The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps
- Автор: Anderson Lars, Barr Randolph
- Год: 2007
- Язык: английский
- Год: Vintage Books
- ISBN: 978-0-307-28048-0
- Жанр: Криминальные детективы
Электронная книга - «The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps». Краткое содержание книги:
Weighing in at over a thousand pages, containing over forty-seven stories and two novels, this book is big baby, bigger and more powerful than a freight train — a bullet couldn’t pass through it. Here are the best stories and every major writer who ever appeared in celebrated Pulps like Black Mask, Dime Detective, Detective Fiction Weekly, and more. These are the classic tales that created the genre and gave birth to hard-hitting detectives who smoke criminals like packs of cigarettes; sultry dames whose looks are as lethal as a dagger to the chest; and gin-soaked hideouts where conversations are just preludes to murder. This is crime fiction at its gritty best.
“She would.”
“She got it. Which means she’s probably with the crystal gazer now, picking his brains dry, and she’ll have that ten thousand dollars reward in her damn, thieving fists before I...”
“Listen,” said Ben Todd. “I don’t allow anybody to damn Sarah Watson. She may be an old battle-axe and an old liar but she’s not a damn old thief.”
“She is a damn old thief!” shouted O’Reilly, thrusting his blue jaw close to Ben Todd’s: “I came here with every intention of sharing that reward with her if she’d help me by going to that crystal gazer and picking his brains dry before we closed in on him. Now she’s got the jump on me, and she’ll cop the whole reward!”
Ben Todd yawned and said:
“Well, you’re giving her a good start, anyway, O’Reilly, while you stand here, sizzling in your own grease. Listen, O’Reilly! I just thought of something! If the crystal gazer knew about the murder before the murder was done, then he’s involved, and if he’s involved...”
“If he’s involved! Of course he’s involved! What else do you think I’ve been thinking? What I should have done was to close in on him first and sweat him after, instead of thinking of conniving with Sarah to pick his brains first...”
Ben Todd reached for his hat and took a long stride toward the door.
“The old girl may be with him now!” he cried. “If he gets wise to what she’s after, then Sarah’s in...”
O’Reilly reached over Ben Todd’s shoulder and opened the door.
“Of course she’s in danger!” he admitted. “What else do you think I’ve been thinking? If you don’t move quicker, Ben Todd, I’ll grind down your heels.”
At just about the moment that Sergeant O’Reilly first made his entrance into the office of the Watson Detective Agency, Sarah Watson herself was leaning upon the rickety stoop railing of a certain flathouse, conversing with a janitress perfumed with gin.
The thick shaft of Sarah’s sturdily corseted body was wrapped in nondescript, rusty black garments. Her antique headgear was set at a hurried angle on her straggling gray hair. There was a slight, unaccustomed tinge of hectic red on the high cheek bones under her grey, bristling-browed eyes. There was, however, no hint of excitement in the hoarse, downright voice with which she fired questions at the vague and wavery target of the janitress.
“She left in a hurry, eh? In a big, black car with red wheels? Walking between two men, eh? Did you get a look at those two men?”
“Well, now.” The janitress ran a soiled hand over her mouth. “Well, I tried to get a look, because it seemed kind of queer, Mrs. Tarrant going off with two strange men like that and her a new widow woman that’s always trying to communicate with her dead husband through the spirits and such, but the men walked awful fast. Seems to me they was both dark and one of ’em had his lip puckered down at the side by a scar, sort of, and the car was the swellest thing on four wheels I ever seen, four red wheels...”
“What time? Think, woman! Remember I’m paying you to think.”
“Am thinking. Fifty cents will buy... Well, don’t glare at me that way, missus. They left right before twelve, because I remember, I was wiping up the halls right after and I smelled something in Mrs. Tarrant’s kitchen and her door was open and I edged in and the smell was beans — burnt to a crisp.”
