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 he did. It was young Franks, the girl’s fiancé. He was walking on his toes and he was swinging a sap in his left hand. The girl looked over her aunt’s head at him and said to the aunt:
“I just thought I’d better stay with you, Aunt Alice. Just in case of—”
I shot young Franks then, taking him just below the knee, where I had a lot of brittle shin bone to aim at. A slug from the kind of gun I shoot will wreck bone structure of that kind and leave a man crippled for life... and I was thinking of that. The girl stood and screamed. It cut through the roaring thunder the big gun made in the room. And Miss Conklin got up from her big chair and peered down at Franks, who was rolling around on the floor and making a lot of noise.
“It’s as I thought,” Miss Conklin said calmly. “Mr. Shay, will you telephone for the police. I’m going to be very busy for a few minutes.”
She didn’t pay any more attention to me, but went over to a drawer built in the bookcase. She pulled out a heavy riding whip. And then she went back to the girl and said:
“Now, you little sneak! I’m going to take the hide right off your damned back. You ungrateful little—!”
And then, by heaven, she did. She had a nice command of language and every time she gave the girl a new title she came down with the whip.
I didn’t want to interfere, but finally I had to.
“You don’t want to kill her, do you?” I said.
She stopped then.
“Did you call the police?” she asked.
I said I hadn’t but would right away. And then somebody said, from the door doorway: “I did, ma’am!”
We turned and looked that way. And here was the cook, the chauffeur, and the two maids staring in. The chauffeur said:
“I called when I heard the shot, ma’am. Then I came in to help.”
I said to Miss Conklin: “You going to turn the girl over to the cops?”
“Certainly not,” she snapped. “I can take care of her very well. The man, the sneak, he will certainly go to prison, if he doesn’t hang.”
“He’ll limp when he goes down that hall to the scaffold,” I told her. “Did you think it was him all the time?”
“Of course,” she said.
And then the cops came.
She came down to see me the next afternoon again. Just as nice as though nothing had happened. She even blushed a little when she asked me how much money I wanted. And I blushed even more when I told her — because all I’d done was what she’d told me to do. She’d supposedly hired a detective and then she’d done all the detective work. She gave me a check.
“Miss Conklin,” I said, “I don’t like to appear too dumb, but what made you think it was young Franks who’d killed the maid? You told me you had that idea right along. Of course we know now why he did it — she’d seen him swipe the dough from your desk. She started to blackmail him, the same as she was already blackmailing your nephew. Of course not for the same reason. But I’d like to know why you picked him as the guilty one, instead of George, or Preacher Toomey, or that thug chauffeur or those gardeners?”
She twinkled her eyes at me and said: “Why it just had to be him, Mr. Shay. I knew that none of my people would steal — and of course I knew my nephew wouldn’t. Not that I’d put it past the boy, but there was no need for him to steal; all he had to do was ask me for the money and I’d have given it to him. So that left only Frances and her friend. And do you know, I’ve never trusted that young man since the first time I met him.”
“But you’d trust that collection of jailbirds you’ve got?”
“Why, of course,” she said pensively. “You see, I know their peculiar psychology. And then I had another reason for thinking young Mr. Franks the murderer. You see, poor Mary had been struck on the right temple — that showed me a left-handed man had struck the blow. Just try it — you’re right-handed, and you’ll notice if you strike another person on the temple it will invariably be on the left side. This was just reversed. And, of course, my nephew, and all the others in the house, happen to be right-handed. Young Mr. Franks is the only left-handed one. But I really didn’t need that proof — and it isn’t the sort of thing that would stand up in court.”
She went out then and left me trying to figure things out. Not the left-handed angle — that’s one of the simple things you overlook because it is so simple.
It was the old gal herself. Here she’d acted like one of the nicest ladies I’d ever met — up to the time she’d found out for sure her niece was in the plot to kill her. And even then she didn’t turn the girl over to the police. Instead she gave her a beating, and kept her where she could keep an eye on her.
And then the language she’d used was hardly the thing a lady knows.
And to top the whole thing off — having that collection of thugs around her and actually protecting them from the police.
It was all by me.
It stayed that way until I met Chick Williams, the police captain, who’d been in charge of the case. I ran into him on the street and he laughed and said:
“You still working for the Conklin woman?” I told him I’d like to have her for a partner... that she’d shown more brains in the thing than either he or I had. He didn’t like this so well and told me that if he’d had his way, and taken the whole bunch down to the station and sweated them, that he’d have had the answer before the old lady had it.
I agreed. And then he laughed again and poked me with a finger and said: “You know who that old gal is? I just happened to mention her to one of the old-timers, who dropped in the office... and he remembered her.”
I said I didn’t know who she was, other than she seemed like a nice, old gal with a lot of money. Then he poked me again and winked and said:
“She’s the Miss Conklin. The one that scragged her sweetie, over forty years ago, and did sixteen years in the pen for it. Cold-blooded murder it was, according to the old boy. He said it was a wonder they ever let her out. She’d fell into a bunch of dough while she was doing time, and that probably had something to do with that angle. Ain’t that a kick, Shay?”
I said it was very funny and felt a lot better. It solved the puzzle. Here I’d been wondering why she’d looked after her convict help and claimed to understand ’em. Why shouldn’t she?
And it explained the language she’d used to the girl and the whip act. They talk rough and they handle their own problems in the women’s wards in jails.
I left Williams. I was thinking that it would be a good bet the jail was glad to see her go. I’m willing to bet the warden slept better.
Because I had the notion that Miss Conklin would be top dog wherever she was... She was one client of mine that had been right on every count.
Concealed Weapon
Roger Torrey
McCarthy hits and runs after a hit and run driver
The man came weaving down the hall of the office building and McCarthy said to Marge Chalmers: “Jeez! That guy’s got seven dollars’ worth of start. What a — load!”
McCarthy turned and slammed his office door and the spring lock took hold with a click. The stranger in the hall lurched into Marge and would have fallen if she hadn’t held him up with a short but sturdy arm. McCarthy said pleasantly enough: