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.
He had moved the daybed to the middle of the room. Where it had been, he sat on the floor, a skinny little man in faded blue pajamas.
“So it wasn’t the daybed, Perry,” I said cheerfully. “It was behind the daybed.”
His eyes blinked and his lips quivered. I half-expected him to burst into tears. He didn’t say anything.
I walked over to where he sat on the floor and squatted beside him. It hadn’t been one of the floorboards I had heard him pry up; it was the eight-inch molding that ran along the base of the wall. The screwdriver he had used was still in his hand. There was an empty space behind the molding; probably he’d gouged it out of the plaster himself. I could see small rectangular bundles wrapped in newspaper in the hole. He had taken three of them out.
“I knew it,” Perry said bitterly. “I fooled the coppers, but the minute you walked into the apartment I knew I wouldn’t be able to fool you.”
“The way you acted, one would’ve got you ten it was in the daybed,” I told him.
“But you’d look and look till you found it,” he said, trying to break the screwdriver in two with his bare hands. “The coppers had a look, but living here in the apartment you would’ve done better, so I knew I had to get the stuff out of here quick.” He sighed. “You were always smarter than me, Willie.”
“Sure,” I agreed.
I unwrapped one of the bundles. The shape had told me what was in it, but when I saw that I was right, I was too experienced to give way to ecstasy.
“Queer money?” I asked him.
“See for yourself.”
I picked off the top bill — a fifty. I looked at it in the light, I crumpled it, I felt it. Beyond doubt Uncle Sam’s mint had manufactured it.
I shuffled through the rest of the money in that pile. The bills were in larger denominations, but not so large that you couldn’t cash them at a bank without arousing suspicion. I made a quick count. Six thousand bucks, about.
“How many bundles in all?” I asked him.
“Ten.”
I whistled. “Sixty grand!”
“Seventy grand,” Perry said miserably. “But the dough’s no good.”
“Hot, eh?” I said. “The banks have the numbers. The coppers will nab you as soon as you start passing them. That it, Perry?”
He shook his head. “This is strictly legitimate dough. No serial numbers on file. Only I can’t spend it.”
“Why not?”
Perry stood up and went to the daybed and sat down. “I know you, Willie,” he said. “You’ll ask questions all over town and find out what the coppers think they have on me and figure out the answers, so I might as well tell you myself.”
I settled myself on the floor, with my back to the hole in the base of the wall. It looked like merely an accident that I was between Perry Pike and the seventy grand.
“A guy named Norval Avery was in the white goods business,” Perry said. “He was a legitimate character, manufacturing white shirts and men’s underwear. Had a small shop off Seventh Avenue and maybe half a dozen workers. Lived in Queens with the missus and two kids in one of those attached brick houses where you can walk blocks and blocks and not tell one house from another. He wasn’t poor and he wasn’t in the dough — till the war came and the OPA and the white goods shortage.”
“You’re telling me,” I commented. “I used to pay twelve bucks for a white shirt worth no more than two.”
Perry nodded. “And a large slice of the difference went into Norval Avery’s own pocket. So there was Norval Avery suddenly rich out of the black market, living high, sending his wife and kids to Florida every winter all winter long, buying everything he’d always hankered for. Of course he paid for everything in cash on account of all that black market dough he got was in cash. Then the war ended and a year later white goods started coming back into the stores and business went back to normal or worse, and Norval Avery found himself with better than one hundred grand in cash.”
“Very nice,” I said.
“Think so?” Perry said. “Wait and see. Of course this Norval Avery didn’t pay income tax on this black market dough. Even if he’d wanted to, he couldn’t on account of his tax would be so high, the OPA would start asking him how come he made so much in just a small shop. But he also had the Treasury boys to worry about. And Norval Avery was a guy who worried plenty. Like when he had all that cash in a bank safety deposit box and then read in the papers that maybe Congress would pass a law to open all safety deposit boxes for a look, he grabbed the dough out and then didn’t know what to do with it.”
“Spend it,” I suggested.
“Sure, he spent it here and there, but not too much. Like when he visited his missus and kids in Florida and started plunging at the racetracks and then heard how Treasury agents were hanging around the tracks to get a line on heavy bettors who hadn’t paid heavy income taxes. So after that he was scared to buy even a two-dollar ticket. Then, just before the OPA was kicked out by Congress, they nabbed some guys who were in the white goods black market and they sang plenty. One of the lads they sang about was Norval Avery. And so the OPA boys asked him this and that, such as how come he was richer than he should be. But they didn’t know the half of it on account of all the transactions had been in cash and they hadn’t any idea about the pile of it he had socked away. But they couldn’t do anything to him. That got the Treasury boys on his tail, and even after the OPA was no more, Norval Avery had the unpaid income tax to worry about. All they had to do was know about all that cash and they’d have him good.”
“Cute,” I said. “That’s what happens with legitimate lads having illegitimate dough. Now if I had it...”
“Yeah?” Perry ran the back of a hand over his mouth. “So there he was with all that cash and scared to spend more than a few bucks of it now and then. Scared to invest it, buy a house, play the horses with it. And he had another headache — where to hide it. Once he buried it in his backyard, but he started thinking that one of the neighbors might’ve seen him, so next night he dug it up again. He hid it in his mattress, and then thought he was cooked when the cleaning woman cleaned the room and made the bed. He hid it in the cellar, but next week a plumber came to repair something down there, and he was sure the plumber would find it. He nearly died waiting for him to leave. Every couple of days he hid it somewhere else.”
“But he didn’t hide it where you couldn’t get it,” I observed.
Perry Pike was silent for a long minute. We both listened to the music coming through the wall. The radio in the apartment next door hadn’t been turned off for a moment since last night.
“Last month I was playing poker in Norval Avery’s house,” Perry went on. “It wasn’t the first time. The way I figured it, he had an idea that if he went in for heavy poker, he could say he’d won the dough. Only the trouble was he was a hunch player, and he never won even once. This night I’m talking about he played like he didn’t care if he took a pot or not, like he was just going through the motions of playing on account of a week before he’d made the date for that game. I wasn’t doing so good myself, but that’s got nothing to do with the story. After a while it so happened that I left the game for a few minutes to go upstairs to the bathroom. I happened to look into a room that was fixed up like a study, and I happened to go in.”
“To see if anything valuable wasn’t nailed down,” I said.
Perry didn’t care for the interruption. He scowled darkly at me. “There was a letter face down on the desk,” he told me. “I turned it over and saw it was addressed to the Bureau of Internal Revenue, so I read it. He’d written them the story I’ve just told you, a confession, and at the end he said he was going nuts worrying over that dough and was ready to pay the tax and fines and hoped they wouldn’t start criminal action against him on account of he was telling all. After I read the letter, I went back to the poker game.”