The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps
- Автор: Anderson Lars, Barr Randolph
- Год: 2007
- Язык: английский
- Год: Vintage Books
- ISBN: 978-0-307-28048-0
- Жанр: Криминальные детективы
Электронная книга - «The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps». Краткое содержание книги:
Weighing in at over a thousand pages, containing over forty-seven stories and two novels, this book is big baby, bigger and more powerful than a freight train — a bullet couldn’t pass through it. Here are the best stories and every major writer who ever appeared in celebrated Pulps like Black Mask, Dime Detective, Detective Fiction Weekly, and more. These are the classic tales that created the genre and gave birth to hard-hitting detectives who smoke criminals like packs of cigarettes; sultry dames whose looks are as lethal as a dagger to the chest; and gin-soaked hideouts where conversations are just preludes to murder. This is crime fiction at its gritty best.
“Here’s some money.” I slid some bills across the table. “If you’re down there more than a couple of nights. I’ll get some more to you. Keep in touch with me, either over this phone or the under-cover one at the office. And — remember this — lay off the stuff! If I come down there and find you all snowed up, I promise that I’ll tip Joplin off to you.”
He had finished counting the money by now — there wasn’t a whole lot to count — and he threw it contemptuously back on the table.
“Save that for newspapers,” he sneered. “How am I goin’ to get anywheres if I can’t spend no money in the joint?”
“That’s plenty for a couple of days’ expenses; you’ll probably knock back half of it. If you stay longer than a couple of days, I’ll get more to you. And you get your pay when the job is done, and not before.”
He shook his head and got up. “I’m tired of pikin’ along with you. You can turn your own jobs. I’m through!”
“If you don’t get down to Halfmoon Bay tonight, you are through,” I assured him, letting him get out of the threat whatever he liked.
After a little while, of course, he took the money and left. The dispute over expense money was simply a preliminary that went with every job I sent him out on.
After Porky had cleared out, I leaned back in my chair and burned half a dozen Fatimas over the job. The girl had gone first with the twenty thousand dollars, and then the poet had gone; and both had gone, whether permanently or not, to the White Shack. On its face, the job was an obvious affair. The girl had given Pangburn the work to the extent of having him forge a check against his brother-in-law’s account; and then, after various moves whose value I couldn’t determine at the time, they had gone into hiding together.
There were two loose ends to be taken care of. One of them — the finding of the confederate who had mailed the letters to Pangburn and who had taken care of the girl’s baggage — was in the Baltimore branch’s hands. The other was: Who had ridden in the taxicab that I had traced from the girl’s apartment to the Marquis Hotel?
That might not have any bearing upon the job, or it might. Suppose I could find a connection between the Marquis Hotel and the White Shack. That would make a completed chain of some sort. I searched the back of the telephone directory and found the roadhouse number. Then I went up to the Marquis Hotel. The girl on duty at the hotel switchboard, when I got there, was one with whom I had done business before. “Who’s been calling Halfmoon Bay numbers?” I asked her.
“My God!” She leaned back in her chair and ran a pink hand gently over the front of her rigidly waved red hair. “I got enough to do without remembering every call that goes through. This ain’t a boarding-house. We have more’n one call a week.”
“You don’t have many Halfmoon Bay calls,” I insisted, leaning an elbow on the counter and letting a folded five-spot peep out between the fingers of one hand. “You ought to remember any you’ve had lately.”
“I’ll see,” she sighed, as if willing to do her best on a hopeless task.
She ran through her tickets.
“Here’s one — from room 522, a couple weeks ago.”
“What number was called?”
“Halfmoon Bay 51.”
That was the roadhouse number. I passed over the five-spot.
“Is 522 a permanent guest?”
“Yes. Mr. Kilcourse. He’s been here three or four months.”
“What is he?”
“I don’t know. A perfect gentleman, if you ask me.”
“That’s nice. What does he look like?”
“He’s a young man, but his hair is turning gray. He’s dark and handsome. Looks like a movie actor.”
“Bull Montana?” I asked, as I moved off toward the desk.
The key to 522 was in its place in the rack. I sat down where I could keep an eye on it. Perhaps an hour later a clerk took it out and gave it to a man who did look somewhat like an actor. He was a man of thirty or so, with dark skin, and dark hair that showed gray around the ears. He stood a good six feet of fashionably dressed slenderness.
Carrying the key, he disappeared into an elevator.
I called up the agency then and asked the Old Man to send Dick Foley over. Ten minutes later Dick arrived. He’s a little shrimp of a Canadian — there isn’t a hundred and ten pounds of him — who is the smoothest shadow I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen most of them.
“I have a bird in here I want tailed,” I told Dick. “His name is Kilcourse and he’s in room 522. Stick around outside, and I’ll give you the spot on him.” I went back to the lobby and waited some more.
At eight o’clock Kilcourse came down and left the hotel. I went after him for half a block — far enough to turn him over to Dick — and then went home, so that I would be within reach of a telephone if Porky Grout tried to get in touch with me. No call came from him that night.
When I arrived at the agency the next morning, Dick was waiting for me. “What luck?” I asked.
“Damnedest!” The little Canadian talks like a telegram when his peace of mind is disturbed, and just now he was decidedly peevish. “Took me two blocks. Shook me. Only taxi in sight.”
“Think he made you?”
“No. Wise head. Playing safe.”
“Try him again, then. Better have a car handy, in case he tries the same trick again.”
My telephone jingled as Dick was going out. It was Porky Grout, talking over the agency’s unlisted line. “Turn up anything?” I asked.
“Plenty,” he bragged.
“Good! Are you in town?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll meet you in my rooms in twenty minutes,” I said.
The pasty-faced informant was fairly bloated with pride in himself when he came through the door I had left unlocked for him. His swagger was almost a Cakewalk; and the side of his mouth that twitches was twisted into a knowing leer that would have fit a Solomon.
“I knocked it over for you, kid,” he boasted. “Nothin’ to it — for me! I went down there and talked to ever’body that knowed anything, seen ever’thing there was to see, and put the X-rays on the whole dump. I made a—”
“Uh-huh,” I interrupted. “Congratulations and so forth. But just what did you turn up?”
“Now le’me tell you.” He raised a dirty hand in a traffic-cop sort of gesture. “Don’t crowd me. I’ll give you all the dope.”
“Sure,” I said. “I know. You’re great, and I’m lucky to have you to knock off my jobs for me, and all that! But is Pangburn down there?”
“I’m gettin’ around to that. I went down there and—”
“Did you see Pangburn?”
“As I was sayin’, I went down there and—”
“Porky,” I said, “I don’t give a damn what you did! Did you see Pangburn?”
“Yes. I seen him.”
“Fine! Now what did you see?”
“He’s camping down there with Tin-Star. Him and the broad that you give me a picture of are both there. She’s been there a month. I didn’t see her, but one of the waiters told me about her. I seen Pangburn myself. They don’t show themselves much — stick back in Tin-Star’s part of the joint — where he lives — most of the time. Pangburn’s been there since Sunday. I went down there and—”
“Learn who the girl is? Or anything about what they’re up to?”
“No. I went down there and—”
“All right! Went down there again tonight. Call me up as soon as you know positively Pangburn is there — that he hasn’t gone out. Don’t make any mistakes. I don’t want to come down there and scare them up on a false alarm. Use the agency’s under-cover line, and just tell whoever answers that you won’t be in town until late. That’ll mean that Pangburn is there; and it’ll let you call up from Joplin’s without giving the play away.”