The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction
- Автор: Якубовски Максим, Беллем Роберт
- Год: 2014
- Язык: английский
- Год: Constable & Robinson
- ISBN: 9781472111807
- Жанр: Крутые детективы
Электронная книга - «The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction». Краткое содержание книги:
Then she told me how he trapped her. They went to Atlantic City for a weekend. He took a fifty-dollar-a-day hotel suite. He lost several hundred dollars at the race track there. When it was all over, he told her about the four fake artist’s checks that he’d put through and held out and cashed, how it was a plan he’d long had in mind. He told Liz Tremayne that she was going to have to cover for him.
At first she refused. She was horrified, sick over it. But he cajoled and threatened. He said if she didn’t cooperate with him and he got caught, he’d involve her, anyhow. He told her that it would just be this once and there was no possible way of it being found out for nearly a year. She gave in, then. She covered for him. Then she was trapped and it became a regular thing.
“I knew we were going to have to face the music at the end,” she finished. “But by then I didn’t care, Kip. I didn’t care. I was so damned in love with the man that I didn’t care about anything. Do you understand, Kip . . . But now he’s – done this – to me!”
She started to cry again, but suddenly jerked convulsively all over. She cut off the weeping. She forced a little half-smile around her mouth. The negligée was half falling away from one shoulder but she didn’t do anything about it, even though she was conscious of the way I was staring. I couldn’t help it. Even now, after all this, she was still breathtakingly beautiful.
“Kip,” she said. She started slowly toward me. “Kip, I–I can’t go to prison. I–I just can’t! Kip, I never noticed before, but you’re handsome, too. And you’re clever. You’ve got personality, too, Ronny Chernow isn’t the only one. You’d make out fine in Mexico, too. I’d help you, Kip; help you a lot! We’d make a striking couple!”
“Don’t be crazy, Liz,” I said. “I’ve got a wife, a family. Are you out of your mind? Stay away from me. It’s no good, Liz.”
But she kept walking, slowly, provocatively, her hands running down over her own hips, pulling the negligée tautly over them, lowering it from the shoulder some more. Watching her, little electric shocks started shooting all through me. My breath seemed to catch and hurt in my chest. Her eyes had cleared from the crying spell, now. Her teeth were very white and even against the red lips as she smiled.
“Mexico, Kip,” she whispered. “You must’ve had dreams, too. I – I’ve got five hundred dollars in cash in my purse. That’s worth a lot more in Mexico. We’ve already got the ticket. The plane leaves at seven in the morning. You’re going with me, Kip. We’ll both put all the past behind us – all of it. We’ll start over.”
I tried to back away from her, but my legs bumped against the bed. She came right up close against me. The faintly musky scent of her filled my nostrils, my whole head. I began to tremble. She pressed against me and her long, carmine-nailed fingers grasped my lapels.
“Just you and me, Kip,” she said, her voice so low and throaty I couldn’t have heard it if her lips hadn’t been only an inch or so away from mine.
Her hands slid from my lapels up around my neck, then to the back of my head. They pulled my head toward her. Her mouth burned against mine and the lights in the room seemed to pinwheel. All thought, all reason went up in a burst of flame in my brain.
I found myself holding onto her by the upper arms, my fingers digging into their soft flesh.
And then the whole thing exploded. It was a muffled explosion, like clapping two thickly gloved hands together hard. Liz Tremayne went limp and, still gripping her upper arms, I was half pulled over with her. I looked at her face. Her eyes stared up at me, wide open and completely blank and horrible.
Her mouth hung slack and wet. I looked over her head toward the doorway.
Ronny Chernow was standing there. He was holding one of the pillows from the studio couch bent over double across one of his hands. For a second I wondered what he was doing with it. Then I saw the smoke wisping out from under the folded pillow. I couldn’t see the gun at all but I knew it was there.
My hands eased from Liz Tremayne’s arms and she went down to her knees and then toppled over onto one side. There was a very tiny black hole in the back of the negligée, near the left shoulder blade. Red shiny stuff was beginning to ooze out of it onto the floor.
“She’s quite a gal, eh, Morgan,” Chernow said. “She can really turn it on, can’t she? She was giving you full voltage. I taught her that stuff, Morgan. And all you jerks in the office thought she was such a pot, not worth a play. How wrong can you get?”
“Very,” I said. “Very wrong, Chernow. As wrong as you’ve gotten. Now, you’ve just committed murder on top of everything else.”
Ronny Chernow’s thick, masculine brows raised. His hair was still curly and tousled, boyishly. He was still the expensively dressed, handsome, arrogant man-about-town. If you didn’t look too closely. But now I could see the glassy gleam in his eyes, and there was a brutal twist to his thin, well-shaped lips. There was a nervous tic at one corner of his mouth. Maybe he didn’t realize yet but this was all having an effect on him.
“You’ve got it wrong,” he said. He gave a quiet, confident laugh. “I haven’t killed anybody. I didn’t embezzle all that money. I didn’t sign that confession that’s in the mail right now, will be in old Malkom’s hands, Monday morning. I didn’t come here and shoot Liz . . . You did all those things, Morgan. Don’t you see the way it is?”
I saw. There was only one way it could be, now. He was going to kill me, too. When Liz and I were found, coupled with the letter of confession, it would be a fairly simple thing for the police to figure. They’d find the plane tickets, figure we’d planned to skip, together. But at the last minute we’d had an argument, a fight about something. I’d killed Liz, then shot myself. That was the way the whole thing was going to figure.
4. Smitty Pays a Visit
I watched Ronny Chernow start toward me. He looked terribly big. Much bigger than he’d ever seemed to me before. He kept holding the couch pillow folded over the gun in his hand.
“Stand still, Morgan,” he said. The smile was gone from his face. His lips were flattened against his teeth. The tic at the corner of his mouth was leaping crazily.
Sure, I thought, stand still so that you can get close enough so that there’ll be powder burns on my shirt front. But I couldn’t seem to make myself move. I felt frozen, carved out of stone. I looked down on Liz Tremayne, sprawled there, her legs twisted under her awkwardly. She looked like a broken rag doll. I wondered if she was having any of those dreams now.
There it is, I told myself. There’s that other life you missed by getting married and settling down. There’s Miss Manhattan At Night-time. There’s your glittering, crowded smoky hotspots and the throbbing, pulsing music and riding through the night in an open Caddy convertible, with a beautiful girl beside you. There’s the easy, crazy, enticing, live-for-the-moment way. Lying there dead with a bullet in her back . . . And coming toward you, a killer, with all those turning, tossing, conscience-stricken nights behind him, with the cruel desperation etched into his face, with fear like little maggots in his brain all the time.
He had all that stuff. He didn’t settle for your life, the drudgery, monotony, the bills, the skipping the new suits and the beautiful shirts and ties because there was another baby coming, the long bus trip back and forth, kids squalling or sick or worrisome in some other way. But look at him. On the ragged edge of mania. He can’t keep killing and killing.
“That’s right,” Chernow said in the quietest voice I’d ever heard him use. “Stand nice and still. Nice – and – still . . .”