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.
My knees buckled. A cloud whipped over my eyes, and through it I saw something move. It didn’t have form or substance, but in a vague way I knew that it was a human being and that he’d just conked me over the head with a blunt object.
My shoulder hit the floor. The cloud thinned a little and I could see legs. Legs wearing pants, and they were moving toward me. Dully the thought ran through my aching head that he was going to hit me again, and this time he’d make sure to bash my skull in.
I didn’t want my skull bashed in. I waved a hand at the legs. Above me there was a panicky yelp. The legs vanished from my line of vision. I heard them run out of the bedroom, across the living room. I heard the hall door open and slam.
I lay back on the floor and closed my eyes. The door slammed again. He’s coming back to finish me, I thought, and twisted on my hip toward the door. I could see part of the living room; nobody was in there. I didn’t hear anybody.
I pushed myself up to my feet and wobbled out of the bedroom. Nobody was in the apartment except Perry and myself. I must have dreamed hearing that door slam twice.
I returned to the bedroom. Perry Pike hadn’t moved. He would never move under his own power. There was too much blood on his shirt and on the floor. And his eyes were open, staring up at me without seeing me.
A knife had done it to him. An ordinary steak knife. The handle was still sticking out of one of the half dozen wounds in his chest.
I felt very bad. I’d known a lot worse lads than Perry. While we hadn’t trusted each other in the matter of seventy grand, who would have? He’d still been a good pal.
My eyes moved about the room. A weekend bag stood on the dresser. I opened it and found ten rectangular bundles. Seventy grand.
Where Perry had intended to go with the dough nobody would ever know. He had dressed and then put it in the bag and then somebody had come into the apartment. Somebody whose nerves had made him strike again and again with the knife and then run in panic when I’d waved my hands at him.
Sure, somebody. Why wouldn’t the cops be convinced that I was that somebody? Motive, opportunity, everything pointed to me. Willie, I thought, you’re in a spot. Start thinking.
I didn’t touch the money. I went into the bathroom and soaked my head. Then I sat in a living room chair which didn’t face the bedroom and lit a cigarette. Through the wall the radio which was never turned off sent soft music. It was too soft. It sounded to me like a funeral dirge — to my own funeral.
Seventy grand in a bag in the bedroom.
I could beat it with the dough. Then when the body was found, the police would check and find that last night I’d come back to live in the apartment with Perry. They were already pretty sure that he was in possession of Norval Avery’s seventy grand. Added up, my disappearance would mean that I’d knocked Perry off for the dough. Result: I’d be seventy grand richer, but I would have as good as confessed to a murder I hadn’t done. I’d be a fugitive for life. My fingerprints were on record, and any time I was picked up for anything anywhere, I’d be shipped back to New York to burn in the chair.
There had to be a better way.
Say I walked out of here with the dough and hid it somewhere. Just where I’d hide it I didn’t know yet, but I could work that out later. Then tonight I’d come back here and pretend I’d just found Perry murdered and I’d call the coppers myself.
So what? They’d still wonder what had happened to the seventy grand. And they’d come to the same answer: I’d knocked Perry off for it.
Only they wouldn’t be able to prove it. They’d take me to headquarters and sweat me, but eventually they’d have to let me go because merely knowing was not legal evidence. And I’d be free with seventy grand in small bills.
And then? Then wherever I went, the coppers and the Federal agents would be sniffing at my tail, and if I was found with that money anywhere it would be all the evidence they’d need. Like Norval Avery and Perry Pike, I’d get heart failure every time I spent an extra nickel.
Whatever you do, Willie, I told myself, you’re not going to be any too comfortable. Make with the brains.
The music coming from the radio next door cut out and a man started to enthuse about furniture polish. Instead of thinking, I sat listening to that voice and idly wondering about two doors slamming.
Two doors, I said to myself suddenly. Not one door, but first one and then another.
I stood up and hunted for Perry’s gun. It was on the dresser behind the bag. I checked the clip. Fully loaded.
I looked at the bag and sighed. I looked down at Perry and said aloud: “I’ll see what I can do for you, pal, and incidentally for myself.” Then I went out to the hall.
Softly I turned the doorknob of the apartment next door. It was locked, of course. It so happened that a couple of years ago I’d borrowed the building superintendent’s passkey without him knowing it. I’d had a duplicate made and then put the original where the superintendent would find it and think he’d dropped it.
I used that passkey now. I turned it in the lock and kicked the door open and plunged through behind Perry’s gun.
I heard and then saw the radio — a small table model against the wall. The lad who liked to listen to the radio day and night wasn’t in the living room, but I heard him in the bedroom.
“Who’s there?” he yelped frantically.
I rushed into the bedroom. The man cowering against the bed was somebody I’d never seen before; he must have moved in recently. He was tall and thin. He needed a shave and had bloodshot eyes, possibly from listening to the radio instead of sleeping. His shirt and pants were on the floor. He’d taken them off because there was blood on them — blood that had spurted out of Perry’s wounds.
“Uh-huh,” I said. “A door slamming twice. My door slamming when you ran out of my apartment, and your door slamming when you ran into yours.”
He straightened his scrawny, half-naked body a bit. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.
“I’ll draw you a picture,” I said. “These walls are thin as paper. If I could hear the radio turned down very low in your apartment, you could hear us talking in my apartment. You heard Perry tell me the tale of the seventy grand. You waited till you heard me leave; then you grabbed up a knife and went next door and knocked. Perry figured you were a delivery boy or something like that and opened the door. When you didn’t seem to have any special business, Perry got leery and dashed into the bedroom for his gun. You went after him and stopped him with your knife.”
“You’re crazy,” he said in a thin, small voice.
“What’s that on your pants and shirt — red paint?”
He looked down at his bloody shirt and pants and then up at my gun, and, except that he was breathing, he looked about as dead as Perry.
“You must be an honest citizen,” I said. “No experience in crime and murder. You had to kill Perry because he knew your face, but you were too frantic and got blood all over yourself. After you conked me, I was more or less helpless, but when I waved a hand at you, you fled like a scared rabbit.” I shook my head disapprovingly. “Very sloppy work, mister. I bet that steak knife in Perry’s chest matches others just like it in your kitchen. The coppers ought to return their pay for solving this one.”
What I’d said about the steak knives must have been true because he broke completely. He buried his face in his hands and rocked from side to side.
“I was such a fool!” he moaned. “But seventy thousand dollars—”
I nodded. “I know just how it is, mister.”