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.
She saw that the dragging had opened the wound again, if indeed it had ever been entirely closed. She boiled the probe and scalpel on the kitchen stove, put the sulpha powder, gauze and adhesive on the nightstand.
In five minutes she knew that she would not have to drive back to the village for the doctor as she had planned. The slug had hit at an angle, had followed all the way around his side, not far under the skin, and had lodged within an inch of his backbone. She felt the lump with her fingers.
Deftly she made the short incision, popped the ugly-looking chunk of lead out by pressing delicately with her thumbs on either side of it. She washed both wounds, packed them with the sulpha powder, bandaged them expertly.
His fever was just under a hundred and two. She gave him sulpha tablets which, in his unconscious state, he choked on. She then injected penicillin into him, covered him up, clicked out the bright light and left the room. At the doorway she paused, intending to go back and take his wallet and look for identification.
But she couldn’t do it. She could not bring herself to snoop among his papers.
After she had quietly closed his door, she realized how tired she was. She went out onto the screened porch and looked at the moon pattern across the water. She tried to bring her mind back to the problem of her future. But somehow she could not work up a sufficient amount of interest. She smoked two cigarettes and, when she began to yawn, she went to her bedroom. Then she realized that he might wake up and leave. With a determined stride she went back to his room, collected both suitcases, took them back to her room and shot the bolt.
Chapter Four
Gaylord Darrold
He sat on the kitchen table and could not keep his eyes off the heavily chalked outline on the floor. The outline of Cynthia. There were two men in the kitchen with him. The big, dull-looking one who leaned against the sink was a Lieutenant Krobey. He had a flat tanned face and blue eyes that looked like marbles freshly spray-painted in watery blue.
The other one was a fat and asthmatic man with a cherub face, a shining bald skull and a deep, somehow sickening, dimple in his forehead. His name was Sergeant Love. He had been an exceedingly doleful and lugubrious man until one day a hopped-up seventeen-year-old had shot Sergeant Love square in the forehead with a twenty-two pistol. The tiny slug had gone an inch deep into the gray tissue of Sergeant Love’s frontal lobe and had turned him into a jolly and optimistic man who told his wife every day of her life that he was living on borrowed time.
“Give it to me slow again,” Krobey said.
“Our marriage had turned into something pretty dull some time ago. She lived her life. I lived mine. When I was home she cooked for me and kept my clothes in shape. When I was away I didn’t care what she did, just so long as she didn’t spend too much money.”
“You buy her the car?”
“She had some money of her own.”
“You got any idea who she might have quarreled with?”
“No,” Gaylord Darrold said.
The gleaming young man from the district attorney’s office came back into the kitchen. He gave each of the three men an identical nod. Mr. Gaylord Darrold had arrived home at ten-fifteen in the morning, exactly sixteen hours after the discovery of the body of his wife by Mrs. Morgantine.
The burnished young man from the district attorney’s office was named Haggard. De Wolfe Haggard. He had been in and out of the kitchen five times.
Gaylord Darrold was the sort of lean-headed man, the type who, in his twenties, is called “wise,” in his thirties is called “sophisticated,” in his forties is called “dissipated” and in his fifties is called “well preserved.” Darrold was edging from sophistication into dissipation.
He glanced mildly at Haggard, brushed some invisible lint off his sharply creased trousers.
Krobey said heavily, “I just want leads. People kill people and we like to know who.” Krobey seemed intent on making sense.
The phone rang. Gaylord Darrold slid easily from the table, walked into the hall and took the call. He turned and handed the phone to Krobey.
Krobey grunted into the phone a few times and then hung up. He said to Sergeant Love, “That’s the Rockwarren lead. A guy answering the description that old lady give us took the bus about six last night to Rockwarren. But we can’t track him from there. Anybody we can’t track is a good bet.”
“You think he’s got a hole in him?” Love asked.
Krobey shrugged. “No screens on the house. That window over there was open. A slug goes out the window, we never find it if it’s angled up a little. If he has a hole in him, it isn’t important.”
De Wolfe Haggard struck a pose in the middle of the kitchen. He rested his chin on his fist and glared at the floor.
“This is my reconstruction, gentlemen,” he said soberly. “Mrs. Darrold went out the night before last. She struck up an acquaintanceship with this Mr. X. He carried a gun. Lieutenant Krobey has explained to us that since it is rather an old gun, a Browning patent manufactured in Belgium, we will probably never trace it. The young man came here with Mrs. Darrold. She had been dead five hours when she was found. That puts the time at one o’clock.
“For some reason they quarreled. He wrapped the gun in that towel, and fired twice at her. The towel muffled the sound of the shots. He missed her once and the bullet went out that window. She was running from him in terror. The second shot struck her in the back of the head. He wiped the gun on the towel, tossed both the gun and the towel on the floor. Then he calmly walked out. Mrs. Morgantine saw him. It matches with the time of death. All we need to do, gentlemen, is inquire around at those places where it is likely that Mrs. Darrold and Mr. X may have met.”
He looked around the kitchen, said to Gaylord Darrold, “Where did they go?”
“They left some time ago.”
“Oh.” For a moment De Wolfe Haggard looked very young and very vulnerable. He swallowed hard, and in what was obviously a gesture to gain face, marched two paces closer to Darrold, leveled a finger at him and said, “This alibi of yours will stand up, you believe?”
Gaylord Darrold selected a cigarette from a battered leather case. He lit it, flicked the match away. The match bounced off the polished toe of Haggard’s right shoe.
Darrold said flatly, “Don’t raise your voice at me, junior. And don’t pick words like alibi to use on me. Somebody killed my wife. You’ve been boring me off and on all afternoon. Now why don’t you go finger a brief or something and let the cops work on this. They know how.”
The burnished young man coughed, touched his fingertips to a dark blue Windsor knot and fled from the kitchen.
Darrold stared at the chalked outline on the floor. His eyes narrowed and he sucked the smoke far down into his lungs.
The phone rang again. Love came from the front of the house to answer it. He listened for a long time, said, “Okay, Joe,” and hung up.
He walked out into the kitchen and smiled at Darrold. “Okay, so you’re clear, Mister Darrold. We got you located at Barnston, fifty miles east of here, at noon yesterday, and that Mr. Walker, the bookkeeper guy, reported that he put you on the Empire City at just five minutes of twelve, headed east. That train makes its first stop two hours later, at two in the afternoon, a hundred and seventy miles east of here. And I guess nobody jumps off that Empire City, hey?”
“Hardly.”
“Then in Richfield, a hundred and seventy miles away, you called on customers, checked in at the Richfield House after dinner, left your room early this morning, checked out, picked up your car from the Wilson Brothers Garage and drove back here.”