“Burnt to a crisp, eh? Mrs. Tarrant must have left in a hurry! Well, here’s your fifty cents and take my advice and put it in the bank and not down your gullet.”
Sarah Watson started briskly down the stoop, wheeled abruptly and transfixed the janitress with a glinting eye.
“By the way, what’s the name of the crystal gazer Mrs. Tarrant goes to?” she asked. “I might find her there...”
“You might. She’s been running there enough, trying to see her dead husband in heaven, but it’s my opinion she’s been looking in the wrong place for him... Don’t growl, missus. It’s Chariot she goes to. Chariot, his name is, and his place is on Green Street, Number...”
Sarah took a little black notebook from her capacious handbag and noted down the address.
A ramshackle vehicle which faintly resembled an automobile chugged to a stop at a corner on Green Street. Sarah Watson stepped out and strode down the street.
Halfway down the block, she passed a dirty first-floor window with a sign in it which said: “Chariot.” She strode by the window, about-faced suddenly, and disappeared down an odorous alley which led to a backyard.
Five minutes later, she mounted the first flight of an iron fire escape ladder and was sitting, bolt upright, on the top step of the ladder, gazing calmly through a rift in the dirty curtains on the open back window of Chariot’s flat.
There was no one in the kitchen beyond the curtains but something was sizzling on the stove. The nostrils of Sarah’s beak quivered appreciatively as a little breeze blew the fragrance out.
Presently, a door in the kitchen opened. For a moment, the aroma of cooking was diluted by the heavy odor of incense and the room beyond the kitchen showed dimly. Then, a swarthy man in a white robe and white turban closed himself into the kitchen, ripped off his white wrappings, flung them on the floor, yanked off his dark, pointed beard, slung it at a chair, kicked at the discarded robe and turban and bent over the sink. Outside on the fire escape, Sarah Watson nodded grimly.
The man turned from the sink suddenly, facing the window. Sarah edged closer to the wall of the building. The man was clothed in dark trousers and undershirt. He was towelling vigorously. His face was no longer swarthy. It was white, very white — and young.
A fuzzy grey kitten rolled out from under the kitchen table and dabbed at the fringes of black beard protruding from the edge of the chair. The man threw down his towel, picked the kitten up by its scruff, grinned at it, and thrust its soft body under his chin. With the kitten cuddled between his collar bone and his jaw, the man bent over a pan on the stove and expertly flipped over a sizzling steak. He bent over another pan, stirring...
A square door in the wall between the man at the stove and the window where Sarah Watson watched began to open, very slowly, very silently. Sarah edged closer to the curtain. The stubby fingers of her right hand began to slide into her handbag...
Suddenly the opening door flew wide, revealing the black hole of a dumbwaiter shaft. A man leaped noiselessly through the door and into the kitchen. He was dark and his profile showed a mouth drawn down by a puckered scar. Before his feet hit the oilcloth, he had placed a gun between the shoulder blades of the man bending over the stove.
The man at the stove stiffened but did not move. The kitten clawed at his shoulder and dropped to the floor, squealing.
“Take it now, snitcher—!” the man with the gun snarled.
A gun blasted. The man with the scar dropped his gun, clawed at his back, slid slowly to the floor. The man at the stove bent over the prostrate man, straightened and looked up at the billowing curtains at the back window. There was smoke still wreathing out of the rift in those curtains, but nothing else.
A few minutes later, a brilliant female in rusty black strode along Green Street and climbed into the ancient automobile parked at the corner. For a moment or so, she sat behind the wheel, her hard bosom rising and falling hurriedly, her stubby fingers wiping away the moisture that beaded the incipient mustache upon her upper lip.
Then the old car coughed and chugged down Green Street. Halfway down the block, it slowed. There was a car parked opposite the window in which Chariot’s sign appeared. It was a fine car, black, with red wheels.
Sarah Watson’s car snorted on a few more yards and stopped. Sarah got out.