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 not offended; he was too much of a soldier for that. It was that he just didn’t have any illusions about the romance of criminal work. That was a lot of applesauce that looked good in print and nowhere else. He had spent two months in the Border Patrol on some tough work and had been promised a week’s leave. He had got but two days of it. Two days on the Galveston beach, and when the messenger boy found him with that fatal telegram from the Adjutant-General he was waiting on a fair young person who would be due in ten minutes.
That annoyed him no end. He had earned a rest, why couldn’t he get it? Now there was more dirty work to be done. That’s all he had ever done, it seemed. God knows, there had been plenty of it in the old Lafayette Escadrille, where he won his wings, and that crazy hitch with the Kosciusko Squadron over in Poland hadn’t been any pink tea. And those four years down in the Guatemalan banana country hadn’t made a dilettante out of him.
Go into any Latin-American country and mention Captain Jerry Frost and nobody would have the slightest idea of whom you spoke. But mention El Beneficio to any soldado and he was all attention. In those countries where men still die for illusions and assume musical names, they tell you that El Beneficio was a bold, roistering Americano who could handle women and a machine-gun like nobody’s business.
No, he was no stranger to dirty work.
“Well,” the Adjutant-General interrupted his reveries, “you can take the pick of the staff. You can do anything you want to. Forty years ago a train robbery in Texas might have been ordinary, but this is 1929. This infernal publicity is bothering me. It’s up to you and the men you name.”
“I’d rather look around a bit first,” Frost said, as he rose to go. “If I need anybody, I’ll let you know.”
“Good luck to you.”
He accepted the hope with a nod of his head and walked out.
Captain Frost expected little information from the chief of police of Jamestown, and he was not disappointed. The chief pointed out that he and his men were after all merely humans, and that they were doing everything humans could do. That this had availed nothing was not his fault. Captain Frost could see that?
Very frankly, Captain Frost said he couldn’t. “It beats me,” he said. “Here it is, the high-powered twentieth century — a scientific age. And a gang of bandits sticks up a passenger train in orthodox Wild West manner and gets away clean with a fortune. Every copper in North Texas is caught flat-footed. I’d like to have the opportunity sometime to get in on top of a case instead of waiting two or three weeks. I sure would.”
“Well,” the chief observed pointedly, “maybe we can arrange that just for you. It’s a funny thing, but criminals never invite us to their parties. However, they might make an exception for the Rangers.”
“Never mind the wisecracks! Didn’t anybody in North Texas make any reports or anything after the robbery? It looks to me like a correspondence school sleuth could have done that.”
“Ain’t I been telling you they didn’t? There wasn’t nothing to report! My God, don’t say that any more to me! It makes me sore all over. Every newspaper in this town has been plastering stories all over their front pages about it. It’s got me goofy!
“Now, listen while I go over it again. Then you’ll know as much as we do — or anybody else does. That train carried $300,000 in torn money that was going back to Washington. It left Jamestown, going east, at 8:45 and when it got to Reddy, about eight miles out, it was flagged down by a man on the track with a lantern. A moment later the engineer and fireman looked into the muzzle of a sub-machine-gun held by a masked robber.
“While this one kept the engineer and fireman covered, another went in the express car, blowed open the safe and got the coin. They slipped in on the messenger, tied him up, but when Cummings, the brakeman, ran through the door, they dropped him with a slug of lead in the forehead. Before anybody else knew what it was all about, the train started. It stopped a little farther on, but the bandits had disappeared.
“It happened right beside the highway but they had put red lights half a mile apart to stop the traffic. It’s the general opinion that they are hiding out somewhere, but we’ve got the numbers of some of the bills and sooner or later we’ll nab the men. Nobody can beat the law!”
It was the sort of a preachment Frost could expect from the chief. He was a man who had been in the chair for twenty years, and was slightly antiquated. One of the old school, as the newspaper boys liked to say.
“Now you know as much as we do.”
“So that’s all, eh?”
“All? Ain’t it enough? It’s been plenty to keep these newspapers in copy. It ought to be enough for you.”
“Are you worried about what they think?”
The chief glared. “Ain’t you?”
“Not particularly.”
“Well, I am; you’re damn well right I am. We got an election coming off here next month and unless the right guy gets in, I go back to pounding a beat. Damn if these crooks can’t pick fine moments to pull big jobs! So, you see how much I’m for you. Personally, I’ll let you have my moral support and hope you have a lot of luck. But I don’t think you will!”
Somebody once wrote that clever crime detection is one-third luck, one-third hard work and one-third intuition. Great detectives rate luck and intuition as a stand-off, which is to say they reckon one as important as the other.
Jerry Frost was not a scientist, he was not a criminologist, he was not, in the technical sense of the word, a detective at all. But he had had a fair amount of luck thus far, he was perfectly willing to work hard, and he knew his intuition had stood him in good stead before.
And he was going to be able to use it this time. He realized that an hour after he had left the Jamestown chief of police.
He saw something that clicked in his mind — and would not be shaken. The very incredibility of the thing was what sold him.
He had dropped into the Secret Service offices of the government in the Federal Building, for, after all, it was their case. His conversation with the inspector had not been especially productive. But his eye caught a picture on the desk. It was a wrecked airplane, and he naturally was interested.
“This was a sweet one,” he said. “Where’d it happen?”
“That,” replied the inspector, “is an old one. It happened about a year ago. I was rummaging around my desk the other day and found it.”
“Nasty spill.”
“Yea, Charlie Cox got killed in it. You ought to remember that. The air-mail pilot. He crashed up in the Red River country. We lost a registered pouch in it.”
“Oh,” said Frost. “I do remember now. Never got anything on that case, did you?”
“Nope, never did. None of the bonds ever showed up.”
“Ever have any ideas about it?”
“Well, not exactly. Charlie just crashed, that was all. Somebody came along and took the pouch. Anybody’d know the difference between registered mail and ordinary mail. We figured some farmer had got it, but we watched that country for a long time. None of the bonds ever showed up. Just another one of those mysteries.”
It was at that moment that Jerry got his idea. But then it was too ridiculous. His intuition kept trying to tell him something, but he wouldn’t listen. The voice was too faint. A little later the idea came bounding back again. And he couldn’t lose it. The air-mail job. What made him think it was connected with the train robbery?