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.
I waited half an hour and then got to see a Mr. Dave Marineau, studio manager. The station manager and the day-program manager were both too busy to see me. Marineau had a small sound-proofed office behind the organ. It was papered with signed photographs.
Marineau was a handsome tall man, somewhat in the Levantine style, with red lips a little too full, a tiny silky mustache, large limpid brown eyes, shiny black hair that might or might not have been marceled, and long, pale, nicotined fingers.
He read my card while I tried to find my Pierrot girl on his wall and didn’t.
“A private detective, eh? What can we do for you?”
I took my Pierrot out and placed it down on his beautiful brown blotter. It was fun watching him stare at it. All sorts of minute things happened to his face, none of which he wanted known. The sum total of them was that he knew the face and that it meant something to him. He looked up at me with a bargaining expression.
“Not very recent,” he said. “But nice. I don’t know whether we could use it or not. Legs, aren’t they?”
“It’s at least eight years old,” I said. “What would you use it for?”
“Publicity, of course. We get one in the radio column about every second month. We’re a small station still.”
“Why?”
“You mean you don’t know who it is?”
“I know who she was,” I said.
“Vivian Baring, of course, Star of our Jumbo Candy Bar program. Don’t you know it? A triweekly serial, half an hour.”
“Never heard of it,” I said. “A radio serial is my idea of the square root of nothing.”
He leaned back and lit a cigarette, although one was burning on the edge of his glass-lined tray.
“All right,” he said sarcastically. “Stop being fulsome and get to business. What is it you want?”
“I’d like her address.”
“I can’t give you that, of course. And you won’t find it in any phone book or directory. I’m sorry.” He started to gather papers together and then saw the second cigarette and that made him feel like a sap. So he leaned back again.
“I’m in a spot,” I said. “I have to find the girl. Quickly. And I don’t want to look like a blackmailer.”
He licked his very full and very red lips. Somehow I got the idea he was pleased at something.
He said softly, “You mean you know something that might hurt Miss Baring — and incidentally the program?”
“You can always replace a star in radio, can’t you?”
He licked his lips some more. Then his mouth tried to get tough. “I seem to smell something nasty,” he said.
“It’s your mustache burning,” I said.
It wasn’t the best gag in the world, but it broke the ice. He laughed. Then he did wingovers with his hands. He leaned forward and got as confidential as a tipster.
“We’re going at this wrong,” he said. “Obviously. You’re probably on the level — you look it — so let me make my play.” He grabbed a leatherbound pad and scribbled on it, tore the leaf off and passed it across.
I read: 1737 North Flores Avenue.
“That’s her address,” he said. “I won’t give the phone number without her O.K. Now treat me like a gentleman. That is, if it concerns the station.”
I tucked his paper into my pocket and thought it over. He had suckered me neatly, put me on my few remaining shreds of decency. I made my mistake.
“How’s the program going?”
“We’re promised network audition. It’s simple, everyday stuff called ‘A Street in Our Town,’ but it’s done beautifully. It’ll wow the country some day. And soon.” He wiped his hand across his fine white brow. “Incidentally, Miss Baring writes the scripts herself.”
“Ah,” I said. “Well, here’s your dirt. She had a boyfriend in the big house. That is he used to be. She got to know him in a Central Avenue joint where she worked once. He’s out and he’s looking for her and he’s killed a man. Now wait a minute—”
He hadn’t turned as white as a sheet, because he didn’t have the right skin. But he looked bad.
“Now wait a minute,” I said. “It’s nothing against the girl and you know it. She’s okay. You can see that in her face. It might take a little counterpublicity, if it all came out. But that’s nothing. Look how they gild some of those tramps in Hollywood.”
“It costs money,” he said. “We’re a poor studio. And the network audition would be off.” There was something faintly dishonest about his manner that puzzled me.
“Nuts,” I said, leaning forward and pounding the desk. “The real thing is to protect her. This tough guy — Steve Skalla is his name — is in love with her. He kills people with his bare hands. He won’t hurt her, but if she has a boyfriend or a husband—”
“She’s not married,” Marineau put in quickly, watching the rise and fall of my pounding hand.
“He might wring his neck for him. That would put it a little too close to her. Skalla doesn’t know where she is. He’s on the dodge, so it’s harder for him to find out. The cops are your best bet, if you have enough drag to keep them from feeding it to the papers.”
“Nix,” he said. “Nix on the cops. You want the job, don’t you?”
“When do you need her here again?”
“Tomorrow night. She’s not on tonight.”
“I’ll hide her for you until then,” I said. “If you want me to. That’s as far as I’d go alone.”
He grabbed my card again, read it, dropped it into a drawer.
“Get out there and dig her out,” he snapped. “If she’s not home, stick till she is. I’ll get a conference upstairs and then we’ll see. Hurry it!”
I stood up. “Want a retainer?” he snapped.
“That can wait.”
He nodded, made some more wingovers with his hands and reached for his phone.
That number on Flores would be up near Sunset Towers, across town from where I was. Traffic was pretty thick, but I hadn’t gone more than twelve blocks before I was aware that a blue coupé which had left the studio parking lot behind me was still behind me.
I jockeyed around in a believable manner, enough to feel sure it was following me. There was one man in it. Not Skalla. The head was a foot too low over the steering wheel.
I jockeyed more and faster and lost it. I didn’t know who it was, and at the moment, I hadn’t time to bother figuring it out.
I reached the Flores Avenue place and tucked my roadster into the curb.
Bronze gates opened into a nice bungalow court, and two rows of bungalows with steep roofs of molded shingles gave an effect a little like the thatched cottages in old English sporting prints. A very little.
The grass was almost too well kept. There was a wide walk and an oblong pool framed in colored tiles and stone benches along its sides. A nice place. The late sun made interesting shadows over its lawns, and except for the motor horns, the distant hum of traffic up on Sunset Boulevard wasn’t unlike the drone of bees.
My number was the last bungalow on the left. Nobody answered the bell, which was set in the middle of the door so that you would wonder how the juice got to where it had to go. That was cute too. I rang time after time, then I started back to the stone benches by the pool to sit down and wait.
A woman passed me walking fast, not in a hurry, but like a woman who always walks fast. She was a thin, sharp brunette in burnt-orange tweeds and a black hat that looked like a pageboy’s hat. It looked like the devil with the burnt-orange tweeds. She had a nose that would be in things and tight lips and she swung a key container.
She went up to my door, unlocked it, went in. She didn’t look like Beulah.
I went back and pushed the bell again. The door opened at once. The dark, sharp-faced woman gave me an up-and-down look and said: “Well?”