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.
And then she perched on the edge of the chair I’d bounced around the desk and brought up for her.
She was really cute. She looked like an old-fashioned grandmother dressed up in Fifth Avenue clothes. They fitted her beautifully and undoubtedly had cost her a lot of money. But she didn’t seem to belong in them. She should have been wearing a lot of ruffles with lace around her neck and a poke bonnet. And Congress gaiters instead of high-heeled shoes. I sat down on my own side of the desk and asked:
“What was it, Miss Conklin?”
“I’ve been robbed,” she said calmly. “And I don’t like it. I don’t like the feeling of not being able to trust my own household.”
I said that was understandable. She went on: “There was $1,864 taken from my desk drawer. There was an envelope containing slightly more than $50,000 in negotiable bonds directly beside the money, but that wasn’t touched. No one had broken in the house and it’s self-evident that some one in the house itself is guilty of the theft. I don’t wish to have the police tramping over my house and asking innocent people a lot of silly questions, but I do want to catch the thief.”
“Suppose I find the guilty person. Will you turn him — or her, if that’s the way it turns out — over to the police?”
She shook her head and said: “I will not. I have an odd household, Mr. Shay. If you’ll ride up to the house with me, I’ll explain that remark on our way.”
I took my gun from its place in the upper desk drawer and started to slip it in the clip under my arm — and she frowned and said:
“You will not need a weapon, Mr. Shay. I’m sure there’ll be no necessity for one.”
So I put the gun back and reached for my hat instead. She hadn’t talked about payment for what I was or wasn’t going to do, and I thought I’d better look over things before bringing the subject up.
I wasn’t worried; people who leave eighteen-hundred-odd dollars loose in desk drawers can usually pay a private cop’s starvation wages.
Her chauffeur was an ugly bird that looked as though he’d just got out of jail. And the funny part of it was he just had. She told me all about it on the way up to the house. She said:
“My house is staffed with people who have been... well, let us say in houses of correction. I believe they should be given a helping hand and a chance to earn an honest living, once they have paid their debt to society.”
“And you keep eighteen hundred dollars, loose, in a desk drawer. Along with fifty thousand dollars worth of bonds that could be hocked with any fence.”
She said: “I have never been robbed, young man. Never.”
“What about now?”
She sounded stiff and old-ladyish now. “There is some mistake, young man. Of that I am sure. One of my people must have faced a problem that only money could solve. Something he or she couldn’t come to me about.”
I told her I faced the same sort of a problem every rent day and listened to more. She had a nephew and niece with her, besides the jail help. And then I got a shock. She said:
“My nephew is George Lawrence, Jr. His sister is Frances Lawrence. I understand they are fairly well-known among the younger set.”
“I know Georgie, Miss Conklin,” I said. “If you have your driver stop, I’ll get out here and go back to my office.”
She asked me what was the matter and I told her. I said: “I had the pleasure of knocking young Georgie almost over the Black Cat Club’s bar, just night before last. I’m surprised you didn’t hear about it — the newspapers had a lot of fun with the thing.”
“I know all about it,” she said placidly. “In fact, that’s one reason I came to you. George has had that coming to him for some time. He came home with a black eye, after my lawyer bailed him out of jail, and told me all about it.”
“What did he say?”
She twinkled her eyes at me and said: “You can depend on it not being the truth. But I asked questions and found out the truth. That should happen oftener to the boy.”
“You’re not sore about it?”
“My goodness no! I’m grateful to you, Mr. Shay. You’ll find George isn’t the kind to cherish a grudge, Mr. Shay... Just forget all about the episode.”
Personally I thought young Georgie would carry a grudge until the day he died, but I didn’t care a whoop whether he did or not. He was one of those loud-mouthed freshies that grates on me, and I was perfectly willing to knock him over a bar whenever we met. A bar was the logical place to look for young George. The kid was a society swack and they don’t come any swackier than that.
And then we pulled into the driveway and up to her house.
It could have been turned into a library without much trouble; it had the lines and the size. An old place and very dignified. I helped her, judging her to weigh not over eighty pounds wringing wet and with lead in her shoes, and as we watched the chauffeur swing the car on and around toward the garage, she cautioned me:
“Now use tact, Mr. Shay! I want none of my people worried. The innocent shouldn’t suffer for the thoughtlessness of one.”
Then the butler opened the door and we went in.
I got a break right off the bat. Fresh from the griddle. The butler was Preacher Toomey, who usually did his time for slipping up on some confidence racket. Of course he’d taken one jolt for armed robbery and another for assault with intent to kill, but they were outside of his regular field of endeavor.
“Why hello, Preacher,” I said.
He bowed and looked at me out of mean little eyes.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Shay.”
Little Miss Conklin twinkled her eyes at both of us and marveled: “Well, isn’t this nice. You know each other then?”
“You might say a professional acquaintance, eh, Preacher?” I said.
Preacher said: “Yes, sir.”
And then Miss Conklin and I went in the library and found the maid.
She hadn’t been dead long... and her name had been Mary Morse. At least that was one of them. She’d done time for everything from shoplifting on up. Somebody had caved in her right temple with something that hadn’t broken the skin at all. The skull bone there is not much thicker than paper and it was crushed in all right, but there was no blood. Just a sort of darkening, where blood vessels below the skin had broken.
Miss Conklin and I had walked in on her together, and I turned to catch the old lady when she fainted, but she just caught the corner of the desk to steady herself.
“My goodness sake!”
“I’ll call the police,” I said.
She waved her hand, palm up, in front of her, but didn’t speak for a moment. And then she said: “Not for a little while, please. I ask that, Mr. Shay.”
“It’s the law, Miss Conklin. They have to be notified at once.”
“Not for a little while, please. I can handle any trouble resulting from your not calling them at once, I can assure you.”
I thought the moment I got a chance at a phone I’d call, so didn’t argue. Just looked at the dead girl.
She’d been pretty. She was maybe twenty-five or twenty-eight, not over that, and she’d been a good-sized wench. Probably around a hundred and thirty, though she didn’t look half that big lying there.
Dead people never do look their weight — they seem to shrink.
There was no sign around of anything she could have been hit with; I decided it was probably a shot-filled sap, though it could have been some home-made affair, filled with sand or anything like that. She was right by the desk, and the drawer above her was half open, as though she might have been searching in it. She was dressed in a neat little black and white outfit — the kind that has a little apron all frilled at the edges and a cap to match.