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 didn’t push it, I just looked at it. The door wasn’t quite shut. A fairly wide crack of dim light edged around its panel. I pushed it an inch. Then I pushed it far enough to look in.
Then I listened. The silence of that house was what made me go in. It was one of those utterly dead silences that come after an explosion. Or perhaps I hadn’t eaten enough dinner. Anyway I went in.
The long living room went clear to the back, which wasn’t very far as it was a small house. At the back there were French doors and the metal railing of a balcony showed through the glass. The balcony would be very high above the slope of the hill, built as the house was.
There were nice lamps, nice chairs with deep sides, nice tables, a thick apricot-colored rug, two small cozy davenports, one facing and one right-angled to a fireplace with an ivory mantel and a miniature Winged Victory on that. A fire was laid behind the copper screen, but not lit.
The room had a hushed, warm smell. It looked like a room where people got made comfortable. There was a bottle of Vat 69 on a low table with glasses and a copper bucket, and tongs.
I fixed the door about as I had found it and just stood. Silence. Time passed. It passed in the dry whirr of an electric clock on a console radio, in the far-off hoot of an auto horn down on Beachwood half a mile below, in the distant hornet drone of a night-flying plane, in the metallic wheeze of a cricket under the house.
Then I wasn’t alone any longer.
Mrs. Marineau slid into the room at the far end, by a door beside the French doors. She didn’t make any more noise than a butterfly. She still wore the pillbox black hat and the burnt-orange tweeds, and they still looked like hell together. She had a small glove in her hand wrapped around the butt of a gun. I don’t know why. I never did find that out.
She didn’t see me at once and when she did it didn’t mean anything much. She just lifted the gun a little and slid along the carpet towards me, her lip clutched back so far that I couldn’t even see the teeth that clutched it.
But I had a gun out now myself. We looked at each other across our guns. Maybe she knew me. I hadn’t any idea from her expression.
I said, “You got them, huh?”
She nodded a little. “Just him,” she said.
“Put the gun down. You’re all through with it.”
She lowered it a little. She hadn’t seemed to notice the Colt I was pushing through the air in her general direction. I lowered that too.
She said, “She wasn’t here.”
Her voice had a dry, impersonal sound, flat, without timbre.
“Miss Baring wasn’t here?” I asked.
“No.”
“Remember me?”
She took a better look at me but her face didn’t light up with any pleasure.
“I’m the guy that was looking for Miss Baring,” I said. “You told me where to come. Remember? Only Dave sent a loogan to put the arm on me and ride me around while he came up here himself and promoted something. I couldn’t guess what.”
The brunette said, “You’re no cop. Dave said you were a fake.”
I made a broad, hearty gesture and moved a little closer to her, unobtrusively. “Not a city cop,” I admitted. “But a cop. And that was a long time ago. Things have happened since then. Haven’t they?”
“Yes,” she said. “Especially to Dave. Hee, hee.”
It wasn’t a laugh. It wasn’t meant to be a laugh. It was just a little steam escaping through a safety valve.
“Hee, hee,” I said. We looked at each other like a couple of nuts being Napoleon and Josephine.
The idea was to get close enough to grab her gun. I was still too far.
“Anybody here besides you?” I asked.
“Just Dave.”
“I had an idea Dave was here.” It wasn’t clever, but it was good for another foot.
“Oh, Dave’s here,” she agreed. “Yes. You’d like to see him?”
“Well — if it isn’t too much trouble.”
“Hee, hee,” she said. “No trouble at all. Like this.”
She jerked the gun up and snapped the trigger at me. She did it without moving a muscle of her face.
The gun not going off puzzled her, in a sort of vague, week-before-last manner. Nothing immediate or important. I wasn’t there any more. She lifted the gun up, still being very careful about the black kid glove wrapped about its butt, and peered into the muzzle. That didn’t get her anywhere. She shook the gun. Then she was aware of me again. I hadn’t moved. I didn’t have to, now.
“I guess it’s not loaded,” she said.
“Maybe just all used up,” I said. “Too bad. These little ones only hold seven. My shells won’t fit, either. Let’s see if I can do anything?”
She put the gun in my hand. Then she dusted her hands together. Her eyes didn’t seem to have any pupils, or to be all pupils. I wasn’t sure which.
The gun wasn’t loaded. The magazine was quite empty. I sniffed the muzzle. The gun hadn’t been fired since it was last cleaned.
That got me. Up to that point it had looked fairly simple, if I could get by without any more murder. But this threw it. I hadn’t any idea what either of us was talking about now.
I dropped her pistol into my side pocket and put mine back on my hip and chewed my lip for a couple of minutes, to see what might turn up. Nothing did.
The sharp-faced Mrs. Marineau merely stood still and stared at a spot between my eyes, fuzzily, like a rather blotto tourist seeing a swell sunset on Mount Whitney.
“Well,” I said at last, “let’s kind of look through the house and see what’s what.”
“You mean Dave?”
“Yeah, we could take that in.”
“He’s in the bedroom.” She tittered. “He’s at home in bedrooms.”
I touched her arm and turned her around. She turned obediently, like a small child.
“But this one will be the last one he’ll be at home in,” she said. “Hee, hee.”
“Oh, yeah. Sure,” I said.
My voice sounded to me like the voice of a midget.
Dave Marineau was dead all right — if there had been any doubt about it.
A white bowl lamp with raised figures shone beside a large bed in a green and silver bedroom. It was the only light in the room. It filtered a hushed kind of light down at his face. He hadn’t been dead long enough to get the corpse look.
He lay sprawled casually on the bed, a little sideways, as though he had been standing in front of it when he was shot. One arm was flung out as loose as a strand of kelp and the other was under him. His open eyes were flat and shiny and almost seemed to hold a self-satisfied expression. His mouth was open a little and the lamplight glistened on the edges of his upper teeth.
I didn’t see the wound at all at first. It was high up, on the right side of his head, in the temple, but back rather far, almost far enough to drive the petrosal bone through the brain. It was powder-burned, rimmed with dusky red, and a fine trickle spidered down from it and got browner as it got thinner against his cheek.
“Hell, that’s a contact wound,” I snapped at the woman. “A suicide wound.”
She stood at the foot of the bed and stared at the wall above his head. If she was interested in anything besides the wall, she didn’t show it.
I lifted his still limp right hand and sniffed at the place where the base of the thumb joins the palm. I smelled cordite, then I didn’t smell cordite, then I didn’t know whether I smelled cordite or not. It didn’t matter, of course. A paraffin test would prove it one way or the other.
I put the hand down again, carefully, as though it were a fragile thing of great value. Then I plowed around on the bed, went down on the floor, got halfway under the bed, swore, got up again and rolled the dead man to one side enough to look under him. There was a bright, brassy shellcase but no gun.