisky sour didn’t seem to improve his temper.
“Who the hell asked you to stick your face in?”
I smiled. I made it a big, friendly smile. “I’m the fellow came in here with you. Remember?”
He grinned back, a flat, white grin. “Whisky sour,” he told the barman. “Get them fleas outa your pants. Service.”
The barman scuttled around, hating us with the whites of his eyes.
The place was empty now, except for the two of us and the barman, and the bouncer over against the far wall.
The bouncer groaned and stirred. He rolled over and began to crawl softly along the baseboard, like a fly with one wing. The big man paid no attention to him.
“There ain’t nothing left of the joint,” he complained. “They was a stage and a band and cute little rooms where you could have fun. Beulah did some warbling. A redhead. Awful cute. We was to of been married when they hung the frame on me.”
We had two more whisky sours before us now. “What frame?” I asked.
“Where you figure I been them eight years I told you about?”
“In somebody’s Stony Lonesome,” I said.
“Right.” He prodded his chest with a thumb like a baseball bat. “Steve Skalla. The Great Bend job in Kansas. Just me. Forty grand. They caught up with me right here. I was what that — hey!”
The bouncer had made a door at the back and fallen through it. A lock clicked.
“Where’s that door lead to?” the big man demanded.
“Tha... tha’s Mistah Montgom’ry’s office, suh. He’s the boss. He’s got his office back—”
“He might know,” the big man said. He wiped his mouth on the Irish flag handkerchief and arranged it carefully back in his pocket. “He better not crack wise neither. Two more whisky sours.”
He crossed the room to the door behind the crap table. The lock gave him a little argument for a moment, then a piece of the panel dropped off and he went through, shut the door after him.
It was very silent in Shamey’s now. I looked at the barman.
“This guy’s tough,” I said quickly. “And he’s liable to go mean. You can see the idea. He’s looking for an old sweetie who used to work here when it was a place for whites. Got any artillery back there?”
“I thought you was with him,” the barman said suspiciously.
“Couldn’t help myself. He dragged me up. I didn’t feel like being thrown over any houses.”
“Shuah. Ah got me a shotgun,” the barman said, still suspicious.
He began to stoop behind the bar, then stayed in that position rolling his eyes.
There was a dull flat sound at the back of the place, behind the shut door. It might have been a slammed door. It might have been a gun. Just the one sound. No other followed it.
The barman and I waited too long, wondering what the sound was. Not liking to think what it could be.
The door at the back opened and the big man came through quickly, with a Colt army .45 automatic looking like a toy in his hand.
He looked the room over with one swift glance. His grin was taut. He looked like the man who could take forty grand singlehanded from the Great Bend Bank.
He came over to us in swift, almost soundless steps, for all his size.
“Rise up, nigger!”
The barman came up slowly, gray; his hands empty, high.
The big man felt me over, stepped away from us.
“Mr. Montgomery didn’t know where Beulah was either,” he said softly. “He tried to tell me — with this.” He waggled the gun. “So long, punks. Don’t forget your rubbers.”
He was gone, down the stairs, very quickly, very quietly.
I jumped around the bar and took the sawed-off shotgun that lay there, on the shelf. Not to use on Steve Skalla. That was not my job. So the barman wouldn’t use it on me. I went back across the room and through that door.
The bouncer lay on the floor of a hall with a knife in his hand. He was unconscious. I took the knife out of his hand and stepped over him through a door marked OFFICE.
Mr. Montgomery was in there, behind a small scarred desk, close to a partly boarded-up window. Just folded, like a handkerchief or a hinge.
A drawer was open at his right hand. The gun would have come from there. There was a smear of oil on the paper that lined it.
Not a smart idea, but he would never have a smarter one — not now.
Nothing happened while I waited for the police.
When they came both the barman and the bouncer were gone. I had locked myself in with Mr. Montgomery and the shotgun. Just in case.
Hiney got it. A lean-jawed, complaining, overslow detective lieutenant, with long yellow hands that he held on his knees while he talked to me in his cubicle at Headquarters. His shirt was darned under the points of his old-fashioned stiff collar. He looked poor and sour and honest.
This was an hour or so later. They knew all about Steve Skalla then, from their own records. They even had a ten-year-old photo that made him look as eyebrowless as a French roll. All they didn’t know was where he was.
“Six foot six and a half,” Hiney said. “Two hundred sixty-four pounds. A guy that size can’t get far, not in them fancy duds. He couldn’t buy anything else in a hurry. Whyn’t you take him?”
I handed the photo back and laughed.
Hiney pointed one of his long yellow fingers at me bitterly. “Carmady, a tough shamus, huh? Six feet of man, and a jaw you could break rocks on. Whyn’t you take him?”
“I’m getting a little gray at the temples,” I said. “And I didn’t have a gun. He had. I wasn’t on a gun-toting job over there. Skalla just picked me up. I’m kind of cute sometimes.”
Hiney glared at me.
“All right,” I said. “Why argue? I’ve seen the guy. He could wear an elephant in his vest pocket. And I didn’t know he’d killed anybody. You’ll get him all right.”
“Yeah,” Hiney said. “Easy. But I just don’t like to waste my time on these shine killings. No pix. No space. Not even three lines in the want-ad section. Heck, they was five smokes — five, mind you — carved Harlem sunsets all over each other over on East Eight-four one time. All dead. Cold meat. And the — newshawks wouldn’t even go out there.”
“Pick him up nice,” I said. “Or he’ll knock off a brace of prowlies for you. Then you’ll get space.”
“And I wouldn’t have the case then neither,” Hiney jeered. “Well, the hell with him. I got him on the air. Ain’t nothing else to do but just sit.”
“Try the girl,” I said. “Beulah. Skalla will. That’s what he’s after. That’s what started it all. Try her.”
“You try her,” Hiney said. “I ain’t been in a joy house in twenty years.”
“I suppose I’d be right at home in one. How much will you pay?”
“Jeeze, guy, coppers don’t hire private dicks. What with?” He rolled a cigarette out of a can of tobacco. It burned down one side like a forest fire. A man yelled angrily into a telephone in the next cubbyhole. Hiney made another cigarette with more care and licked it and lighted it. He clasped his bony hands on his bony knees again.