The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps
- Автор: Anderson Lars, Barr Randolph
- Год: 2007
- Язык: английский
- Год: Vintage Books
- ISBN: 978-0-307-28048-0
- Жанр: Криминальные детективы
Электронная книга - «The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps». Краткое содержание книги:
Weighing in at over a thousand pages, containing over forty-seven stories and two novels, this book is big baby, bigger and more powerful than a freight train — a bullet couldn’t pass through it. Here are the best stories and every major writer who ever appeared in celebrated Pulps like Black Mask, Dime Detective, Detective Fiction Weekly, and more. These are the classic tales that created the genre and gave birth to hard-hitting detectives who smoke criminals like packs of cigarettes; sultry dames whose looks are as lethal as a dagger to the chest; and gin-soaked hideouts where conversations are just preludes to murder. This is crime fiction at its gritty best.
“Why was he down there after hours?”
“An experimental chemist,” Bergstrom proclaimed, “has no hours. He was working nights on an experiment of his own. Only during the day did he help me with one of my inventions.”
“Which is?”
Bergstrom brightened. “An inexpensive device for recording sound on motion picture film. An attachment for the home movie camera, selling for only a few dollars, which—”
“Give the details to the advertising department,” Spike broke in. “We’re not handing out any free publicity for your invention.” He paused, looked the big German straight in the eye. “Do you believe, Mr. Bergstrom, that the body found was John Hamlin’s?”
Bergstrom shrugged, said cautiously: “You say Hamlin iss missing und a body was found in the laboratory. Surely you, as a brilliant young newspaper man, should be able to draw the obvious conclusion.”
“But perhaps,” Spike said slowly, “the conclusion is too damned obvious!” He glared at the bristling Bergstrom. “Have you stopped to think of that?”
“I haff hardly had time,” Bergstrom retorted stiffly, “to think of anything. Und now if you excuse me please, I run oud to the plant.”
We followed him out of the dining room. In the lobby Katie asked: “Are you going out to see Mrs. Hamlin?”
“Yes, darling!” Spike shot back. “And I suppose you’d like to tag along.”
“Yes, dear! I’d love it. You know how I enjoy your company.”
We found Mrs. Hamlin dry-eyed and calm, though we knew immediately when we saw her that she had been informed of her husband’s death. She was a tall, big-boned woman with black hair that looked dyed and dark, close-set eyes.
She invited us into the living room and asked us to sit down. “I knew that those experiments would end in tragedy,” she told us calmly. “You see, my husband was developing a high explosive.”
“So far as anyone knows,” Spike pointed out, “there was no explosion.”
“The chemicals he used were highly inflammable.”
“I see.” Spike didn’t look as though he saw at all. “Did your husband come home for dinner tonight, Mrs. Hamlin?”
“He came home, yes. He ate an early dinner, as always, and rushed back to the laboratory. He must have got there a little before six. I did my dishes and sat down and tried to read. I had planned to go to a movie. But, somehow, I didn’t dare leave the house. I was sitting here on the Chesterfield when the coroner phoned. I was neither surprised nor shocked. You see, I have been expecting this.” She wiped her dry eyes with a folded handkerchief. “I suppose you will want pictures?”
She turned to a table, picked up three large snapshots and handed them to me. “They were taken a year ago today. Our wedding day.”
Well, it should have been pretty pathetic, but somehow it wasn’t. I looked at the pictures. Mr. and Mrs. John Hamlin on somebody’s lawn. A little guy with a head too big for his stooped shoulders, his thin arm held in the possessive grip of a smirking, over-dressed Amazon.
Spike asked quietly: “Did Mr. Hamlin carry any insurance?”
“Yes. He took it out before we were married.”
“A large amount?”
“Eighty thousand dollars.”
Spike peered around the room.
“Quite a sizable policy for a man in his circumstances, wouldn’t you say?”
I could see her stiffen as she glared at Spike. “Considering the dangers of his work, no. He wished me to be provided for if anything happened.”
“Well, we’ll hope his wish is granted,” Spike said, rubbing a smile off his lips. “Although insurance companies sometimes get tough about things like this. Any further questions — children? If not,
that will be all, Mrs. Hamlin. Sorry to trouble you, and thanks for the pictures.”
We filed out, climbed into our cab and started back to the Hall.
“What a story, what a story!” Spike chortled. “If we can only crack it!”
“You mean this poor woman’s losing her husband on their wedding anniversary?” Katie asked.
Spike moaned. “Brilliance. That’s it. Positive brilliance. Duchess, don’t you know a Schwartz when one jumps up and spits in your face?”
“A Schwartz?”
“Tell her, Pinky. She was still in kindergarten when the Schwartz case broke.”
“This Schwartz was a chemist and inventor too,” I said. “He had a laboratory out in Walnut Creek where he was working on a process of manufacturing artificial silk. One night there was an explosion and the joint burned down. They found a man’s body in the ashes. Everybody thought, of course, that Schwartz had cashed his checks. His wife put in for the hundred grand insurance he carried.
“Then it developed that the body wasn’t Schwartz’s at all. The dead guy was an itinerant preacher whom the chemist had lured into the laboratory and knocked over the head. Schwartz, in the meantime, had holed up in an apartment he’d rented weeks before he pulled the hoax. The dicks got on his trail and were closing in on him when Schwartz put a .45 slug between his eyes. Since then, Katie, an insurance hoax of that type has been known as a Schwartz.”
The Duchess took one of my cigarettes and lit it with hands that weren’t very steady. “And you think this is an insurance hoax?”
“Cinch,” Spike declared flatly.
“Why?”
“Because it’s too damned pat and because that guy Hamlin carried too much insurance.”
“And who was the man they found in the laboratory?”
“Some hobo who’ll never be missed. Hamlin got him in there on the pretext of giving him a job, slapped him over the conk and fired the joint. Simple, Duchess.”
“And you think Kurt Bergstrom was in on the hoax?” Katie pursued.
“Cinch.” Spike nodded gleefully. “The way I dope it, the time of the fire was prearranged to put Bergstrom in the clear. John Hamlin is a weak sister and the whole plot was cooked up by Bergstrom and Mrs. Hamlin. Hamlin is safely holed up somewhere, and when the heat is off he and the dame’ll scram to South America with forty grand.”
“And the other forty grand?”
“Into Kurt Bergstrom’s sock. Well, what do you think of it, Duchess?”
“I think the whole thing,” Katie promptly retorted, “is a silly machination of a disordered brain.”
When we got back to the press room I called the beat while Spike and the Duchess phoned their offices. Then, on a hunch, I rang the morgue and by sheer good luck got hold of the coroner himself.
“Pinky Kane,” I said. “Look, coroner. About that man who was burned to death in the Bergstrom fire. Have you got around to a p.m. yet?”
“We’ve made a cursory examination at the request of Captain Wallis.”
“What’d you find?”
“Perhaps you’d better ask Wallis. He ordered me not to give out any details.”
Katie and Spike were still in the phone booths as I impatiently jiggled the hook, got the operator and asked for the Captain of Detectives. Wallis came on almost immediately.
“This is Kane, skipper. Understand you ordered a post mortem on Hamlin’s body.”
“That’s right, Pinky.”
“What’d you find out?”
“Well, his height and build approximate that of John Hamlin. He carried a gold watch on which Hamlin’s initials are still discernible. He wore a full denture — not a tooth in his head. Same as Hamlin. And that, Kane, is about the works.”
“Come on, skipper. Kick in.”
“I said that was the works.”
“Now look here. You were on that Schwartz case and so was I. And I haven’t forgotten it. Now what else did your medical examiner discover when he went over that body? Tell me everything.”