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.
I told him I hadn’t had a chance to speak to Tim Harper.
Morris and Lake sneered at us largely but they were carefully not having any of the conversation.
And neither was Sue. Whatever she had up her sleeve, she was keeping there. Personally, I didn’t think she had very much; the blackmail angle still looked plenty good to me.
In daylight the House of No Evil looked like just what it was: a tired, old-fashioned place that had started out life in good society forty years before and had dropped out of the parade long ago. We went in, Manners and I keeping a peeled eye on Skip Morris and Harry Lake. They were meek as lambs.
Inside the lecture room Cap Fisher was sitting on a chair only half big enough for him, talking to Jane College or Gerda Frake, Manners had said her name was when he told me he was engaged to her.
A Homicide dick, named Malloy, was lounging with his hands in his pockets and there was another guy there that I didn’t know.
Jane College looked around and saw Manners and her face went white and anxious. She jumped up, said, “Freddie, what’s happened? Oh, what have they done to you?”
The way she looked at him, it was easy to tell they sort of liked each other.
Manners grinned, said, “I’m O.K., Gerda. I just slipped and skinned my face on a knuckle.”
“I’m a little late,” Sue said. “I’m sorry, Captain.”
Fisher said, “It’s O.K. Us Homicide men aren’t supposed to get any sleep. Anyway, I wanted to go over some things here with Miss Frake.” He smiled, said, “I think I’ve got your drift, Miss Jordan. It sort of puzzled me when you phoned last night and said not to lose track of that packing case full of monkeys but when this lad” — he gestured at the guy I didn’t know — “showed up this morning, I began to figure things out. What made you think of it?”
“It was just a hunch,” Sue said. “I couldn’t imagine why Sivaja — or Levy — would want six gross of the little figures. Then on the bottom of one of the figures was scratched a sort of a cipher, HI-M-N-3-7-S13.”
She didn’t say what had become of that particular figure and, fortunately, Fisher was too interested in what was coming to ask.
Sue continued, “I kept wondering and finally it occurred to me that maybe Sivaja hadn’t wanted the monkeys but he had wanted something the monkeys brought in with them from Japan — narcotics.”
Fisher said admiringly, “You’re a smart girl.”
“Thanks,” said Sue. “This morning I called the Customs at the harbor and found Sivaja had received two other similar shipments in the last few months, one of them aboard the Hideyoshi Maru from Nagasaki. That cleared up the letters HI, M and N, scratched on the one figure, and the clerk at the Customs said the rest was probably a date, Jap fashion. They date their year, it seems, from the coronation of the living Emperor, which made it read March 7 of Showa Thirteen, or March 7 of this year. And the clerk said the Hideyoshi Maru would be sailing from Nagasaki for Los Angeles about that date. Which indicates another shipment of apes is due to arrive here on that voyage of the Hideyoshi Maru.”
The guy I didn’t know said, “I want to congratulate you, Miss Jordan, on an exceedingly clever piece of work. I sawed one of the figures open and found it contained approximately three ounces of heroin. If all the rest of the figures contain the same amount, it will be one of the largest seizures made by the Government Narcotic Bureau on this coast in a long time. Your agency has a nice amount of money coming by way of reward.”
He showed a mutilated figure of the three apes and a little bottle full of snowy powder. A chunk had been sawed out of the ape that had its hands over its ears and there were traces of powder inside.
Captain Fisher said, “Swell, but where do I come in? I still got a murder on my hands.”
“We even thought of that, Captain,” Sue said. “We rounded up some lovely suspects for you. Introduce them, Kerry.”
“Huh?” I said, looking up from the three apes. “Oh, yeah, skipper, meet Skip Morris and Harry Lake, ex-cons and pals of Doc Sivaja. They set him up in this racket here so I guess they can tell you plenty you want to know.”
“Well, well,” said the skipper, putting a hard and happy eye on the two of them. “They’re the sort of lads I like to meet.”
Harry Lake snarled through his busted nose but Morris was smooth, nonchalant. He said quietly, “We don’t know a thing about this, Captain. We’ve got nothing to worry about.”
“There’s one thing you won’t have to worry about, boys,” the skipper told them, heavily humorous. “And that’s the dope-smuggling charge. After we run you through the gas chamber for murder, the Feds won’t be interested in you any longer.”
Skip Morris still looked unworried. He had a very nice front. He said, “You’ll need a bit of proof, won’t you, before you can convict even two ex-cons of murder?”
Fisher looked at Sue, at me. He said, “How about it? You got any proof these guys pulled the killing?”
“Well,” I said, “all I know is they’d threatened to get him because he’d used their dough to set up the cult racket and then double-crossed them by believing his own stuff and turning holy on them. My guess is he’d turned so holy he was even going to tip off the law on the dope smuggling and they had to shut his mouth.”
“Yeah, yeah,” said the skipper, “but that’s guesses. Can’t you give me a tighter case than that against them?”
Sue grinned. She said, “Am I to understand, Captain, that you want International to do all the Homicide Squad’s work?”
Fisher reddened but he managed a grin, too. “I guess we can find out a few things ourselves from these boys.”
He turned on Morris and Lake as though he meant to reach down their throats and drag the truth up.
I listened for a little and looked at the three apes in my hand for a while and thought I had never run into a screwier case. Three apes that could speak or see or hear no evil — and look what they’d accomplished along that line. I looked at them and again saw Levy lying dead on the floor of his study; I felt a slug of lead fanning my face in the darkness outside the Woodring home; I saw a blind girl and her man-crazy mother and her money-mad husband; I saw young Manners on the floor with his face battered to a pulp. The three apes had worked out swell for everybody — three apes that could speak no evil, could see no evil, could hear no evil. It was all very screwy.
But presently I began to wonder if it really had been so screwy. I got up, caught Sue’s eyes and said, “Come here, sweetheart.”
I walked her down the length of the room away from the rest of them.
“Listen,” I said under my breath as we walked slowly toward the hall, “you were pretty smart. You figured this whole thing out all by your little self. Jordan the Magnificent!”
“Don’t be sore,” Sue said. “I knew you could handle Kirkwood’s case without even drawing a deep breath. When I realized I probably had a big narcotic reward for International by the tail, I had to stay with it. I’d have tipped you off, Kerry, before it was all wound up. Honest!”
“Skip it,” I said. “I’m not sore. But I’ve got to have my fun. I’ll give you ten to five I can pull one out of the hat right now that you never even thought of.”
Sue said, “You’ve made a bet.”
We had come to the archway between the lecture room and the hall. I said, “O.K. Stand right where you are. Don’t turn around.”
She didn’t turn but I did. Facing her, I could see the group down at the other end of the lecture room. I could see Kirkwood watching us out of the corner of his eye and Gerda Frake talking to Manners and Cap Fisher shaking his fist in Skip Morris’ face and the Homicide dick helping him and the Narcotic man watching us in a bored fashion.