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.
“He was!”
Kennedy smiled drolly. “I’ve been poking around this morning. I went down to Rand’s office. I talked with his stenog. I got the names of the men who called on Rand yesterday morning. One of them was a man named Osgood — the only name I didn’t recognize. So I looked up the business directory and found out a man named Charles Osgood was connected with the Packillac Motor Car Company. I sloped around and looked him up. Yes, he’d called on Rand. They’d had a long talk. When Osgood left it was practically settled that Rand was to sell his Colosseum to the Packillac people for $300,000.”
MacBride barked: “Sell the Colosseum— What for?”
“The Packillac people intended to convert it into an assembling and distributing plant.”
MacBride smacked the table. “Then it wasn’t money! It wasn’t money that worried him! It wasn’t, then, suicide!”
“Hold on. We’ve got to believe that he intended to commit suicide. The sale could have been consummated through his estate. When he bought that gun, we must believe it was with the intention of committing suicide. Then, maybe, he changed his mind.”
“So why, in the first place, if he had a chance to sell the Colosseum for $300,000 — why did he even think about suicide?”
Kennedy was dry: “There might have been another reason. Men do the Dutch, you know, because of women. Not often. But now and then.”
MacBride’s voice was low, hoarse: “Then you’ve changed your mind about the suicide theory?”
“Blushingly,” bowed Kennedy.
“Kennedy,” MacBride said. “I always liked you. I never said I didn’t like you, did I?”
Kennedy chuckled. “Old tomato!... How’s the chances of buying me a drink?”
MacBride stood up. “Nah. Not this bellywash Tony sells. Here’s the key to my private stock. Go back to my office. Lower right drawer.”
“Where’s your white whiskers, Santa Claus?”
The shabby phaeton rolled into the flagstone courtyard of Tudor Towers. A liveried chauffeur opened the door and MacBride stepped out, passed into the large, deftly lighted lobby. No hurry here; no noise: Tudor Towers was strictly residential, quietly austere. The elevator that carried the skipper to the top floor was a vehicle of black and chromium, noiseless in its ascent.
MacBride’s hard heels were ably muffled by the thick cushioned runner in the corridor. The oldish maid with the gargoyle’s face let him in. When he entered the living-room he saw Halo Rand sitting in a vis-à-vis couch beside a man wearing a correct morning suit, with a winged collar, dark-rimmed pince-nez. He was about fifty, black-haired, black-eyebrowed. He rose.
Halo Rand, wearing a black crêpe negligee, did not rise; but she said: “Captain MacBride, this is Dr. Landau.” She had been crying. Her eyes were red-rimmed, her face sapped of color; and she was listless, tired.
Landau gripped MacBride’s hand, eyed him with a dark, keen, direct look. “I am delighted to know you, Captain. I have heard a lot about you. I was just trying to console Mrs. Rand.” He threw a profound look at her. “It is not easy, Captain.”
“Family doctor?”
“Well, I’ve attended Dan Rand for quite a few years.” He stopped, inhaled deeply, said in a low, level voice: “I am glad you came, Captain, when you did.” He stared fixedly, remorsefully, into space. “You know, Dan Rand came to my office yesterday morning. We had a long talk together. He wasn’t well, you know. It was marvelous, the way he kept it from everyone. But he was that way... proud; he hated pity. He’d been coming to me regularly and I’d been treating him, but finally, yesterday, he wanted to know the truth. I tried to evade telling the truth. But when a man like Rand becomes angry — And, well, he wanted to know. So I told him. Lungs.” He nodded reflectively, bitterly. “I told him the truth. I told him to give up business. I said it was necessary for him to go west — New Mexico — if he hoped to prolong his life. He thanked me. He walked out of my office. So you see, Captain” — he shrugged — “what happens when a man demands the truth of a doctor.”
Mrs. Rand said: “Do you want something, Emma?”
The maid was still hovering in the doorway. “N-no, madam.”
“Then please go.” For a brief instant Halo Rand seemed angry. Then it passed, and she relaxed, was limp again.
“That’s news, Doctor,” MacBride said.
“I daresay it is. Regrettable news. I hope you will understand my position. I hope you will understand that I tried to keep the truth from Rand a long time.”
“Would this change of climate have helped him?”
“It would only have prolonged his life a little while. I daresay the poor chap took the bravest way out. I only regret that in a way I was responsible—”
MacBride scoffed. “Wasn’t your fault.”
They were silent for a moment and then Landau said: “Well, I shall have to get on.”
When he had gone, MacBride sat down on a straight-backed chair and regarded Mrs. Rand.
He said: “Well, that seems to straighten out the motive for Dan’s suicide.”
“P-poor Dan,” she said in a tiny voice, half sobbing.
“Only I came here,” MacBride went on, “pretty firmly convinced that it wasn’t suicide.”
She looked up, startled. “Wasn’t suicide!”
“Yeah.”
“But... but if it wasn’t—”
He said: “Mrs. Rand, your husband, when he left here at noon yesterday, went and bought a gun off a pawnbroker on Diamond Street. I have a complete description of the gun. It wasn’t the gun we found in Dan’s hand; that was the gun I gave him; it wasn’t the gun that killed him.”
“Oh!” She felt her throat. “You can’t mean—”
He dragged out sardonically, half to himself: “It kind of bears the dirty earmarks of murder.”
She sat bolt upright. “Murder!”
“Mrs. Rand, it appears that the gun I gave him was not in his desk drawer when he came home yesterday at noon. It appears that though he left this house and bought a gun with the intention of committing suicide, he changed his mind later in the day.”
“But his gun must have been there!”
He thought this over. “No,” he said, “it mustn’t have been. He went out and bought another.”
She was taut, white-faced, shaking. “This... this is all incredible, Captain!”
He was point-blank: “Is there another man in your life?”
She jumped to her feet, her eyes flashing. “How dare you say a thing like that?” she cried.
“My job,” he said, rising, eying her levelly, “is not always the pleasantest under the sun. I asked you a question.”
“It is so absurd that I don’t feel called upon to answer it!”
He said: “Of course, you don’t have to answer me — not now, anyhow. Later, you might.”
Her eyes shimmered. For a long moment she stood tall, quivering, shiny-eyed. Then she burst into tears and covered her face and her handkerchief fell to the floor.
“How cruel you are! How utterly cruel!”
He bent, picked up the handkerchief, passed it in front of his face, sniffed, caught the faint odor of perfume. She took her hands from her face and stared at him with tears streaming from her eyes. He gave her back the handkerchief. She broke out into an incoherent hodgepodge of words, wringing her hands, shaking her head.
He raised palms towards her and said: “Please, Mrs. Rand.”
She fell suddenly to the divan and fainted. The oldish maid came swiftly, silently, into the room; flicked a cold, contemptuous look at MacBride.
He offered: “I’ll help you—”
“You needn’t!” the maid snapped.
He colored, stepped back. “Very well. Tell Mrs. Rand I’ll see her again — soon.”