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.
She blew her nose again, on one of the dirtiest handkerchiefs I ever saw. “I got a cold.”
“You know what’s good for it,” I said.
She gave me a swift, raking glance. “I’m fresh out of that.”
“I’m not.”
“Gawd,” she said. “You’re no cop. No cop ever brought a drink.”
I brought out my pint of bourbon and balanced it on my knee. It was almost full still. The clerk at the Hotel Sans Souci was no reservoir. The woman’s seaweed-colored eyes jumped at the bottle. Her tongue coiled around her lips.
“Man, that’s liquor,” she sighed. “I don’t care who you are. Hold it careful, mister.”
She heaved up and waddled out of the room and came back with two thick, smeared glasses.
“No fixin’s,” she said. “Just what you brought.” She held the glasses out.
I poured her a slug that would have made me float over a wall. A smaller one for me. She put hers down like an aspirin tablet and looked at the bottle. I poured her another. She took that over to her chair. Her eyes had turned two shades browner.
“This stuff dies painless with me,” she said. “It never knows what hit it. What was we talkin’ about?”
“A red-haired girl named Beulah. Used to work at the joint. Remember better now?”
“Yeah.” She used her second drink. I went over and stood the bottle on the table beside her. She used some out of that.
“Hold on to your chair and don’t step on no snakes,” she said. “I got me a idea.”
She got up out of the chair, sneezed, almost lost her bathrobe, slapped it back against her stomach and stared at me coldly.
“No peekin’,” she said, and wagged a finger at me and went out of the room again, hitting the side of the door casement on her way.
From the back of the house presently there were various types of crashes. A chair seemed to be kicked over. A bureau drawer was pulled out too far and smashed to the floor. There was fumbling and thudding and loud language. After a while, then, there was the slow click of a lock and what seemed to be the screech of a trunk top going up. More fumbling and banging things around. A tray landed on the floor, I thought. Then a chortle of satisfaction.
She came back into the room holding a package tied with faded pink tape. She threw it in my lap.
“Look ’em over, Lou. Photos. Newspaper stills. Not that them tramps ever got in no newspapers except by way of the police blotter. They’re people from the joint. By God, they’re all the — left me. Them and his old clothes.”
She sat down and reached for the whisky again.
I untied the tape and looked through a bunch of shiny photos of people in professional poses. Not all of them were women. The men had foxy faces and racetrack clothes or make-up. Hoofers and comics from the filling-station circuits. Not many of them ever got west of Main Street. The women had good legs and displayed them more than Will Hays would have liked. But their faces were as threadbare as a bookkeeper’s coat. All but one.
She wore a Pierrot costume, at least from the waist up. Under the high conical white hat her fluffed-out hair might have been red. Her eyes had laughter in them. I won’t say her face was unspoiled. I’m not that good at faces. But it wasn’t like the others. It hadn’t been kicked around. Somebody had been nice to that face. Perhaps just a tough mug like Steve Skalla. But he had been nice. In the laughing eyes there was still hope.
I threw the others aside and carried this one over to the sprawled, glassy-eyed woman in the chair. I poked it under her nose.
“This one,” I said. “Who is she? What happened to her?”
She stared at it fuzzily, then chuckled.
“Tha’s Steve Skalla’s girl, Lou. Heck, I forgot her name.”
“Beulah,” I said. “Beulah’s her name.”
She watched me under her tawny, mangled eyebrows. She wasn’t so drunk.
“Yeah?” she said. “Yeah?”
“Who’s Steve Skalla?” I rapped.
“Bouncer down at the joint, Lou.” She giggled again. “He’s in the pen.”
“Oh no, he isn’t,” I said. “He’s in town. He’s out. I know him. He just got in.”
Her face went to pieces like a clay pigeon. Instantly I knew who had turned Skalla up to the local law. I laughed. I couldn’t miss. Because she knew. If she hadn’t known, she wouldn’t have bothered to be cagey about Beulah. She couldn’t have forgotten Beulah. Nobody could.
Her eyes went far back into her head. We stared into each other’s faces. Then her hand snatched at the photo.
I stepped back and tucked it away in an inside pocket.
“Have another drink,” I said. I handed her the bottle.
She took it, lingered over it, gurgled it slowly down her throat, staring at the faded carpet.
“Yeah,” she said whisperingly. “I turned him in but he never knew. Money in the bank he was. Money in the bank.”
“Give me the girl,” I said. “And Skalla knows nothing from me.”
“She’s here,” the woman said. “She’s in radio. I heard her once on KLBL. She’s changed her name, though. I dunno.”
I had another hunch. “You do know,” I said. “You’re bleeding her still. Shamey left you nothing. What do you live on? You’re bleeding her because she pulled herself up in the world, from people like you and Skalla. That’s it, isn’t it?”
“Money in the bank,” she croaked. “Hundred a month. Reg’lar as rent. Yeah.”
The bottle was on the floor again. Suddenly, without being touched, it fell over on its side. Whisky gurgled out. She didn’t move to get it.
“Where is she?” I pounded on. “What’s her name?”
“I dunno, Lou. Part of the deal. Get the money in a cashier’s check. I dunno. Honest.”
“The hell you don’t!” I snarled. “Skalla—”
She came to her feet in a surge and screamed at me, “Get out, you! Get out before I call a cop! Get out, you—!”
“Okay, okay.” I put a hand out soothingly. “Take it easy. I won’t tell Skalla. Just take it easy.”
She sat down again slowly and retrieved the almost empty bottle. After all I didn’t have to have a scene now. I could find out other ways.
She didn’t even look towards me as I went out. I went out into the crisp fall sunlight and got into my car. I was a nice boy, trying to get along. Yes, I was a swell guy. I liked knowing myself. I was the kind of guy who chiseled a sodden old wreck out of her life secrets to win a ten-dollar bet.
I drove down to the neighborhood drugstore and shut myself in its phone booth to call Hiney.
“Listen,” I told him, “the widow of the man that ran Shamey’s when Skalla worked there is still alive. Skalla might call to see her, if he thinks he dares.”
I gave him the address. He said sourly, “We almost got him. A prowl car was talkin’ to a Seventh Street conductor at the end of the line. He mentioned a guy that size and with them clothes. He got off at Third and Alexandria, the conductor says. What he’ll do is break into some big house where the folks is away. So we got him bottled.”
I told him that was fine.
KLBL was on the western fringe of that part of the city that melts into Beverly Hills. It was housed in a flat stucco building, quite unpretentious, and there was a service station in the form of a Dutch windmill on the corner of the lot. The call letters of the station revolved in neon letters on the sails of the windmill.
I went into a ground-floor reception room, one side of which was glass and showed an empty broadcasting studio with a stage and ranged chairs for an audience. A few people sat around the reception room trying to look magnetic, and the blond receptionist was spearing chocolates out of a large box with nails that were almost royal purple in color.