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.
“Think of your publicity,” I said. “I bet you twenty-five I find Beulah before you put Skalla under glass.”
He thought it over. He seemed almost to count his bank balance on his cigarette puffs.
“Ten is top,” he said. “And she’s all mine — private.”
I stared at him.
“I don’t work for that kind of money,” I said. “But if I can do it in one day — and you let me alone — I’ll do it for nothing. Just to show you why you’ve been a lieutenant for twenty years.”
He didn’t like that crack much better than I liked his about the joy house. But we shook hands on it.
I got my old Chrysler roadster out of the official parking lot and drove back towards the Central Avenue district.
Shamey’s was closed up, of course. An obvious plainclothes man sat in a car in front of it, reading a paper with one eye. I didn’t know why. Nobody there knew anything about Skalla.
I parked around the corner and went into the diagonal lobby of a Negro hotel called the Hotel Sans Souci. Two rows of hard, empty chairs stared at each other across a strip of fiber carpet. Behind a desk a bald-headed man had his eyes shut and his hands clasped on the desk top. He dozed. He wore an ascot tie that had been tied about 1880, and the green stone in his stickpin was not quite as large as a trash barrel. His large, loose chin folded down on it gently, and his brown hands were soft, peaceful, and clean.
A metal embossed sign at his elbow said: This Hotel Is Under the Protection of the International Consolidated Agencies, Inc.
When he opened one eye I pointed to the sign and said: “H.P.D. man checking up. Any trouble here?”
H.P.D. means Hotel Protective Department, which is the part of a large agency that looks after check bouncers and people who move out by the back stairs, leaving second-hand suitcases full of bricks.
“Trouble, brother,” he said, in a high, sonorous voice, “is something we is fresh out of.” He lowered the voice four or five notches and added, “We don’t take no checks.”
I leaned on the counter across from his folded hands and started to spin a quarter on the bare, scarred wood.
“Heard what happened over at Shamey’s this morning?”
“Brother, I forgit.” Both his eyes were open now and he was watching the blur of light made by the spinning quarter.
“The boss got bumped off,” I said. “Montgomery. Got his neck broken.”
“May the Lawd receive his soul, brother.” The voice went down again. “Cop?”
“Private — on a confidential lay. And I know a man who can keep one that way when I see one.”
He looked me over, closed his eyes again. I kept spinning the quarter. He couldn’t resist looking at it.
“Who done it?” he asked softly. “Who fixed Sam?”
“A tough guy out of the jailhouse got sore because it wasn’t a white joint. It used to be. Remember?”
He didn’t say anything. The coin fell over with a light whirr and lay still.
“Call your play,” I said. “I’ll read you a chapter of the Bible or buy you a drink. Either one.”
“Brother,” he said sonorously, “I kinda like to read my Bible in the seclusion of my family.” Then he added swiftly, in his business voice, “Come around to this side of the desk.”
I went around there and pulled a pint of bonded bourbon off my hip and handed it to him in the shelter of the desk. He poured two small glasses, quickly, sniffed his with a smooth, expert manner, and tucked it away.
“What you want to know?” he asked. “Ain’t a crack in the sidewalk I don’t know. Mebbe I ain’t tellin’ though. This liquor’s been in the right company.”
“Who ran Shamey’s before it was a colored place?”
He stared at me, surprised. “The name of that pore sinner was Shamey, brother.”
I groaned. “What have I been using for brains?”
“He’s daid, brother, gathered to the Lawd. Died in nineteen and twenty-nine. A wood alcohol case, brother. And him in the business.” He raised his voice to the sonorous level. “The same year the rich folks lost their goods and chattels, brother.” The voice went down again. “I didn’t lose me a nickel.”
“I’ll bet you didn’t. Pour some more. He leave any folks — anybody that’s still around?”
He poured another small drink, corked the bottle firmly. “Two is all — before lunch,” he said. “I thank you, brother. Yo’ method of approach is soothin’ to a man’s dignity.” He cleared his throat. “Had a wife,” he said. “Try the phone book.”
He wouldn’t take the bottle. I put it back on my hip. He shook hands with me, folded his on the desk once more and closed his eyes.
The incident, for him, was over.
There was only one Shamey in the phone book. Violet Lu Shamey, 1644 West Fifty-fourth Place. I spent a nickel in a booth.
After a long time a dopey voice said, “Uh-huh. Wh-what is it?”
“Are you the Mrs. Shamey whose husband once ran a place on Central Avenue — a place of entertainment?”
“Wha... what? My goodness sakes alive! My husband’s been gone these seven years. Who did you say you was?”
“Detective Carmady. I’ll be right out. It’s important.”
“Wh... who did you say—”
It was a thick, heavy, clogged voice.
It was a dirty brown house with a dirty brown lawn in front of it. There was a large bare patch around a tough-looking palm tree. On the porch stood one lonely rocker.
The afternoon breeze made the unpruned shoots of last year’s poinsettias tap-tap against the front wall. A line of stiff, yellowish, half-washed clothes jittered on a rusty wire in the side yard.
I drove on a little way and parked my roadster across the street, and walked back.
The bell didn’t work, so I knocked. A woman opened the door blowing her nose. A long yellow face with weedy hair growing down the sides of it. Her body was shapeless in a flannel bathrobe long past all color and design. It was just something around her. Her toes were large and obvious in a pair of broken man’s slippers.
I said, “Mrs. Shamey?”
“You the—?”
“Yeah. I just called you.”
She gestured me in wearily. “I ain’t had time to get cleaned up yet,” she whined.
We sat down in a couple of dingy mission rockers and looked at each other across a living room in which everything was junk except a small new radio droning away behind its dimly lighted panel.
“All the company I got,” she said. Then she tittered. “Bert ain’t done nothing, has he? I don’t get cops calling on me much.”
“Bert?”
“Bert Shamey, mister. My husband.”
She tittered again and flopped her feet up and down. In her titter was a loose alcoholic overtone. It seemed I was not to get away from it that day.
“A joke, mister,” she said. “He’s dead. I hope to Christ there’s enough cheap blondes where he is. He never got enough of them here.”
“I was thinking more about a redhead,” I said.
“I guess he’d use one of those too.” Her eyes, it seemed to me, were not so loose now. “I don’t call to mind. Any special one?”
“Yeah. A girl named Beulah. I don’t know her last name. She worked at the Club on Central. I’m trying to trace her for her folks. It’s a colored place now and, of course, the people there never heard of her.”
“I never went there,” the woman yelled, with unexpected violence. “I wouldn’t know.”
“An entertainer,” I said. “A singer. No chance you’d know her, eh?”