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 said a Mirror reporter had told somebody that I was a key-figure in the case and it had got to Morgan.
“Who’s the dame?”
He said she was just Morgan’s steno.
“What did English have on Morgan?”
Maxie shivered. “Mister, I don’t know. I’m very damned glad I don’t know. What English knew got him killed. You were supposed to have got the story from English, so you were supposed to be killed. I got sent here to see if you had the story on paper and if you did, to burn it.
“If I found a file on English in your safe I would have burned it without looking inside, as soon as I read his name on the folder. I’m — I’m glad I don’t know any more than I do about it.”
He couldn’t walk, or thought he couldn’t. I hoisted him and booted him into the corridor. He got up and made it to the elevator.
Moe Baumgart came out of his office next door and coldly asked whether I’d been holding a three-ring circus all morning. I apologized nicely and went in again to lock up.
I went to the precinct to file charges against the kid.
The part I hated was that there wasn’t any money in it for me. Maybe keeping alive’s more important than money. If it is, why does anybody get into the detective business? But I had something to do with it. They were sure as hell going to shoot my tail off unless I got the drop on them. I could call the cops and tell them the whole story, but what was the story?
A punk who wouldn’t talk. A phone-call that only I knew anything about. A little peterman who could sue me for assault and collect. Another gambling house. A nasty kind of murder still unsolved.
The cops would laugh.
But I wasn’t laughing.
I was going to see Mr. Morgan and tell him that I didn’t know him from Adam.
How was I going to find Mr. Morgan without getting chopped down? Ah-hah, that’s the catch. Maybe I was going to get chopped down. Wouldn’t that be funny as hell? To be killed so I wouldn’t spill a secret I didn’t know?
I went out and rented a dress suit.
“Got a wedding job?” Sol asked, and I said yes. After the deposit was paid I got the quakes. I felt somehow that the ten dollars changing hands had committed me. There was no turning back now.
In my hotel room I tried on the dress suit and it looked lousy. I pressed it myself, and it didn’t fit any better but it lost that off-the-shelf look. I filled the pockets with a set of cheap, flashy accessories — cigarette case, lighter, wallet, pen, memo pad, silk handkerchief. They were all monogrammed C. McC.
In my top left bureau drawer I keep a tiny Belgian .25 automatic. It’s a slim, dainty woman’s gun, no bigger than a pack of cigarettes and not as thick. I hefted it for a long minute and pondered. I slipped it into the little pocket half-way down the left tail of the dress-coat. It didn’t bulge. The tail swung a little too heavily when I tried the jacket on and walked. That was all.
I got into the gray suit again and took the subway for Washington Square. That’s Greenwich Village, where the suckers go, and I felt like the biggest sucker who ever drew breath.
Morgan’s was a brownstone front three stories high, with curtained windows. I walked past it a couple of times — it looked like three stories of absolutely nothing.
By six I was back at my hotel. The manager got three hundred dollars of my money from the safe and I stowed it in the C. McC. wallet. It was probably going to be gone before the evening was over. I might not be alive to miss it.
I shaved myself clean again and took off my sideburns. From that top bureau drawer on the left I took a sissy-looking pair of horn-rim glasses and put them on. I parted my hair and plastered it down. Usually I comb it back with water and the hell with dandruff. I polished a pair of dancing-pumps — old-fashioned, but they and the hair would take more than an inch from my height.
By eight I was dressed and staring dubiously at myself in the mirror. Nuts. I put on a chesterfield and the rented opera hat and called the desk for a taxi.
The taxi took me to a clip-joint nightclub six doors from Morgan’s. The place was the last water-hole, and some gambling parties were sure to stop there. The rest was up to me.
The clip-joint loved me. Only half a dozen parties were in dinner-jackets, and my tailcoat was almost too good to be true. The captain scraped and gave me a ringside table. I ordered a club sandwich, to the dismay of the waiter, and a side-car.
By the time I’d finished that side-car and another the nine-o’clock floor show had begun. There was a soapy little emcee who told three fairy jokes and then brought on the unrivaled, unparalleled, lavish and magnificent chorus of five retired scrubwomen. They listlessly hipped their way through a Hawaiian number and then the emcee was back.
He told three fairy jokes and brought on that brilliant tip-top tapper, favorite of Broadway, star of stage, screen and radio, Joe Nobody. Joe pretended to work up a sweat doing a steal of Bill Robinson’s staircase dance, milked a little applause by keeping up a double-shuffle for a full minute, and pranced off to the thunderous clapping of the waiters, bus-boys and the hat-check girl.
The emcee dashed on again. While he was telling three fairy jokes I ordered another side-car and looked over a party of six who’d just come in. They were in evening clothes and looked like money. They got a good table, three away from me, and ordered bonded whiskey highballs. They drank them, ordered more and stayed through the scrubwomen’s high-hat-cane-1931-Broadway-rhythm-hotcha number. They tittered hysterically at the emcee’s three fairy jokes that followed. They drank up and left in the middle of a blue-lit fan dance by the lumpiest of the scrubwomen.
Two men came in, one of them badly plastered. They were both dressed, but had a cheap look about them. They had a couple at the bar, then decided to sit for a while. They got the table next to mine. The sober one ordered coffee for the drunk one and a highball for himself. The drunk babbled that he din’ wan’ coffee and the manager began to flutter nervously in the vicinity.
The emcee was on again. When the coffee arrived the drunk threw it on the floor and bellowed: “I don’ wan’ any coffee!”
The emcee thought he would make like Eddie Davis and quell the heckler with a witty, biting gag.
“Ya know, buddy,” he said, pointing, “theh’s on’y two kines a animals ’at make a noise like ’at. One’s a—”
The drunk realized he was being talked about, took two steps onto the floor and bashed the emcee in the mouth.
“I sai’ I din’ wan’ any coffee!” he challenged the whole clip-joint and its customers.
Waiters began to flow toward him. The drunk’s friend and I each took an elbow and led him off the floor. The drunk started to apologize to the manager, who grinned and said: “That was a nice poke you gave him. The damned loudmouth needed it. I got to throw you out now. One check?”
“Sure,” I said. “Let me have it.” We got our coats and went out together. “Where to?”
The drunk said: “Le’s go Morgan’s. I gotta blackjack sys’em works ev’ time. Le’s go Morgan’s.”
“You know Morgan’s?” asked the other one.
I shrugged. “They don’t know me.”
“I’ll get ya in. They took enough from me by now ta let a friend of mine in.”
We got into the anteroom just by knocking. There was a little doubt about me there. A cauliflowered bruiser in a beautiful dinner-jacket politely refused to let me in until Hellman, wounded in the pride, swore he’d known me for seven years and that I was Square Joe from Rightville. That did it. That more than did it. The bruiser wrote me out a card — just like speakeasy days! — and I was a member. We went on in.