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 about this one in the street?”
“Hell, he’s dead.”
The cops drove after the taxi, one shooting, his partner having trouble steering with the flat tire.
Sail, for a fat man, ran away from there very fast.
Sail planted his heaving chest against the lunch stand counter, held on to the edge with both hands, and stood there a while, twice looking down at his knees and moving them experimentally, as if suspecting something was wrong with them. The young man, who looked as youths in lunch stands somehow always manage to look, came over and swiped the counter with his towel.
“What’ve you got in cans?” Sail asked him, then stopped the answering recital on the third name. Beer suds overflowed the can before it hit the counter. Sail drank the first can and most of the next in big gulps, but slowed down on the third and seemed tied up in thought. He scraped at the tartar on a tooth with a fingernail, then started chewing the nail and got it down to the quick, then looked at it as if surprised. He absently put three dimes on the counter.
“Forty-five,” the youth corrected.
Sail added a half and said, “Some nickels out of that.”
He carried the nickels over to the mob around the slot machines. He stood around with his hands in his pockets. He tried whistling, and on the second attempt got a good result, after which he looked more satisfied with himself. His mouth warped wryly as he watched the play at the two machines. He took his nickels out, looked at them, firmly put them back, but took them out a bit later. When there was a lull, he shoved up to the slot machines.
The one-armed bandit gave him a lemon and two bars, with another bar just showing.
“You almost made it,” someone said. “A little more and you’d have made the jackpot.”
“Brother,” Sail said, “you must be a mind reader.”
He backed up, waited, still giving some attention to his private thoughts, until he got a chance at the other machine. It showed a bar, a lemon, a bar. Sail rubbed his forearms, looked thoughtful and walked off.
A telephone booth was housed at the end of Pier Four. Sail, when a nickel got a dial tone, dialed the 0, said, “Operator, I believe in giving all telephone operators possible employment, so I never dial a number. Give me police headquarters, please.” He waited for a while after the operator laughed, said, “I want to report an attempted robbery,” then told someone else, “This is Captain Sail of the yacht Sail. A few minutes ago, a man and a woman boarded my boat and marched me away at the point of a gun. I do not know why, except that the man was a drug user. I feel he intended to kill me. There was a police car parked at the corner of Biscayne, and when I broke away and got behind it, the man tried to shoot me, then drove off with the woman in a taxi, and two officers chased them. I want to know what to do now.”
“It would help if you described the pair.”
The man and woman Sail described would hardly be recognized as Blick and Nola.
“Could you come up to headquarters and look over our gallery?” asked the voice.
“Where is it?”
“Turn left off Flagler just as you reach the railroad.”
When Sail left the telephone booth, the youth with the hot-dog-stand look was jerking the handle of one slot machine, then the other, and swearing.
“Funny both damn things blew up!” he complained.
Sail walked off wearing a small secret grin.
Two hours later, Sail pushed back a stack of gallery photographs in police headquarters and said in a tired, wondering voice, “There sure seem to be a lot of crooks in this world. But I don’t see my two.”
The captain at his elbow said heartily, “You don’t, eh? That’s tough. One of the boys in the radio car got it in the leg. We found the taxi. And we’ll find them two. You can bet on that.” He was a big brown captain with the kind of jaw and eyes that went with his job. He had said his name was Rader.
Sail rode back to the City Yacht Basin in a taxi, and looked around before he got out. He walked to Sail. While adjusting a spring line, he saw a head shape through the skylight. By craning, he saw the head shape was finished out by a police cap. Sail walked back and forth, changing the spring lines, which did not need changing, and otherwise putting off what might come. Finally, he pulled down his coat sleeves, put on an innocent look and went down.
One policeman waiting in the cabin was using his tongue to lather a new cigar with saliva. The tongue was coated. He was shaking, not very much, but shaking. His face had some loose red skin on it, and his neck was wattled.
The second policeman was the young bony cop with the warp in the end of his mouth. He still had his flashlight.
The third man was putting bottles and test tubes in a scuffed brown leather bag which held more of the same stuff and a microscope off which some of the enamel was worn. He wore a fuzzy gray flannel suit, had rimless, hookless glasses pinched tight on his nose, and had chewed up about half of the cigar in his mouth without lighting it. The cigar was the same kind the other policeman was licking.
Sail said, “I just talked to Captain Rader.”
The warp got deeper in the end of the young cop’s mouth. He switched his flashlight on and off in Sail’s eyes, then hung it from the hook on his belt.
“What about?”
Sail told them what he had talked to Captain Rader about — the kidnapping, which he said he could not understand. In describing Nola and Blick, whom he did not name — he made no mention of having heard their names — he repeated the words he had used over the telephone.
When it was over, the young cop stepped forward, jaw first.
“All right, by God! Now you can tell us the truth!”
The shaking policeman got up slowly, holding his shiny damp cigar and looking miserable. “Now, Joey, that way won’t do it.”
Joey grabbed Sail’s right wrist and squeezed it. “The hell it won’t! Lewis says there was human blood on the dock along with the fish blood!”
The shaking policeman said, “Now, Joey.”
Joey shouted, “A lot of people heard somebody let out a yip. Even over in the park where I was doing the vice squad’s work, I heard it.”
Sail held out his left hand to show the tear in the brown callus of the palm.
“A fishhook made that,” he said. “You saw it bleed. There’s your human blood on the dock.”
Joey yelled, “Mister sailor, we’ve been checking on you by radio. You cleared from Bimini, the customs tells us. We radioed Bimini. You know what? You were asked to get out of Bimini. A gambling joint went broke in Bimini because one of their wheels had been wired and a lot of lads in the know made a cleaning. It ended up in a brawl and the gambling joint owner went to the hospital.”
Joey shook his finger at Sail’s throat. “The British police asked around and it began to look as if you had tipped the winners how to play. The joint owner claimed he didn’t know his wheel was wired. It ended up with you being asked to clear out. The only reason you’re not in the Bimini jug is because they couldn’t figure any motive. You didn’t get a cut. You hadn’t lost any jack on the wheel. You didn’t have a grudge against the owner. It was a screwy business, the British said, from beginning to end. But that’s what they think. I think different. You know what I think?”
“I doubt if it would be interesting,” Sail said dryly.
“I think you outfoxed ’em. You’re a smooth article. That’s what you think. But you can’t pull this stuff here.”
The shaking policeman said, “You haven’t got a leg, Joey,” between teeth clicks.