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.
“Wait a minute,” Longstreet called.
I looked back at him, waiting.
“I withdraw all charges,” he said to Blake.
Sergeant Blake’s face reddened and he rose to his feet. “Lissen...” he started to say, but that was as far as he got.
“Don’t raise your voice at me!” Longstreet interrupted. And, leaning across the rail, he planted his fist squarely in the sergeant’s nose.
Two things happened rapidly. Sergeant Blake sat on the floor, and the cop who brought us in twisted Longstreet’s arm up behind his back until the fat man stood on his toes.
“Lock him up!” Blake roared, using his desk to pull himself erect. Blood trickled across his mouth from each nostril.
Still cramping Longstreet’s arm behind his back, our cop dogtrotted him toward the corridor leading to the pokey. As they passed through the door, the fat man twisted his head over his shoulder to grin at me. The familiar mischievous laughter was back in his eyes.
“He had a devil of a time getting arrested,” I said to Blake.
But the sergeant was too busy holding a handkerchief to his nose to care what I said or did. I picked my check off his desk, dropped the receipt and left.
As I went down the steps, Anton Strowlski, partially supported by the rookie cop, groggily stumbled up. The look he threw me tried to be venomous, but it came out more punchy than baneful.
I returned it with a grin.
The phone blared me out of a sound sleep at four in the morning. I let it ring while I strapped on my leg and slipped into a robe, being in no rush to end the wait of anyone who phoned at that hour.
“Moon,” I said, when I finally got to the phone.
“About time,” a familiar voice rapped in my ear.
It was Inspector Warren Day, Chief of Homicide, who for years had been trying to decide whether he hated my guts or loved me like a brother.
“Go to bed,” I said.
“Get your clothes on. Hannegan is on his way over to pick you up.”
“Yeah? What’s the charge?”
“No charge. Want to see you.”
I was silent for a minute. Then I said: “You’ve seen me lots of times. Go home and sober up.”
Day’s voice sank to its normal growl. “Listen, Moon. I’m in no mood for your sass. You come with Hannegan, or I’ll send him back with a warrant. You’re a material witness in a murder.”
“Nuts. I haven’t seen a murder since the last time I unraveled one you’d fouled up.”
“Get your clothes on,” Day repeated, and hung up.
I brushed my teeth, felt the rubble on my cheeks and wondered if a shave would bring me awake. Deciding against it, I jolted myself alive with a shot of rye instead. I was dressed when Lieutenant Hannegan arrived.
His expression was wary when he came in, a result of past experience with my resistance to Inspector Day’s arbitrary orders.
“You ready?” he asked uneasily.
“All set.”
He looked relieved and a little surprised. I followed him outside to the squad car, and asked no questions until he got it in motion.
Then I asked: “What’s the deal?”
“Corpse named Carmichael. And the guy who did it, couldn’t have.”
“Come again?”
“The guy who did it was in jail when it happened. That’s where you come in. Fellow named Longstreet.”
“Oh,” I said softly. “A faint light glimmers.”
Inspector Warren Day paced back and forth in his office, chewing his eternal dead cigar and periodically ducking his skinny bald head to peer at one or another of us over his glasses.
Willard Longstreet sat on a straight-backed chair in the center of the room, his fat seat protruding beyond both edges. His clothes hung in perspiration-soaked wrinkles and his round face sagged with fatigue from hours of answering questions. But a faint mocking light still glimmered in the back of his eyes.
Hannegan sat alongside Day’s desk, and I relaxed in a chair tilted against the wall.
“You can’t get away with it,” Day snarled at Longstreet for the twenty-seventh time. “At 3:30 p.m. you had a phone argument with Carmichael. Your joint secretary recognized your voice. At 5:00 p.m. you phoned again and told Carmichael you’d be there in ten minutes. Your secretary swears it was your voice. When she left for home, Carmichael was in his office waiting for you. At 5:30 a shot was heard and the medics confirm that as the time of death. Your gun was found on the office floor too far away for it to be suicide. Your prints, and nobody else’s, are on it. You got plenty of motive. You did it. How?”
“Anyone could have stolen my gun,” Longstreet said patiently, also for the twenty-seventh time. “I live in a hotel and passkeys are easy to get. Besides, I was in a locked cell from 3:00 p.m. on.”
“Locked cell! Locked cell!” Day screeched. “Shut up about locked cells! You got out and back in some way.” He turned on Hannegan. “Get him out of my sight! Chain him to the wall. And post a guard in sight of him, so he doesn’t get out and murder the whole police department. He’s got Houdini beat!”
Hannegan got to his feet and motioned the prisoner erect. Longstreet rose slowly, his shoulders drooping with tiredness.
“Would you like to earn ten thousand dollars, Moon?” he asked me casually.
“Mister Moon,” I said.
“Mr. Moon, then,” he said agreeably. “Would you like to earn ten thousand?”
“Depends on the method.”
A mischievous twinkle pushed past the fatigue in his eyes. “Break this case. I don’t think the cops can.”
I looked him over thoughtfully. “If I prove you did it, where do I collect? From your estate?”
He shook his head. “I didn’t do it.”
I said: “I’ll drop down to your cell later on.”
When Hannegan and Longstreet were gone, Warren Day threw himself into his desk chair, traded his cigar butt for one just like it in his ashtray, carefully dusted it off and stuck it in his mouth.
“What do you think, Manny?” he asked dispiritedly.
“I think four in the morning is a hell of a time to wake me up when the murder was discovered ten hours earlier.”
“How’d I know you’d been brought in with Longstreet? A different man was on the desk at six, and I didn’t hear about you till just before I called.” He ran a hand over the place his hair had been. “What you think about all this?”
I said: “You’re sitting on dynamite.”
“I know I am.”
“Wait till the papers learn you’ve charged a guy with committing a murder that happened while he was locked in one of your escape-proof cells.”
“He’s not charged with murder. We’re holding him for assaulting a cop.”
“What’s bond?”
“Five hundred.”
“Five hundred!” I said. “Longstreet only cost me two-fifty. Cops aren’t worth twice as much as people.”
Day wiggled his thin nose and studied his cigar. “He hasn’t inquired about bond. Seems in no hurry to get out.”
“But he can, whenever he wants. Then what do you do? Charge him with murder?”
The inspector rubbed the side of his nose. “I’d get laughed out of town. Jeepers creepers, Manny, you got any ideas at all about this?”
I felt sorry for him. Normally he would cut off his head before he would ask my opinion about the weather. But he was stopped so cold by this that he hadn’t even cursed me once. And it was the first time in our eight-year acquaintance that we had met without trading profanity and a few mild threats.
I said: “Only what I told you. I’m as sure as I sit here that Longstreet deliberately got himself arrested. That was his sole purpose in picking a scrap at the Jefferson. And when he couldn’t needle me into filing counter-charges, he slugged Blake. You have to conclude he was building an alibi. Why else would he try to get in jail?”