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.
The man sitting behind the wheel of the black car sat up suddenly, taking his eyes off the dingy entrance to Chariot’s flathouse and transferring them to the woman standing with her elbow resting on the edge of the open window at his left.
“No use waiting,” she said. “He’s not coming out.” She jabbed her elbow viciously into his neck just below the chin. Something in her right hand cracked down upon the back of his head. His slid, his lids fluttering down over amazed eyes.
Sarah Watson drew a hairpin from the knob of grey hair under her hat. She thrust the pin into the button in the center of the steering wheel. The horn began to blow.
Sarah leaned over the man slumped under the wheel and peered into the back of the car.
“It’s all right, Mrs. Tarrant,” she soothed the frightened woman. “The cop will come running when he hears the horn and the cop will take the ropes and bandages off you. I haven’t time.”
Sarah withdrew her head, gazed sternly for a moment at the unconscious man behind the wheel, then strode away.
As she mounted the steps of the tenement which housed Chariot, a horn was still blowing behind her, and a ruddy cop was tearing around the corner and down Green Street toward the black car with red wheels. Sarah stepped into the vestibule of the tenement, opened a door into the hall, pressed a firm finger on the bell under Chariot’s name and kept the finger there.
The horn of the black car ceased blowing suddenly. Sarah took her finger off Chariot’s bell. A smell of burned steak permeated the hall.
The door opened two inches. A man’s voice said: “Chariot is not receiving.”
Sarah leaned on the door and said, hoarsely:
“Chariot’s receiving me, if he knows what’s good for him,” and she wedged her common-sense shoe into the two-inch opening.
“Madam, if you wish a reading, you must return later. The crystal is clouded. Chariot cannot—”
“Listen,” Sarah interrupted fiercely, wedging her foot farther in, “the crystal may be clouded, but it ain’t too clouded for me to see that there’s a corpse in Chariot’s kitchen...”
The voice behind the door gasped. Sarah pushed through, stepped into the dimly lit room beyond, slammed the door shut behind her, locked it, and faced a white-robed man whose white turban was over one ear and whose dark, pointed beard was slightly askew.
“Chariot,” Sarah declared, “I got a premonition we ain’t got much time. Now talk. I want to know how you were able to tell that fool Tarrant woman just where and how the body of Alexander Courtwell would be found, and I want to know quick.”
The man in the tipsy turban looked down at the gun in Sarah’s stubby fingers.
“Who...? What...?” he stuttered.
“And what have you done with the man shot down in your kitchen?” Sarah asked.
“My God! You know about that... You think I killed him?”
“Young feller, you’re in a mess and if you want to get out of it, you’d better talk. Sit down here by your glass ball. I’ll sit here on the other side, where your fool clients sit. I’ll look into the crystal myself, young feller, and see what I see. I see you, Chariot, without that brown stain on your skin and without that beard. You’re peaked and white... prison white...”
“Prison! How did you know...?”
“I saw it in the crystal, young man. Yes, you’ve been in jail. Maybe you didn’t belong there...”
“I didn’t. I was...”
“Half of ’em don’t belong there — so they say. You’ve been in jail, Chariot, and somehow, either there or after you got outside, you found out just how and why Alexander Courtwell was going to be killed, and you blabbed it to one of your gullible woman customers. Why?”
“I had to. I had to tell her something. She kept tormenting me, kept coming here every day, begging me to see something in the crystal. I kept seeing things, of course, things I thought she wanted me to see. But I kept thinking of that poor fellow, Courtwell. I kept thinking of how I’d heard those two planning in the next cell, planning to stick him in the heart with the bone-handled knife one of ’em owned, and planning to throw his body in the swamp.
“I kept thinking how I’d heard them whispering about what Courtwell had done to ’em, how he’d cheated ’em out of some big gambling debt. I kept thinking about it, I tell you, and when the Tarrant woman kept nagging me to see something, I kept seeing Courtwell’s body in a swamp with a bone-handled knife sticking out of the heart, and one night, before I knew I’d done it, I blabbed. I didn’t mean to. I didn’t think she’d ever tell anybody, ’til I saw that letter in the paper today, and then I knew something was going to happen — something like that dead man in the kitchen — something like you...”
“Young man,” said Sarah, “worse things could happen to you than me. Now, I’m looking in the crystal I see two men, planning and plotting in a cell. What do they look like?”
“I don’t know.”
“What?”
“I was released the morning after they came in. I never saw them. I only heard their voices.”
“Damn,” said Sarah and leaned over the crystal. “Wait! I’m beginning to see... One of them had a scar on his chin...”
“No,” Chariot shivered, twisted in his chair. “That one spoke to me before he fell down with a bullet in his back. I’d have known the voice, if he’d been one of them.”
“Drat it, man,” Sarah explained. “You can’t hang a murderer on a voice. Think, now! You must have heard those two say something definite, something that would identify them?”
“I heard their names.”
Sarah Watson stood up. She waved her gun under Chariot’s nose.
“At last we’re getting some place,” she said, hoarsely. “Their names, young feller! What were their names?”
A bell shrilled suddenly, went on ringing, filling the dim room with clamor. Chariot sat erect, staring into Sarah’s glinting eyes. Someone began to bang lustily upon the flimsy door to the hall.
“The cops!” Sarah cried. “You’ve got one chance, Chariot. Scuttle down the fire escape. Take my car outside — License 4738. In the side pocket, you’ll find the keys to my flat and the address. Get there quick — and stay there ’til I come. It’s your one chance, Chariot. There’s a dead man in your kitchen and your fingerprints are all over the place and you’ve been to jail...”
Chariot got up, still staring at Sarah.
“Leave that white nightgown in the kitchen,”
she said, “and take the kitten with you. It might starve before you get back here again.”
Chariot looked into her grim eyes a moment longer, then turned and fled. Sarah got up and opened the door. O’Reilly and Ben Todd stood outside.
“Too late, boys,” she lied. “The swami’s evaporated... climbed up a rope and disappeared... magicked himself into thin air or something. There’s a man in the kitchen and you might ask him, but I don’t think he’ll answer. He’s dead.”
The police car sped through the night, O’Reilly at the wheel, Sarah Watson bolt upright beside him, Ben Todd lounging in the rear.
“A little speed, please, Sergeant,” Sarah urged. “I’m used to speed.”
“You’ll have to get unused to it, then,” O’Reilly chuckled. “Your racing car is gone and Chariot, alias Eddie Danville, has gone with it.”
“You know, Sergeant,” said Sarah, dreamily, “Chariot — Eddie Danville, I mean — didn’t look like a boy that would steal a poor old woman’s car.”
“Whadya know about how he looked?”
“I saw his prison picture, didn’t I? A nice looking feller. Didn’t look like he belonged in jail.”