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 merely wagged my chin and twisted my lips around at Sue for about thirty seconds and Sue said, “You make beautiful faces, Kerry, but so what?”
“Wait and see,” I muttered, and dodged past her and walked down the room fast. I got half-way down the room before the break came.
Gerda Frake said something to Fred Manners and then she screamed on a high, sustained note that rippled my spine. Manners spun like an open-field runner, caromed off the Narcotic man and knocked him down. The Narcotic man fell into Gerda Frake, who was running toward the study doorway, and she fell flat on her face.
Manners was already in the doorway. I have to give the kid credit; he could still have made his getaway alone because everyone but myself was paralyzed with surprise. But he wasn’t going to leave Jane College.
He stopped in the doorway, his gun out and swinging, and he shouted, “Gerda,” and waited.
I made the mistake of continuing to come at him and his gun blasted in the room, the bullet shaving hair off my head just above my left ear. I ducked and the room boomed to another shot and when I looked up, Manners was just beginning to fall forward. He fell on his face beside Jane College but by the time I got there, he had squirmed over on his back.
Fisher stuck his gun, still smoking, back into his holster and looked down at Manners. He said in an amazed voice: “For cripes sake!”
The skipper’s slug had slammed through Manners’ belly. I could see a little blood oozing out, staining his shirt front. I said, “I’m sorry, Manners.”
“Yeah,” Manners said, making heavy weather of it. “I’m sorry too, Thorne. Now... now I... don’t get that International job. And, hell, I wanted to be a shamus — with a good — agency. But no job — now, eh?”
One hour later a deputy jailer let me out of the prison ward at the receiving hospital. On the street I caught a cab and lit a cigarette as the cab started rolling. The cigarette didn’t taste good but that was because I didn’t feel so good. I never did like seeing guys die.
When I got to the office, I walked to Tim Harper’s office, stuck my head in. Tim was there, looking not so sour now, and Sue was there, too.
She said, “Well?”
“As well as you could expect,” I said. “Manners died but they got a yarn out of him before he kicked off.” I sat down and put my feet on Harper’s desk. He was too interested to bawl me out about it. “Manners was the guy who thought up the gag of getting heroin in by ordering the apes, supposedly for the cult, and loading them with dope. Sivaja found out about it when he overheard Manners making a phone call from the house a couple of days ago about the shipment that was due.
“Sivaja beat Manners to the shipment at the Customs and told him he was going to turn him in to the Narcotic folks. So Manners had to shut his mouth. He told us plenty more, too. He was the guy that took a shot at me outside Mrs. Woodring’s house. He wanted to get the figure of the apes away from me and he took everything else off me to cover up that it was just the apes he wanted. He told us how he knew I had the figure and that I was heading for the Woodring place.”
“I’ve guessed that all by my little self, now,” Sue said. “Gerda Frake is deaf. She reads lips and I remember that she was in the room with us after the murder when we were talking about the letters and the figure of the apes.”
“Exactly,” I said. “She told Manners and he beat me to the Woodring place. Then, having the letters and knowing about Morris and Lake, he thought up a fast one. His smuggling game was washed up and he really did have a yen to be an op for a good agency, so he figured he’d plant the letters and my gun in their place, tip me off and cinch a job with us. Also, as he doped it out, if the cops had them to play with, it would divert suspicion from him. So he beat it to their place, watched them leave, got in and planted the stuff. Lake caught him outside by his car but made the mistake of thinking Manners had just climbed out of the car instead of being about to get in. But that made the planted letters and gun just as good as though Lake hadn’t caught Manners. And he was willing to take a beating to let it stay that way.”
“You didn’t have this under your hat all the time,” said Sue.
I admitted I hadn’t. “I pulled it out of the air just about thirty seconds before I walked you down that room. I wasn’t satisfied with the thing as we had it. Morris and Lake were taking it too easy, there were too many loose ends. Why were they wasting time on a shakedown when they should have been worrying about a hundred grand worth of heroin? While I was wondering about that, I kept looking at the three apes who couldn’t speak evil or see evil or hear evil. And suddenly the thing popped out of the blue. We’d had a guy that wouldn’t speak evil, a girl who couldn’t see evil. So why couldn’t we have somebody who couldn’t hear evil — a deaf person?
“Some deaf folks can read lips so well that you’d never suspect they were deaf. If that hunch was on the level, I knew I had something. Kirkwood and the Woodring household certainly wouldn’t be in on the dope setup but they were the only ones, outside of you, that I’d told about heading for there.
“Then I began to figure who had seen me talking to you about it and that pointed the finger right at the Frake girl. I started remembering things. She and Manners had worked for a medical laboratory and that put them on the fringes of the drug racket. And Manners had as an alibi only his claim that he was at the Lotsatime Café when the shooting took place and in a crowded joint like that, who’s to say just what minute a guy leaves?”
Nobody answered me. I went on:
“Also I recalled how the Frake girl hadn’t seemed to hear me when I told her to call the cops, not until I shook her out of her hysterics and made her look at me. Even then she had finagled it so you did the calling because she probably can’t hear well on the phone. So I decided to pull my little gag on them and it worked!”
Sue said, “You certainly made the nastiest faces. What were you saying?”
“I didn’t say anything but I made my lips work as though I was saying: ‘We’ve let this thing go far enough. I’m going to put the finger on Manners and the girl and get cuffs on them before they know what it’s all about.’ I knew she was watching me, and I figured if my hunch was right, she couldn’t help slipping Manners a warning and he’d be so startled that he’d do something to give himself away. You know the rest.”
Sue got a five-dollar bill out of her purse and handed it to me. She said, “Gee, Kerry, but you’re wonderful.”
“Thanks, sweetheart,” I said. “You’re wonderful, too.”
Tim Harper had been listening, not saying anything. He growled at us now but he did it with a twist to his mouth. He said, “Wonderful, my eye. All the detective work you both did on this could be put on the end of a sharp needle. Scram and make out your reports.”
Sue and I got to the outside office and the office boy lugged a big package toward me and slammed it on a desk. Mailed in the Orient by my aunt.
Sue said, “Ah, another elephant from Aunt Frieda.”
“If it is,” I said, starting to unwrap the thing, “I’ll go nuts. I’ve already got Aunt Frieda’s elephants strung around my apartment like a circus parade. So help me, I’ll go nuts.”
I got the thing unwrapped and reached in and pulled out three big brass monkeys, holding mouth, eyes, ears.
Sue laughed and laughed. She said, “You lucky, lucky boy! It isn’t an elephant, after all. In case you don’t know what it is, it’s three apes from the East.”
“Pardon me,” I said, “while I go nuts anyway.”