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 picked a way to the bedroom and prowled my flash around discreetly, after lowering the shades and pulling the drapes across them. The light dropped on a tumbled bed, on daubs of print powder, on cigarette butts on the window sills and heel marks in the nap of the carpet. There was a green and silver toilet set on the dressing table and three suitcases in the closet. There was a built-in bureau back in there with a lock that meant business. I had a chilled-steel screwdriver with me as well as the flash. I jimmied it.
The jewelry wasn’t worth a thousand dollars. Perhaps not half. But it meant a lot to a girl in show business. I put it back where I got it.
The living room had shut windows and a queer, unpleasant, sadistic smell. The law enforcement had taken care of the Vat 69, to make it easier for the fingerprint men. I had to use my own. I got a chair that hadn’t been bled on into a corner, wet my throat and waited in the darkness.
A shade flapped in the basement or somewhere. That made me wet my throat again. Somebody came out of a house half a dozen blocks away and whooped. A door banged. Silence. The tree frogs started again, then the crickets. Then the electric clock on the radio got louder than all the other sounds together.
Then I went to sleep.
When I woke up the moon had gone from the front windows and a car had stopped somewhere. Light, delicate, careful steps separated themselves from the night. They were outside the front door. A key fumbled in the lock.
In the opening door the dim sky showed a head without a hat. The slope of the hill was too dark to outline any more. The door clicked shut.
Steps rustled on the rug. I already had the lamp cord in my fingers. I yanked it and there was light.
The girl didn’t make a sound, not a whisper of sound. She just pointed the gun at me.
I said, “Hello, Beulah.”
She was worth waiting for.
Not too tall, not too short; that girl. She had the long legs that can walk and dance. Her hair even by the light of the one lamp was like a brush fire at night. Her face had laughter wrinkles at the corner of the eyes. Her mouth could laugh.
The features were shadowed and had that drawn look that makes some faces more beautiful because it makes them more delicate. I couldn’t see her eyes. They might have been blue enough to make you jump, but I couldn’t see.
The gun looked about a .32, but had the extreme right-angled grip of a Mauser.
After a while she said very softly, “Police, I suppose.”
She had a nice voice, too. I still think of it, at times.
I said, “Let’s sit down and talk. We’re all alone here. Ever drink out of the bottle?”
She didn’t answer. She looked down at the gun she was holding, half smiled, shook her head.
“You wouldn’t make two mistakes,” I said. “Not a girl as smart as you are.”
She tucked the gun into the side pocket of a long ulster-like coat with a military collar.
“Who are you?”
“Just a shamus. Private detective to you. Carmady is the name. Need a lift?”
I held my bottle out. It hadn’t grown to my hand yet. I still had to hold it.
“I don’t drink. Who hired you?”
“KLBL. To protect you from Steve Skalla.”
“So they know,” she said. “So they know about him.”
I digested that and said nothing.
“Who’s been here?” she went on sharply. She was still standing in the middle of the room, with her hands in her coat pockets now, and no hat.
“Everybody but the plumber,” I said. “He’s a little late, as usual.”
“You’re one of those men.” Her nose seemed to curl a little. “Drugstore comics.”
“No,” I said. “Not really. It’s just a way I get talking to the people I have to talk to. Skalla came back again and ran into trouble and got shot up and arrested. He’s in the hospital. Pretty bad.”
She didn’t move. “How bad?”
“He might live if he’d have surgery. Doubtful, even with that. Hopeless without. He has three in the intestines and one in the liver.”
She moved at last and started to sit down. “Not in that chair,” I said quickly. “Over here.”
She came over and sat near me, on one of the davenports. Lights twisted in her eyes. I could see them now. Little twisting lights like Catherine wheels spinning brightly.
She said, “Why did he come back?”
“He thought he ought to tidy up. Remove the body and so on. A nice guy, Skalla.”
“Do you think so?”
“Lady, if nobody else in the world thinks so, I do.”
“I’ll take that drink,” she said.
I handed her the bottle. I grabbed it away in a hurry. “Gosh,” I said. “You have to break in on this stuff.”
She looked towards the side door that led to the bedroom back of me.
“Gone to the morgue,” I said. “You can go in there.”
She stood up at once and went out of the room. She came back almost at once.
“What have they got on Steve?” she asked. “If he recovers.”
“He killed a nigger over on Central this morning. It was more or less self-defense on both sides. I don’t know. Except for Marineau he might get a break.”
“Marineau?” she said.
“Yeah. You knew he killed Marineau.”
“Don’t be silly,” she said. “I killed Dave Marineau.”
“Okay,” I said. “But that’s not the way Steve wants it.”
She stared at me. “You mean Steve came back here deliberately to take the blame?”
“If he had to, I guess. I think he really meant to cart Marineau off to the desert and lose him. Only a woman showed up here — Mrs. Marineau.”
“Yes,” the girl said tonelessly. “She thinks I was his mistress. That greasy spoon.”
“Were you?” I asked.
“Don’t try that again,” she said. “Even if I did work on Central Avenue once.” She went out of the room again.
Sounds of a suitcase being yanked about came into the living room. I went in after her. She was packing pieces of cobweb and packing them as if she liked nice things nicely packed.
“You don’t wear that stuff down in the tank,” I told her, leaning in the door.
She ignored me some more. “I was going to make a break for Mexico,” she said. “Then South America. I didn’t mean to shoot him. He roughed me up and tried to blackmail me into something and I went and got the gun. Then we struggled again and it went off. Then I ran away.”
“Just what Skalla said he did,” I said. “Hell, couldn’t you just have shot the — on purpose?”
“Not for your benefit,” she said. “Or any cop. Not when I did eight months in Dalhart, Texas, once for rolling a drunk. Not with that Marineau woman yelling her head off that I seduced him and then got sick of him.”
“A lot she’ll say,” I grunted. “After I tell how she spat in Skalla’s face when he had four slugs in him.”
She shivered. Her face whitened. She went on taking the things out of the suitcase and putting them in again.
“Did you roll the drunk really?”
She looked up at me, then down. “Yes,” she whispered.
I went over nearer to her. “Got any bruises or torn clothes to show?” I asked.
“No.”
“Too bad,” I said, and took hold of her.
Her eyes flamed at first and then turned to black stone, I tore her coat off, tore her up plenty, put hard fingers into her arms and neck and used my knuckles on her mouth. I let her go, panting. She reeled away from me, but didn’t quite fall.
“We’ll have to wait for the bruises to set and darken,” I said. “Then we’ll go downtown.”
She began to laugh. Then she went over to the mirror and looked at herself. She began to cry.