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.
Well, that was all right. But when five p.m. rolled around and the party still had not answered, I knew that I was going to have to go up there and interview the guy when he got home from work, and that it was all kind of a nuisance. Dinah made a date for dinner, but I agreed only on condition that she went up to Beeker Place with me. She must have been hungry because she accepted the stipulation without a howl.
So off we went to cover the man from Babylon, Iowa, little knowing what we were letting ourselves in for...
Martin Penn was not home. He lived in a small apartment house in Beeker Place and we rang his doorbell for ten minutes before we gave it up as a bad job. I was just as glad but Dinah, the little nimbus cloud, only said, “Hi-ho, it only means you have to come back tomorrow and try, try again. Let’s eat at the Hideaway Club. I haven’t seen Bill Latham since they put Santa Claus’ whiskers back among the moth-balls.”
That was all right with me. We took a cab over to Broadway where the Hideaway Club failed to live up to its name by advertising its location in no uncertain neon lights.
Bill Latham greeted us at the door with a broad grin. “Well, well,” he said, “the Fourth Estate in person. Are you following Poppa Hanley around or did he tell you to meet him here?”
“Is that galoot here?” Dinah sighed. “Oh great gouts of blood — now he and Daffy will discuss death and detection all night. It’s like going out to dinner with a signal 32 ringing in your ears. I’ll bet you five fish, Bill, that they get a call before dessert.”
“I’ll take it,” Latham grinned. “Things have been pretty quiet, Poppa was telling me, so the chances are you’ll lose. He’s over there in a wall booth, down by the band.”
We wended our way past the jitterbugs on the dance floor and reached the red leather booth where Poppa was sitting, mangling a half a dozen oysters and looking pompously dignified.
When he saw us, he leaped to his feet and looked happier. Poppa is one homely man, when you come right down to it. He was all dressed up, but that didn’t keep his long ears from sticking out like an elephant’s flappers, and his face, always brick red, was holding its own. “Golly,” he said, “this is a pleasure, Dinah. If only you could have left the runt at home. Oh well, a guy can’t have everything. Sit down.”
... Dinah won the five bucks. We had finished the beefsteaks and were waiting for the salad when Bill Latham came over and slipped a fin in Dinah’s bag and said, “Telephone call for you, Lieutenant. Will you take it here?”
Poppa looked grim and nodded. They brought a telephone to the booth and plugged it in.
“Wow,” I said, “so you’ve been to Hollywood, Bill, eh? This is the way they do it in the Brown Derby and Sardi’s out there. Guys go to eat in those joints and tell their butlers to give them a ring, just so they’ll be paged and get the eye from the other customers.”
Poppa said, “Hello? This is Hanley... Oh, hello, Babcock. I’m eating dinner. I told you not to call unless it was something important... eh?... Oh... Hell... All right. What’s the address again?... I’ve got it. I’ll meet you there. You pick up Claghorn and Louie, and tell Dr. Kyne to come running. I think he’s over in Bellevue. I’ll see you there.”
He hung up and took a deep breath and sighed and looked at me.
Dinah groaned, “The march of crime.”
“A guy,” Hanley said to me. “Bumped off. Want to come?”
“Who is it?” I said. “Of course I’ll come. If I didn’t come, the Old Man would beat my pride into the dust, grrr!”
“Guy named Fenwick Hanes,” said Poppa. “Babcock got the call through Telegraph Bureau.
Someone telephoned in and said that this guy had been found in the Hotel Metronome on West 45th. That’s not far from you. Let’s go see. Just up Broadway a couple of blocks. You heard what I said.”
“Well,” Dinah said sourly, “I’ll be a rootin’ tootin’ hillybilly if I get left here alone with the check. I’m coming too, boys, and don’t argue with a woman. Garsong! L’addition for these gentlemen!”
We got out of there and walked north, the three of us, until Dinah got a stitch in her side from the pace. “Take it easy,” she said. “That meal is having its troubles. The fellow is dead. Why the rush?”
“Listen, Angel-Eyes,” I said. “The last time you saw a corpse, you passed out on me. I think you’d better go home.”
“Not me,” Dinah said grimly. “I’ve got a date with you and not even a murder is going to make me a wall-flower.”
We reached the Metronome a few minutes later and found Detective Claghorn waiting for us in the lobby downstairs. We shook hands with him and then we went up.
Claghorn said, “I came right up, Chief, when I heard the news. Did Babcock telephone you? I guess he’s on the way with the stuff and the M.E. I happened to be home when he buzzed me and I don’t live far from here myself. The manager is upstairs and I don’t think we’re gonna get a lead from what he said.”
On the seventh floor, we found the manager, a man named Horace Wilson, who was pasty-faced and nervous. “These things are always bad publicity for the hotel,” he groaned, “but what can we do about them? They always happen.”
“Let’s have a look-see,” Hanley grunted non-committally.
We opened the door and went in. Dinah took one look and opened the door and went out again. “I’ll wait downstairs,” she said. “I’ll tell the other boys where to come. But as for me, I just had dinner and I don’t want to waste the money you all spent on it. See you anon.”
Dinah is a sissy, but I like her for it. These women who can look a stiff in the eye without flinching are too hard-boiled for Daffy. It wasn’t that Mr. Fenwick Hanes was a mess, for he wasn’t. He had been murdered very neatly indeed, and there was little blood.
Fenwick Hanes had been shot to death. One shot. He was lying in his bed with his shoes and his coat and vest off.
“Mr. Hanes left a message at the desk that he was to be awakened at eight o’clock,” the manager explained. “Apparently he decided to take a nap. He was in from out of town and had been running around quite a bit and was tired. At eight p.m., the elevator boy heard a shot. He called me and I came in and found him like that.”
“Hmm,” said Hanley. “Looks like a .32...” He stared at the manager. “You mean that’s all there is? You didn’t see anyone in here?”
“Yes.”
I went over and picked up a small alarm clock which Hanes had set by his bed. It said eight-thirty. I looked at it sharply and I said, “Boy, if this could only talk.”
The elevator boy showed up then along with Dr. Kerr Kyne and Babcock and the police fotog. Hanley went to work on the boy and the gist of it was that the boy had been going by the floor when he heard a shot. He instantly came back to the seventh floor and stepped out. He said he heard a bell ringing. Then he went for the manager. He did not see anybody.
Big help. I could see the disappointment in Hanley’s face.
Well, it was one of those things. I wasn’t particularly interested in the killing and I didn’t see where the Chronicle’s readers would be. Just a hotel knock-off That is, until I asked for some dope on Fenwick Hanes himself.
“We don’t know anything about him,” said the manager. “He checked in three days ago and signed the register Fenwick Hanes, Babylon, Iowa—” The manager stopped short because of the way I gaped at him.
“Babylon, Iowa!” I said.
“That’s right.”
I grabbed the telephone and then set it down again. I was that excited. Then I took up a telephone book and looked up the apartment in Beeker Place and telephoned the superintendent. “This is the police department,” I growled at the super while Hanley watched me as though he thought me half cracked. “I want you to go right up to Mr. Penn’s apartment and open it and have a look at it. We have a tip that there’s been foul play and we’re checking on it. You telephone back and tell me what you find.” And I gave him the number. “Ask for Lieutenant Hanley, room 706.”