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 felt like a woman in a scene from a cheap melodrama. And she had dressed for the part. A dress of the wrong color, too tight a fit, a foolish buy of several months ago. Earrings longer than she liked. Too much lipstick, smeared heavily to give her mouth a square look, a ripe hardness.
Early in the evening there had been much traffic, many pedestrians. But the night had grown more still. Far down the street a juke blasted the cool night air. The heavy rhythm came through, pretending to be a faster heartbeat.
She leaned against the railing post and near her right foot was a neat array of the four cigarettes she had butted against the dry-rotted wood.
The screen door slammed and she straightened. The man moved slowly toward the stairs, walking with the wooden method of the very drunk. He was partially bald, the skin of his scalp glowing under the hanging bulb with a sick pallor.
He kept his eyes on the stairs. She was directly in his way. She didn’t move. At last he saw her feet, stopped and stood very still. Slowly he lifted his eyes to her face, full of an unbearable expectation.
The look faded into dullness. “Thought it was her,” he muttered.
“Dan Walker?” she asked.
He walked carefully around her, went to the door on which she had knocked, reaching for his key. It fell onto the floor. She bent and picked it up.
He looked at her as though seeing her for the first time. “I’m Walker.” He said his own name with an odd mixture of contempt and disgust.
Unlocking the door for him, she pushed it open. The room was dark. It smelled sour and dusty.
With the lights on, it became one of those impersonal rooms such as are seen in fourth-rate hotels. A bed, chair, table, bureau, rug, radiator and window. The sheets on the unmade bed were gray and twisted.
She shut the door behind her. He turned and stared at her, puzzled. “What do you want?” he demanded.
Before she could answer he said, “You’re another of them.”
He reached clumsily for her. She evaded him easily. Blundering against the door, he turned around, scowled and said, “Who the hell are you, anyway? How did you get in my room? Did I bring you here?”
“Darrold sent me.”
Once again he froze the way he had on the stairs. She couldn’t read his face. He sat on the bed. “Go on,” he said huskily. He seemed suddenly to be more sober.
“He couldn’t come, himself. You know how it is, Mr. Walker. He has to stick around and answer questions, and besides, it would look funny if he came here.”
“Go on.”
“Mr. Darrold asked me to come over to see you and tell you that you’d better stick to your story.”
“What story?”
“About putting him on the train. He says it’s important.”
Walker laughed. It was a yelp without humor. “He thinks it’s important. What do you know? Darrold, the man of distinction. Wouldn’t that hand you a laugh, though?”
“Why should I laugh?”
Walker stood up, walked to the bureau, steadied himself against it and looked at his face in the mirror. He took a comb from the top of the bureau and carefully combed his hair to cover his baldness.
To his reflection in the mirror he said, “I don’t like it and you can tell Darrold that I don’t like it. Where the hell does he get off bringing in women on the deal? How much did he tell you?”
It was the critical point. Doris Logan managed a smirk. “How much did he tell me about you? You and the money?”
Dan Walker cursed. He took a bottle from the top drawer of the bureau, drank deeply, corked it and replaced it. Turning on Doris, he said, “It isn’t half as important as Darrold thinks it is. You understand that? Not half as important. It was important yesterday. Right up until the minute Angel...”
He sat down on the bed again and cried. There was no dignity in his tears. Small-boy tears, with contorted mouth, gasping sobs and squinted eyes.
He looked at her through the tears, and suddenly stopped crying. “I’ve seen you,” he said. “I’ve seen you before!”
“Sure. Right out there on the stairs.”
“Some other place.”
“Was I with Darrold?”
“No, you weren’t with Darrold.” He imitated her tone of voice.
What was the name he had said? She wondered if she should take a chance. “I think I saw you with Angel,” she said.
“Never again. Never any more.” Once more he began to cry.
She sat down. When he looked at her, she shrugged and said, “Friend Darrold gets all the breaks. He’ll go free, and from what he told me, I wouldn’t be surprised if he hooked up with Angel.”
It couldn’t have been more effective if she had stabbed him with a hot poker. He jumped up, his eyes wide. “What did he say?”
“It wasn’t important.”
His fingers hurt her shoulder. “Tell me!”
With her head tilted to one side she said, “Oh, he just said that Angel had more brains than she needed to see through a punk like you.”
Walker paced the room, with much better coordination. “Oh, he did, did he? A punk like me, hey?”
It was the moment to test the guess that she and Paul January had made. She said casually, “Of course, if a man happened to be in a little jam, and if he could put the finger on a man who was in a much bigger jam, it might go a lot easier with him.”
The anger went out of him. He sat on the bed for a moment, then with blank face walked to the door, opened it and went down the hall. She heard another door slam. Suddenly she had a horrid suspicion. She ran after him, her heels skidding on the bare hall floor.
He had stretched out in the tub to do it. And he hadn’t done it very well. She had time to find the gaping artery, pinch it shut between finger and thumb. She sat on her heels, holding his life fast, and began to scream with all the force of her young lungs.
Chapter Nine
Gaylord Darrold
The hammering at the front door and the ringing of the bell awakened him. He waited for a time to see if they would go away. They didn’t. He sat on the edge of the bed, nodded politely to the empty bed beside his and said, “Good morning, Cynthia, my dear.”
After he had scuffed into slippers, belted the robe around him, he padded down the stairs. He pulled the front door wide open, smiled at them and said, “Quite a committee for so early in the morning!”
“It’s a little after eleven,” Lieutenant Krobey said. With Krobey was the burnished De Wolfe Haggard, the jovial little Sergeant Love, a tall and lovely redhead and a quiet-looking young man.
“This here is the murderer, Mr. Darrold,” Krobey said. Darrold saw that the young man was manacled to Sergeant Love.
Darrold felt an enormous tension within him relax. A spring suddenly broken. He cursed deep in his throat and jumped at the quiet young man. He felt the jolt from his knuckles all the way up to his shoulder. The young man sagged and Love supported him.
Krobey grabbed Darrold and said, “Hey! None of that, now. We know how you feel, but none of that. Just settle down. We want to re-enact the murder. This killer is named Paul January. This young lady will play the part of your wife. First we want Mrs. Morgantine to get a look at this guy. Then, if you want, you can watch our little play.”
Mrs. Morgantine, shrill, positive and exultant, had been hurried off. The group adjourned to the kitchen.
The kitchen was exactly as it had been the day of the murder. In fact, a few traces of the chalk outline on the linoleum remained.
Sergeant Love unlocked January’s wrist. “No breaks, fella, or we shoot,” Love said severely.