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.
My face was still nestling in the center of a divot when I began to remember things again. I remembered groggily for a moment and then very clearly and I didn’t know whether to be sore at myself or get a laugh out of it.
“At least,” I mumbled as I got my feet under me, “I’m probably the first shamus in the history of International that could knock himself out with one dive to the chin.”
But when I started to pat my pockets, there wasn’t anything to laugh about. Everything I’d had on me had been lifted — wallet, watch, keys, gun, a pocketful of change. And the Woodring letters and the three brass apes.
It was pretty. And to make things complete, I took three steps in the darkness and put my hoof down on top of my new hat, for which I’d laid out seven bucks just the day before. I swore for a while but there wasn’t any satisfaction in it.
“Go on up to the house and take your medicine,” I told myself, “you long-eared dope.”
I got the wreck of my hat on and headed for the house. It turned into something definite as I got nearer, a big and very white affair of Norman architecture with a long stretch of two stories of blank windows.
Faint light inched through venetian blinds at a lower window and I leaned on the bell-push. After a minute or so, a light went on over the door. The door opened three inches on a chain and a long, white nose and eyes that had all the genial expression of marbles looked out at me.
A mouth under the long nose said, “Yes? Are you the detective person? The detective person who phoned?”
“You weren’t expecting any detective persons who didn’t phone, were you?”
Osgood couldn’t seem to think offhand of the answer to that one but he didn’t take the chain off the door.
I said, “Yes, Osgood, I am the detective chappie, the one that phoned. And I’m here to see Mr. Kirkwood. How about it?”
He finally collected himself enough to get the door unchained and I went in. When I got in, I took a good look at Osgood and he squirmed around a bit under it. In fact, he seemed to be in somewhat of a dither about something. He looked a lot like a fish but a husky fish with good shoulders and big hands that had plenty of bone and muscle to them. He wore a woolly bathrobe but trousers showed below the bathrobe and he had shoes on, not slippers. The shoes were damp around the soles, the toes.
“Lot of dew on the grass tonight, Osgood,” I said.
“Dew? I don’t understand, I’m sure,” he said. But his eyes couldn’t help darting down toward his shoes and then back at me.
“Yeah,” I said. “Or did you get your shoes wet running around on these Chinese rugs?”
He licked his lips and tried to go English butler on me. He said, “I went outside a short while ago, it so happens, sir. I thought I had heard a shot somewhere on the grounds and I made a brief investigation.” His eyes fastened themselves on my skinned-up face, my wreck of a hat. “I found nothing but it occurs to me that perhaps you might know quite a lot about it.”
“Maybe I do,” I said. “How about Mr. Kirkwood?”
“Please wait in there.”
He showed me a small reception room off the hall and left me there with a reluctant look on his face, as though he didn’t quite trust me not to walk off with the bric-a-brac.
The room was furnished with Louie-or-something furniture, all very elegant, and the one thing out of place was a big, bronze figure of the three apes on a small table. They made me remember the yarn I was going to have to tell Kirkwood and I felt like asking them to move over and make room for a fourth and the biggest monkey of all.
But it wasn’t Kirkwood that showed up. It was two women. One of them I knew must be Mrs. Woodring and the other, the younger one, her daughter. The Woodring dame gave me the impression of a dowager queen, aching to go on the loose. Her hair was brassy yellow and, even at this hour, put up in curls and ringlets and waves. Her negligee was a generation too young for her and gave the world a load of a not-so-small bosom. She had wrinkles in her cheeks and a roll of fat between her shoulders and eyes that had a yen in them. She looked like October playing at being April and it made you sorry for her and disgusted with her at the same time.
The daughter, Mrs. Kirkwood, was another order. She had a tall, lithe body and blue eyes that would have been beautiful if they hadn’t had the blank, expressionless look of the blind. Her face was pale and strong and stopped just short of being pretty. She came into the room, holding on to her mother’s arm, but she had so much more to her that she almost gave the impression of leading the older woman.
Mrs. Woodring’s voice sounded scared and patronizing and coy, all at the same time. She said, “You wished to see me, young man?”
I said, “No, ma’am. I want to see Mr. Kirkwood.”
She arched her bosom a little farther out of the negligee. “Young man, this is my home. You can tell me whatever you have—”
The girl said in a low voice, “Mother, please. Paul will take care of this.”
“Nonsense, Anne,” la Woodring said. “There are a lot of very queer things going on around here this evening and—”
The girl protested again, “Mother, please—”
“I say there is something mysterious going on. Why was Paul so insistent that I stay home tonight? Why is this young man here at this hour? I insist on knowing what it’s about.”
But she didn’t have a chance to shoot any questions at me because just then the draperies at the door parted and Kirkwood was there. He was immaculate and sleek and casual on the surface but he was breathing a little fast, as though he had just stopped being in a hurry as he got to the door of the room.
He slapped a look of pure venom at me and then shifted gears with his face so fast that by the time Mrs. Woodring had her eyes around to him, he was wearing a smile for her that damn near had a caress in it.
She looked back at him the same way, and I thought it just as well that Anne Kirkwood was blind.
La Woodring said, “Paul, what is it that’s going on tonight? You’re all acting so queerly and what’s this man here for?”
“Now, Mother,” Kirkwood said, “don’t you bother your head about this man. Osgood should have told me at once that he was here instead of disturbing you.”
“But, Paul—”
Kirkwood kept on smiling, patted the old lady on the shoulder. The way he did it was sensuous. The old dame beamed horribly.
He said, “You’re just imagining things, Mother. This man is here to give me a report on a business investigation. Now you and Anne trot along upstairs and I’ll join you there as soon as I’ve finished with him.”
Mrs. Woodring didn’t argue. She said, “Very well, Paul, dear,” as meek as oatmeal, and the two women turned to go. It was pretty apparent that Kirkwood called the shots around that household and no wonder he didn’t want Sivaja chiseling in on his territory.
When the women were gone, Kirkwood turned on me and there wasn’t any smile in his eyes. He said savagely, “You fool, I told you and that woman detective merely to get in touch with me. The last thing I wanted was for you to show up here. I’ll see that your agency hears about this in the morning.”
I let it pass. I said, “Have you heard about Sivaja?”
He didn’t say anything right away. His eyes bored at me and then he said, more quietly, “What should I have heard?”
“He’s dead,” I said. “Murdered.”
Kirkwood didn’t look shocked but he did look surprised. I couldn’t tell whether the surprise was real or not and I wished I hadn’t led up to it quite in that way, that I had socked him with the information without any preliminaries. Then, maybe, I could have told whether he was actually surprised or putting on an act.