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.
“That’s what you’d think, all right. So what?”
“So we take her up. What the hell else can we do?”
We found the Duchess, sitting off by herself, in the lobby of the Drake at eight o’clock.
“Well, keed, when does the curtain go up?” Spike asked.
“Almost any minute,” Katie returned shortly. “Just keep your shirts on and your mouths shut.”
She lit a fresh cigarette off a glowing butt.
Her hands were shaking and I saw that the palms were moist. Her eyes were bright, feverish, as she kept watching the door.
“Our little pal seems a bit nervous,” Spike grinned.
“We can do without your puerile mouthings for a while, Mr. Kaylor,” the Duchess told him.
Then Kurt Bergstrom strode into the lobby and Katie rose. The chemist spotted her and came over. He looked keyed up and he didn’t smile as he bowed perfunctorily over her hand.
“These are your friends?” he asked, looking at Spike and me with cold and fishy eyes.
“Not my friends, but they’ll do as witnesses.”
“Goot! Bring them up in ten minutes.” Bergstrom turned and walked briskly toward the elevators. Katie sat down and lit another cigarette. She was plenty nervous.
I began to feel restive myself. Even Spike, who is almost irrepressible, didn’t have anything to say. We watched ten slow minutes tick off on the clock over the desk. Then Katie stood up.
“When we go up to Bergstrom’s room,” she said, “you two will do as you’re told and ask no questions. Have you got that straight?”
“Oke, kid,” Spike nodded. “Lead the way.” Bergstrom received us in the living room of his suite. He waved Katie to a chair and then stood for a minute eyeing Spike and me. You could see he didn’t like us. You could see he wished we were a long way from there. Finally he said:
“I hope we can trust them, Miss Blayne.”
“They’ll do as they’re told and like it,” the Duchess said.
“That all depends,” Spike said, “on what you tell us to do.”
Bergstrom threw open a door to a clothes closet. “You will go in there und stay there und keep quiet,” he said crisply. “You will leaf the door oben two or three inches, joost enough so you can see und hear what goes on. You will nod come oudt until you are told to come oudt. All right?”
“All right,” Spike agreed.
“I will tell you when to go in. In the meantime, please to sit down und be comfortable.”
We sat down diffidently. So help me, I couldn’t get the angle. I couldn’t make head or tail of the layout. Spike caught my eye, while Bergstrom paced briskly up and down the room, and signalled: “Watch yourself. I don’t trust this guy.” I didn’t trust him either.
After a time the telephone rang. Bergstrom took it up, listened a moment, ordered: “Show him up at once.”
Spike started to rise.
“No, no. Nod yet,” Bergstrom said irritably. “It iss only Captain Wallis.”
Spike sat down again, looking a bit deflated. Bodie Wallis came in after a few minutes. In his quiet blue serge business suit, he didn’t look much like a detective.
He nodded to Katie and Bergstrom, grinned at Spike and me.
“You two boys don’t miss anything, do you?” he chuckled.
“Not if we can help it,” Spike admitted, a bit boastfully.
“I might point out,” Katie remarked, “that they are here at my invitation. And anything they see or hear won’t be reported in the Telegram until it has appeared exclusively in the Sun. Right, Mr. Kaylor?”
“Wrong, Miss Blayne!” Spike bristled. “That wasn’t part of the bargain.”
“It’s part of the bargain now.”
“Sister, it takes two to make a bargain. And as long as I have two legs and can run to the nearest telephone—”
The phone buzzed at that instant and Bergstrom raised his hand authoritatively. “Silence, if you please!” He picked up the instrument, and after a moment: “Show her up at once.”
He turned and waved us toward the closet. We got up and went in and closed the door to a two-inch crack. Spike jammed his foot against the door and I pulled on the knob, to hold it steady open. Spike, kneeling at the crack, whispered:
“It’s a funny one, Pink. You got any ideas?”
“No ideas, but I got a good hunch,” I whispered. “Bergstrom is on the spot. With Katie’s unwitting help, he’s trying to slide out from under.”
“Yeah. That’s the way I dope it. He’s about to pull a fast one. And when it comes down the groove, we’ll pole it over the right-field fence for a home run. How’s about it?”
“That’s okey by me.”
We didn’t say any more, because Bergstrom had stepped to the hall door and was admitting — Mrs. John Hamlin! She wore black and she looked tense and watchful and cool. Bergstrom was saying:
“Miss Blayne you haff met, I believe. Und this, Mrs. Hamlin, iss Mr. Wallis.”
Mister Wallis! Well, why not? The whole situation was cockeyed anyway.
“Please to sit down, Mrs. Hamlin,” Bergstrom said, helping her to a chair with great solicitude. “We haff wonderful news for you. Your husband, my dear, iss alive!”
Mrs. Hamlin sat on the edge of her chair, stiffly, blinking up at him. She said carefully: “I buried my husband this afternoon.”
Bergstrom smiled down at her gently, shook his head. “The man you buried vas nod your husband. John iss alive. He vas badly burned in the fire und he sustained a severe injury to the head. He hass been suffering from amnesia ever since. In fact, even now he iss delirious. But the doctor assures me that his chances for pulling through are excellent.”
The woman never moved but I could see the last of the color in her cheeks fade out.
Spike whispered: “Amnesia! Did I tell you a fast one was coming down the groove? Amnesia!”
Well, it was easy enough for a couple of smart reporters to dope the play. I saw it this way: When Bergstrom and Hamlin realized their hoax wasn’t going over, they got together and devised this amnesia gag. Burned Hamlin with a little acid, probably. Cooked up a good story. “I don’t remember anything that happened till I woke up in the hospital.” That sort of thing — it’s pulled every day.
Yes, it was all pretty smart. Just about the type of stuff you’d expect a bright lad like Herr Bergstrom to pull. Having Captain Wallis there on the job was just the right touch. It showed the supreme confidence and egoism of the chemist.
“I feel certain there has been some mistake,” Mrs. Hamlin said slowly, gripping the arms of her chair. “I did not see John’s body. I did not want to look at it. But I knew, as I sat there staring at the coffin this afternoon, that my husband was in it.”
“But,” Bergstrom pointed out calmly, “there iss no way you could know, Mrs. Hamlin. No way in the world, because — John iss in bed in the next room. Alive. Delirious, seriously burned, very ill — but alive!”
He shouted that last word in a way that sent a chill down my spine — even though I’d suspected all along that Hamlin wasn’t dead.
And then all at once I was conscious of a voice from the room on the far side. Someone in there had been talking for quite a while, talking very softly. And now, as Spike and I and the people in the living room listened, the voice grew louder. We could catch a word or two: “Valence of three... calcium chloride... neutralized...”
What a shock to that woman who was sitting there so white and rigid. A voice, literally, from the dead!