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.
“What chicken tracks?”
I told Sue about the numbers and figures that had been scratched on the bottom of the monkeys. She made me repeat them slowly. I said, “You got any inkling?”
“None. Who do you think killed him?”
“I’m not thinking. That’s the Homicide Squad’s headache. We’ll turn these letters over to Kirkwood and then we’re out of the case.”
“How about the apes you have in your pocket?”
“On those we’ll wait. If it seems the cops should have them, the cops’ll get them. Where were you to reach Kirkwood tonight?”
“At Mrs. Woodring’s home.”
“Oke. As soon as Fisher turns us loose, we’ll go out there and turn over the letters.”
She looked at me sort of queerly, said, “Suppose we pretend. Suppose we pretend Kirkwood had a lot to do with this killing. It will look swell for International to be playing on his side against the cops.”
I chewed over that one. “What makes you think he might have?”
“Nothing. But possibilities are possibilities. We’ll have to watch our step, Kerry.”
There was some kind of a disturbance at the front door and then Haggarty came through the lecture room, towing a tall, young, blond guy. The blond saw me and nodded, said, “Hello, Thorne.”
For a moment I didn’t place him. Then I did. I said hello and Haggarty took him on into the study.
“Who?” said Sue.
“His name is Fred Manners. He’s a kid who angled himself a private license some time ago. I ran into him on the fringes of a case a year ago and then never saw him again until now. I thought he’d probably faded into something that was more his speed.”
A few minutes later one of the dicks came to the curtains and beckoned to Jane College. She went to the study with him and we waited. We waited some more and then we kept on waiting. It was pretty close to an hour before Fisher came out of the study. He didn’t look unhappy when he sat down beside me.
I said, “Don’t tell me, skipper, that you’ve already got it all untangled.”
“Not exactly,” he said, “but we’ve got a pretty nice lead. Did you know this guy, Sivaja, was really an ex-con named Eddie Levy?”
“What?” I said. Then I looked reproachfully at Sue. “A nice spot you led me into, Miss Jordan — associating with ex-cons.”
Sue choked but she managed to mutter something about she hadn’t known and she was sorry.
“Yeah,” said Fisher. “An ex-con. We got that out of this secretary gal and the private dick that showed up a while ago. It seems this guy went up for mail fraud from St. Louis after taking some old Dutchman there for his life’s savings. The kraut never got over it and he located this Eddie Levy here six months back and took a shot at him. Levy kept it quiet but he hired this shamus, Manners, as a body-guard. The Dutchman hasn’t shown around here since then but he’s written Levy a lot of threatening letters. We found those in a wall safe in the study. So tonight Manners takes the night off and it looks to me like the kraut took the opportunity to get square. Anyway, we’re putting out a teletype on him.”
“Here’s luck,” I said. “And now how’s about letting Miss Jordan and me go places and get some drinks? I need two or three or seven.”
“Sure,” Fisher agreed. “I can reach you at the agency. And what’s your address, Miss Jordan?”
Sue gave him the name of her hotel and we got under way.
As I pulled my roadster around the corner from the side street into North Figueroa, I said, “When we get out to the Woodring place, Sue, we will go—”
“Not ‘we,’ Kerry.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean you can handle it from here. Why should I lose sleep?”
“Oh,” I said. “Lone wolfess stuff.”
She said sweetly, “Why, Kerry, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Listen, babe, I know all about you and the way you like to show us pants-wearing ops up. You think you’ve figured out a hot angle on this and you want to work it all by yourself and grab all the credit.”
“I’m hurt, Kerry.”
“Yeah,” I jeered. “Nothing short of a solid crack in the jaw would hurt you. But if you want to make it a contest, we’ll make it that way.”
“Make what a contest?”
“I don’t know but you probably do.” I’d been watching the lights of a car in my mirror. When the car behind jogged through the radiance of a streetlight, I saw it was a squad car. I said, “Some cops are tailing us. I guess Fisher didn’t believe everything I told him. Now my feelings are hurt.”
I took the next dark cross street, unlatched the door on my side and told Sue to get ready to slide under the wheel. Around another corner, I made the street and let the impetus of my jump carry me across the curb and into some shrubbery. The roadster slowed for an instant and then spurted. The police car tagged along, and as soon as it was out of sight I walked back to Figueroa, found a drug-store and got on the phone.
I had Sue Jordan on my mind nearly as much as the phone call I was going to make. She had an angle on the fire. I felt pretty sure of that and I wasn’t too pleased. She’s a nice gal but she has a way of wandering off by herself and “stumbling” onto some hot lead in a case, thereby making the guy who’s working with her look and feel like a first-class jackass. Not that she ever hogs the credit with the bosses; but no guy likes to feel he’s a jackass.
It took a while but finally a low British voice at the other end of the wire admitted that I was connected with the home of Mrs. Woodring. I told the voice I wanted to speak to Kirkwood.
“That,” said the voice, “will be impossible. Mr. Kirkwood cannot come to the phone at the moment. What is it about, sir?”
I asked who was talking.
“This is Osgood, Mrs. Woodring’s butler.”
“O.K., Osgood,” I said. “Just tell Mr. Kirkwood a detective by the name of Thorne has something he’ll be interested in and that this same guy named Thorne will be ringing the front doorbell in about twenty minutes.”
Another phone call landed me a cab...
The Woodring place was no less than an estate. It stood in an acre of lawns and semi-tropical shrubs out on West Washington, the whole of it surrounded by a high, balustraded wall that had cost as much dough as the average guy’s entire home. There were bronze gates in the wall but they weren’t closed and between them a graveled drive headed up toward a huge, white blur of house.
A block past the place, I paid the cab off and walked back to the gates. West Washington was fresh out of pedestrians at that hour but a streetcar clanked along noisily three blocks away and automobiles whirred by at wide intervals, going fast and sucking at the macadam with drawn-out, whining sounds.
Inside the gates I got off the gravel, walked on the grass. Streetlights were cut off by the wall, trees and distance, and it was dark, almost completely black. That, I guess, was the only thing that saved me from stopping a nice hunk of lead.
A clump of bushes half-way to the house swayed a little just as I came abreast of them, although there wasn’t any breeze. I hadn’t been expecting any rough stuff and if I ducked my head and shifted my feet fast, it was due entirely to the involuntary nerve reflexes of being damn good and scared. The clump of bushes snapped a flat, jarring explosion at me, along with a burst of blue and orange flame. The clanking streetcar was going by at that exact moment, so the shot didn’t seem very loud. But it seemed plenty in earnest.
My feet, doing a rhumba as I tried to get around to face the clump of bushes and drag out my gun at the same time, tangled with the head of a lawn-sprinkler system. I went into the air, spread-eagled, and made a one-point landing on my chin. At least, I think it was my chin because I was picking blue grass out of my teeth for two days afterward.