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.
As I say, that was interesting, but what I had on my mind were letters, papers, anything that could hook up Mrs. Woodring with the doc. After all, International was being paid to keep her clear. I went through the doc’s big desk fast and found nothing I wanted. One of the pictures on the wall looked a little cockeyed and on a hunch I lifted it away. Behind it was a wall safe and I began to believe in luck. The outer door was ajar and keys dangled in the inside door.
Inside I found cash, a sheaf of A-1 bonds and a thick package of letters held together with a rubber band. I got the rubber band off and leafed through the letters. He’d had ’em from socialites, top-flight picture people, even from big-shot business guys. I found five on the stationery of Helen K. Woodring, slid those in my pocket and stuck the others back in the safe. I knew the newspapers would have a lot of fun with those letters and their senders but la Woodring was my only lookout.
When I had the picture back in place, I eased up a little. There might be other stuff around that would tie in the Woodring dame but I’d have needed hours to prowl the entire layout and I had to gamble on the letters being all there was. Just out of curiosity I got down on my knees and put my ear to the phone receiver. If the doc had merely unhooked the receiver by knocking the phone off the desk, I’d have got the dial tone. I didn’t. That meant he had been starting to dial a number when he was shot.
While I was down on my knees, the small replica of the monkeys caught my eye. Light shone on the flat, solid bottom of the figures, showed me scratches that looked like letters. I picked the thing up, held it closer to the light. The scratches were letters and numbers reading: HI-M-N-3-7-S13. Underneath that in raised letters was the mold mark: MADE IN JAPAN. I didn’t have time to think about whether the letters and numbers might mean something or nothing because just then I began hearing siren noise. But, on the chance they might connect with Mrs. Woodring, I popped the three monkeys into my pocket.
I was looking wise and doing nothing when two cops came busting into the study like a rash. Jane College was looking a lot more collected than before but as though she could still have the weeps if someone would give her the right signal. Sue was her usual composed self.
A big, red-nosed cop, in the lead, saw the body and started on us. “What’s happened here? Who’re you people? What’re you doing here?”
I recognized the second cop, said, “Hello, Haggarty.”
“Hi, Thorne,” said Haggarty. He was a thin, mouse-haired guy with uneven, yellow teeth and I’d met him a couple of times out fishing on the live-bait boats. He looked at the doc’s body, said, “Suicide or murder?”
“Murder,” I said.
“Better call Homicide, Oscar,” said Haggarty. His partner went out in tow of Jane College and Haggarty said, without bothering to fuss with the body, “What’s it all about, Thorne?”
I gave him a few fragments, not mentioning the letters and the apes that I had in my pocket.
“Umm,” Haggarty said. “Well, we’ll wait until the Homicide boys arrive. No sense in a dumb flatfoot doing any detecting and getting stuck for a week in court. Done any fishing lately, Thorne?”
Haggarty and I cut up a lot of bait and made a tentative date to go after yellowtail in a couple of weeks. While we were doing it, Oscar came back and started to prowl the room, heavy-footed.
He wound up at the packing case and I saw him fish around in it. He said, “Jeez, a zoo.”
We all took a look inside and the case was full of small figures of the three monkeys, matching the one I had in my pocket. Apparently that had come out of the case because there was one missing from the top layer. I did some quick counting of the top layer and some estimating. There must have been at least six gross of the things in the case.
“Jeez,” said Oscar, “what would a guy be wanting with all them monkeys? He musta been up to monkey business.”
It was a pretty weak effort but nobody topped it so we let it lie.
It wasn’t long before Captain Fisher of the Homicide squad, fat and gimlet-eyed and sloppy in a blue suit that hadn’t been pressed for a week, arrived with two dicks named Ahearn and Kirk.
The minute Fisher saw me, he said, “Why’d you do it, Thorne?”
I grinned. “Who’s been informing on me, skipper?”
“Nobody. You’ve just got a naturally guilty look. What’re you doing around here?”
That was something that had been on my mind from the moment I knew the situation called for cops. I couldn’t say that Sue and I had been putting the pressure on the doc in order to get him out of Mrs. Woodring’s pocketbook; the papers would get it and have a holiday with it.
I said, “The dead man was the founder of a new religion, a cult. And the little lady here, Miss Jordan, was one of his followers. She wanted me to meet him and hear one of his lectures. You know how I am about the ladies, skipper, so I humored her even though I did think it was screwy.”
Sue gave me a sweet glance and managed to look ga-ga, although I knew she wanted to tie me up by the thumbs. She said in a coy, wounded fashion, “Why, Kerry, I thought you were really sincere.”
Fisher looked as though he believed the act but I wasn’t too sure of it. He’s a long ways from being dumb. But all he said was, “I see. And what happened?”
I gave him the bare physical facts, how we’d talked to the doc and been at the front door with the secretary when the blasting began. Fisher scouted around a little, looked into the small room, came back. He said, “That door was closed when you were in here first?”
I said it had been.
“All right,” Fisher said. “You and Miss Jordan and the other lady wait out in the next room. I’ll want to talk to all of you later.”
Out in the lecture room I stalled until Jane College had picked a chair near the dais and then I ambled Sue down to the other end of the room. Oscar, the red-nosed cop, stood in the doorway and kept an important eye on us.
“So I’m cult-screwy, am I?” said Sue. She had her voice low so Oscar couldn’t hear what she said, but not low enough to seem suspicious. “You’ll pay for that crack, Kerry. And, also, how about paying off on that bet?”
“Me pay off? Listen, I bet the doc would be out of town inside of forty-eight hours. He is, isn’t he?”
“So you’re going to quibble. I’ll remember that. Did you find anything in there while I was phoning the cops?”
“You phoned?”
“Miss Frake was too occupied with her jitters to do it. Did you find anything?”
“Some of Woodring’s letters.”
She smiled. “And three apes on the floor?”
I said, “Damn clever, these Jordans.”
“I saw the thing on the floor before I went to the phone. It was gone when I got back.”
“It probably didn’t have any bearing,” I said, “but I didn’t know. The way I looked at it, the doc might have been more stirred up about being exposed than he seemed on the surface. We know he pulled that crack about Kirkwood regretting it and I know he’d started to dial a phone number when somebody let him have it. That call might have been about Kirkwood, and the chicken tracks on the figure of the apes might have counted in some fashion. A lot of ‘mights’ but I grabbed the apes on the strength of them.”