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.
“Miss Baring? Miss Vivian Baring?”
“Who?” It was like a stab.
“Miss Vivian Baring — of KLBL,” I said. “I was told—”
She flushed tightly and her lips almost bit her teeth. “If this is a gag, I don’t care for it,” she said. She started the door towards my nose.
I said hurriedly, “Mr. Marineau sent me.”
That stopped the door closing. It opened again, very wide. The woman’s mouth was as thin as a cigarette paper. Thinner.
“I,” she said very distinctly, “happen to be Mr. Marineau’s wife. This happens to be Mr. Marineau’s residence. I wasn’t aware that this... this—”
“Miss Vivian Baring,” I said. But it wasn’t uncertainty about the name that had stopped her. It was plain, cold fury.
“—that this Miss Baring,” she went on, exactly as though I had not said a word, “had moved in here. Mr. Marineau must be feeling very amusing today.”
“Listen, lady. This isn’t—”
The slamming door almost made a wave in the pool down the walk. I looked at it for a moment, and then I looked at the other bungalows. If we had an audience, it was keeping out of sight. I rang the bell again.
The door jumped open this time. The brunette was livid. “Get off my porch!” she yelled. “Get off before I have you thrown off!”
“Wait a minute,” I growled. “This may be a gag for him, but it’s no gag to the police.”
That got her. Her whole expression got soft and interested.
“Police?” she cooed.
“Yeah. It’s serious. It involves a murder. I’ve got to find this Miss Baring. Not that she, you understand—”
The brunette dragged me into the house and shut the door and leaned against it, panting.
“Tell me,” she said breathlessly. “Tell me. Has that redheaded something got herself mixed up in a murder?” Suddenly her mouth snapped wide open and her eyes jumped at me.
I slapped a hand over her mouth. “Take it easy!” I pleaded. “It’s not your Dave. Not Dave, lady.”
“Oh.” She got rid of my hand and let out a sigh and looked silly. “No, of course. Just for a moment... Well, who is it?”
“Nobody you know. I can’t broadcast things like that, anyway. I want Miss Baring’s address. Have you got it?”
I didn’t know any reason why she would have. Or rather, I might be able to think of one, if I shook my brains hard enough.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I have. Indeed, I have. Mister Smarty doesn’t know that. Mister Smarty doesn’t know as much as he thinks he knows, does Mister Smarty? He—”
“The address is all I can use right now,” I growled. “And I’m in a bit of a hurry, Mrs. Marineau. Later on” — I gave her a meaning look — “I’m sure I’ll want to talk to you.”
“It’s on Heather Street,” she said. “I don’t know the number. But I’ve been there. I’ve been past there. It’s only a short street, with four or five houses, and only one of them on the downward side of the hill.” She stopped, added, “I don’t think the house has a number. Heather Street is at the top of Beachwood Drive.”
“Has she a phone?”
“Of course, but a restricted number. She would have. They all do, those—. If I knew it—”
“Yeah,” I said. “You’d call her up and chew her ear off. Well, thank you very much, Mrs. Marineau. This is confidential, of course. I mean confidential.”
“Oh, by all means!”
She wanted to talk longer but I pushed past her out of the house and went back down the flagged walk. I could feel her eyes on me all the way, so I didn’t do any laughing.
The lad with the restless hands and the full red lips had had what he thought was a very cute idea. He had given me the first address that came into his head, his own. Probably he had expected his wife to be out. I didn’t know. It looked awfully silly, however I thought about it — unless he was pressed for time.
Wondering why he should be pressed for time, I got careless. I didn’t see the blue coupé double-parked almost at the gates until I also saw the man step from behind it.
He had a gun in his hand.
He was a big man, but not anything like Skalla’s size. He made a sound with his lips and held his left palm out and something glittered in it. It might have been a piece of tin or a police badge.
Cars were parked along both sides of Flores. Half a dozen people should have been in sight. There wasn’t one — except the big man with the gun and myself.
He came closer, making soothing noises with his mouth.
“Pinched,” he said. “Get in my hack and drive it, like a nice lad.” He had a soft, husky voice, like an overworked rooster trying to croon.
“You all alone?”
“Yeah, but I got the gun.” He sighed. “Act nice and you’re as safe as the bearded woman at a Legion convention. Safer.”
He was circling slowly, carefully. I saw the metal thing now.
“That’s a special badge,” I said. “You’ve got no more right to pinch me than I have to pinch you.”
“In the hack, bo. Be nice or your guts lie on this here street. I got orders.” He started to pat me gently. “Hell, you ain’t even rodded.”
“Skip it!” I growled. “Do you think you could take me if I was?”
I walked over to his blue coupé and slid under its wheel. The motor was running. He got in beside me and put his gun in my side and we went on down the hill.
“Take her west on Santa Monica,” he husked. “Then up, say, Canyon Drive to Sunset. Where the bridle path is.”
I took her west on Santa Monica, past the bottom of Holloway, then a row of junk yards and some stores. The street widened and became a boulevard past Doheney. I let the car out a little to feel it. He stopped me doing that. I swung north to Sunset and then west again. Lights were being lit in big houses up the slopes. The dusk was full of radio music.
I eased down and took a look at him before it got too dark. Even under the pulled-down hat on Flores I had seen the eyebrows, but I wanted to be sure. So I looked again. They were the eyebrows, all right.
They were almost as even, almost as smoothly black, and fully as wide as a half-inch strip of black plush pasted across his broad face above the eyes and nose. There was no break in the middle. His nose was large and coarse-grained and had hung out over too many beers.
“Bub McCord,” I said. “Ex-copper. So you’re in the snatch racket now. It’s Folsom for you this time, baby.”
“Aw, can it.” He looked hurt and leaned back in the corner. Bub McCord, caught in a graft tangle, had done a three in Quentin. Next time he would go to the recidivist prison, which is Folsom in our state.
He leaned his gun on his left thigh and cuddled the door with his fat back. I let the car drift and he didn’t seem to mind. It was betweentimes, after the homeward rush of the office man, before the evening crowd came out.
“This ain’t no snatch,” he complained. “We just don’t want no trouble. You can’t expect to go up against an organization like KLBL with a two-bit shakedown, and get no kickback. It ain’t reasonable.” He spat out of the window without turning his head. “Keep her rollin’, bo.”
“What shakedown?”
“You wouldn’t know, would you? Just a wandering peeper with his head stuck in a knothole, huh? That’s you. Innocent, as the guy says.”
“So you work for Marineau. That’s all I wanted to know. Of course I knew it already, after I back-alleyed you, and you showed up again.”
“Neat work, bo... but keep her rollin’. Yeah, I had to phone in. Just caught him.”
“Where do we go from here?”
“I take care of you till nine-thirty. After that we go to a place.”