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.
It was then that she realized that with the as yet unoccupied house on one side and with her own empty house on the other, and with no houses across the street, screaming was a singularly empty procedure.
She moved sideways to the sink, turned on the cold water, cupped her hand and liberally spattered her face. It felt very good.
Mrs. Morgantine’s appetite for the mystery story was almost insatiable. She began to think in terms of “murder weapon” and “motive” and “suspects” and “scene of the crime.”
She found the weapon, a disappointingly inoffensive-appearing automatic, on the far side of the kitchen, almost under the kitchen table. She knew enough not to touch it. She regretted touching the faucet.
She backed out of the kitchen, scurried down the steps and began to run down toward her garden gate.
She was standing impatiently in front of the Darrold house when the white police sedan appeared five minutes later. She gave them no chance to ask questions. As she followed them up to the front door of the Darrold house, both policeman had begun to walk with their knees bent, as men who brace themselves against a storm.
Chapter Three
Doris Logan
She wrinkled her nose at the ripe stink of alcohol as she took her seat beside the sleeping man. She half stood, lurching as the bus started, but there were no other vacant seats. Well, if he kept sleeping, he’d be no trouble.
She wondered vaguely why she was always getting entangled with amorous drunks. Doris Logan was remarkably devoid of pride or pretense. When she thought of herself, which was seldom, she thought of a girl who was too tall, with a mouth that was too wide, hair of a strange red color, eyes that were an odd greeny-pale. She did not know that it all added up to a striking attractiveness.
She thought of herself as a husky and capable nurse. Which she was. Though vaguely conscious of missing some important and integral part of life, she found that men bored her, almost without exception. A kiss was a remarkably unsanitary gyration.
But, on the bus trip, she had no time to think of vague matters. Her problems were more specific. For three years she had been the surgical assistant to a very fine doctor. She had followed him in so many operations that she could anticipate his every move.
A week before, the doctor she worked for explained that the hospital administration was requesting him to return to the system whereby he took on internes as surgical assistants, thus complicating his own operations, but furthering their education.
He gave her a month off with pay, and she had spent one week at a rented cabin at Lake Morris near Rockwarren. She had thought of offering her services to another surgeon whom she knew, and had left her car at the bus station in Rockwarren, had taken the bus down to the city. She found that the other surgeon had the same problem.
After the three years of acting as surgical assistant, she doubted whether she could force herself to return to a nursing routine.
So Doris Logan was worrying about her future. Unless she could find the means and the opportunity to go to medical school, further progress in the field was denied her. In fact, they wanted her to retrogress. To an individual of her spirit, this was very irksome indeed. She thought of her mind as one of the little white mice she had seen once in a laboratory maze. It ran back and forth, bewildered, its pink nose twitching. The bus was getting well out into the country. The sun had gone below the horizon and the after-work traffic had lessened. Neon was flashing up in front of the juke spots on the highway, and some gas stations were already floodlighted. The driver clicked on the inside lights in the bus.
Her seat companion stirred restlessly and his hat rolled off his head, blundered down into her lap. She picked it up with distaste, glanced at him, half stood and put it on the overhead rack.
She looked at him for a time. Silly man to get so drunk. Yet rather a nice-looking man. Sensitivity in that face. And intelligence. The eyes were set well in the face, and the mouth, though slack in sleep, had a certain firmness and character. She suddenly felt a warmth that surprised her.
Doris, my girl, if you start feeling mushy about drunks in buses, you are really in a sad, bad way.
There were spots of color in the man’s cheek. His breathing was a shade too rapid. Professional interest immediately swallowed personal interest. She watched him narrowly.
If she took his wrist to find the pulse, he might awaken. She moved her head to where she could watch a pulse in his throat. Her watch, of course, had a sweep second hand. She counted.
One hundred and twelve! Not good at all. Ever so lightly, she touched the back of her hand to his dry forehead. It was alarmingly hot.
The slight pressure disturbed him. His right arm moved up and the inside of the forearm pressed against his side just at his waistline.
His hand slowly slid back to the seat. She looked at the place where he had pressed. There seemed to be a slight bulge there. She wondered what it was. She carefully grasped the edge of the rayon cord jacket, lifted it until she could see his gray and white belt. She caught her underlip between her teeth. Even under weak artificial light in a moving bus, she could tell dried blood when she saw it.
It led to a very direct line of reasoning. The man was hurt. There were doctors in the city. He was leaving the city. Thus the wound would be either a knife wound or a bullet wound. She wondered which. She did not doubt for one moment the correctness of her reasoning.
She remembered a ticket stub inside the gray hatband. She stood up and glanced at it. Rockwarren. At Rockwarren she would turn him over to the police. He would probably be wanted.
But ten miles from Rockwarren, he moaned. He opened his eyes and looked at her with the glaze of partial delirium. She saw his teeth shut hard, saw him slowly pull himself together.
He sat up and said weakly, “Could you tell me how far it is to Rockwarren?”
She liked his voice and she liked his eyes. “Another fifteen minutes.” She leaned toward him and said, in that trained voice that doesn’t carry as far as a whisper, “How far do you expect to walk with that wound?”
His hand lifted to his side, then slowly dropped. Surprisingly, he smiled. “You got me, pal,” he said.
“Can you make it about fifty yards?”
“By myself, yes. But not carrying two suitcases.”
He sank into the seat of the small coupe with a heartfelt sigh. She got behind the wheel and drove back to the bus station. He waited and she came out in a moment carrying his bags. In the center of the small village she went into a drugstore.
When she came out she saw that he was either asleep or had fainted. She got behind the wheel, stowed her package in back, considered a moment, and then lowered him so that his head rested in her lap. She threw his hat in back.
Five miles from Rockwarren she turned off the county road onto a dirt track with grass growing high in the middle. It brushed the underside of the car. Her lights made a bright tunnel through the darkness of the woods. The road went down a steep pitch.
She steadied him with her right hand on his shoulder. At the foot of the incline she turned sharply left, her lights brushing across a split-log cabin.
Beyond the cabin was the lakeshore. She left him in the car, went up onto the porch, went into the spare bedroom and turned on the lights. Deftly she made up the bed with her extra sheets.
She could not rouse him when she returned to the car.
With her hands in his armpits, she dragged him out, his heels hitting the ground. She rested when she got him to the steps. She rested again when she got him to the top of the steps. After dragging him across the small living room and into the bedroom, she made one final effort and managed to get him up onto the bed.