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.
Paul January went to the ticket counter.
Behind the ticketseller was a map of the bus lines marked heavily in red. He squinted at it and picked out a name.
“One-way to Rockwarren, please.”
“That’ll be two eighty-five, sir. Next bus leaves in twenty minutes out that side door over there.”
Paul held himself very straight as he went back to his bench.
An old man sat beside him, lean jaw stubbled with white, shapeless gray cap, reddened eyes, roving in constant wariness. The old man jerked a pint bottle out of his side pocket, took long swallows, his seamed throat convulsing. He lowered the bottle, wiped his mouth on his hand, gagged and slid the bottle back in his pocket.
Paul January separated two dollars from the wadded bills in his pocket. “I’ll give you two dollars for the rest of that bottle,” he said.
The wary old eyes regarded him. “You look like you need it, friend.”
He slid the bottle over, pocketed the two dollars. Paul January, ignoring the baleful eye of a matron on his right, tilted it up and finished it without once taking it from his lips.
The liquor hit his stomach, radiated warmth and strength in all directions.
The driver put the suitcases in the side compartment. Paul January went to the third seat behind the driver, inched in close to the window. He pulled his cocoanut straw hat low over his eyes. He was asleep by the time the bus started.
Chapter Two
Olive Morgantine
She was a muscular and angular woman in her late fifties with teeth as white, as carefully tended and as artificial as the low white picket fence surrounding her tiny footage and white cottage. Though Henry Morgantine had died eighteen years before, Olive still talked about him in a manner which had sensitive guests on the verge of glancing quickly over their shoulders.
Her living room, a twelve-by-twelve cube, was jammed. In solitary and muscular splendor, Mrs. Olive Morgantine moved carefully among her possessions, dusting, oiling, polishing.
Her most startling variation from type was an addiction to very gay and quite youthful clothes, horridly embellished by whole areas of clattering, clanking costume jewelry.
During the past six months Olive Morgantine had been kept in a state of outrage. It was all due to the “development.” She failed to see why the empty lot near her cottage, adjoining it, in fact, had been shrewdly split into two tiny lots, and a white house erected on each.
As if that were not enough, the couple who purchased the house nearest to hers had been of “a very low type, my dear. The things I could tell you!”
The facts were a silver thread running through her fabric of woe. A couple had bought the house next door. He was some sort of a salesman. She was a coarse-looking young woman, pretty in a rather vulgar way, blatant in her dress and her habits.
Olive Morgantine did not mind the shrill quarrels when the husband was home. Nor did she mind the lateness of their parties. She could have adjusted to those factors. The one thing she could not stand was the fact that Mrs. Darrold “stands out on that stupid little back porch and hurls, just hurls, mind you, all of the empty bottles and cans down to the foot of the yard. You have no idea what it is doing to the neighborhood. I suppose when their yard is full they’ll start hurling them into my begonias!”
Cynthia Darrold’s habits were just sufficiently regular to react on Mrs. Morgantine in the same way as the ancient torture of the slow dripping of water.
With her husband away, Cynthia Darrold apparently arose around eleven. She made her breakfast and loafed until late afternoon. At that time she would make herself some cocktails, quite a number, in fact, and later have a can of soup before going out.
Thus, every day, somewhere between four and six, a bottle or a can would be hurled out into the yard. No matter how Mrs. Morgantine tried to avoid hearing the noise, she would always hear it.
There was another factor in Cynthia Darrold’s life that bothered Mrs. Morgantine a great deal. She was always asleep when Cynthia came home. And, rather too often, sometime during the following day, a strange young man, usually a different one, would walk from the Darrold house and disappear down the street headed toward the nearest bus stop.
Never did Cynthia stir herself to climb behind the wheel of the powerful red roadster and take the young man back to wherever he belonged.
It was four o’clock and Mrs. Morgantine was beginning to get her daily case of nerves over the routine of the tin can or the bottle. She stood well back from her windows and watched the Darrold house. At noon a tall young man had walked away from the Darrold house. He had been rather a good-looking young man, wearing gray slacks and one of those cotton sports coats. Of course, she could not say but what he had arrived just before she saw him leave, as she had been rather busy in her bedroom, sorting her jewelry.
Surely any minute now she would see signs of Cynthia’s moving about in the kitchen. And then, indolent and sloppily dressed, Cynthia would shuffle out onto her porch, brace herself and throw a can or bottle down the yard.
Mrs. Morgantine made herself some tea, drank it, paced restlessly about, looked at her watch. A little after five. And still no crash and clatter in the back yard. Yes, the red car was still parked beside the house.
Five-thirty... quarter to six... six... five after six.
Mrs. Morgantine stood up. She had been sitting by her beautifully polished dining room table, drumming on it with businesslike fingernails.
Mrs. Darrold had never been this late.
She went to the phone. “Information, please. Do you have a phone listed for a Mr. Gaylord Darrold on Hillside Drive? Thank you very much.”
She dialed the number they had given her. She cocked her head on one side and listened. Yes, she could hear the distant ringing of the Darrold phone. She counted the rings. After it rang twenty-four times, she hung up, began to tap on her front teeth with the back of her thumbnail.
Cynthia Darrold surely could not be sleeping that soundly!
Mrs. Morgantine paced back and forth through the little house. She made her decision. Of course, if Cynthia came to the door, it would be a very neighborly thing to have done, and might mean that the Darrold woman would be in her hair until she could successfully freeze her out again.
Mrs. Morgantine emptied a small sugar bowl back into the big sugar tin. She put a wide, shallow smile on her knobbed face, walked briskly down to her garden gate, stepped delicately over the maze of cans and bottles and climbed the warped steps to the Darrold back door. The buzzer inside was startingly loud.
After giving the buzzer seven long rings, she thumped heartily on the door with a capable fist. No answer. She half turned, then, lips compressed, snatched the doorknob and turned it. The door opened readily.
She tiptoed into the back hall. A big refrigerator hummed. A distant clock ticked. Sunlight fell in a fading pattern on the rather grubby linoleum.
Holding her breath and clutching the sugar bowl, Mrs. Morgantine tiptoed her way into the kitchen.
The blue sugar bowl slipped from her fingers and smashed on the floor. The first three screams were high and thin. She stood staring down at the dead woman and screamed again and again until her voice itself was almost gone and had become a hoarse bellow.