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.
“All right,” said the super. “I’ll take a look right away.”
Ten minutes later he telephoned back and I grabbed the handset and listened while he roared shrilly, “Murder! Murder! Mr. Penn is been murdered!”
I hung up instantly and I turned to Poppa Hanley and said, “Three wise men, all of Babylon, all dead. Come on, Poppa. The thing is really beginning to get hot.”
Wilbur Penn had been killed in Babylon. Martin Penn had been killed the day before we found him. Fenwick Hanes had been killed at eight p.m. this very night.
What had started with a routine inquiry from Iowa had suddenly blossomed into three exceedingly dead corpses. Which goes to show that life is still full of little surprises.
Poppa and I sent Dinah home and we left Babcock and Claghorn over at the Metronome and took Dr. Kerr Kyne with us. “I want it clearly understood,” Dr. Kyne said to me with sarcasm as we drove to Beeker Place, “that you never call me Buzzard again. For if anybody ever made me look like an amateur when it comes to hovering over the dead, you are that man, Mr. Dill, and it gives me great pleasure to say that I can practically scent the smell of graveyards all over and around you.”
I let him go on. I couldn’t help smiling because it was about time he got a chance to crow a little. We reached Beeker Place in nothing flat and were greeted at the door by the superintendent who was almost hysterical with fright. He took us right up to the apartment where Dinah and I had previously rung the bell to no avail. He unlocked the door and we trooped in.
Dr. Kerr Kyne went right to work. Martin Penn was dead, all right. You didn’t have to be the chief M. E. of New York County to gather that much. He was a thin, sharp sort of man with a shrewd face, this corpse which sat comfortably in a chair. No bullet in the head this time, as in the case of Fenwick Hanes. This bullet had struck Martin Penn directly over the heart. From the expression on the dead man’s face, it was plain that he had seen his killer, perhaps even talked with him. For there was hate in Martin Penn’s face and no fooling.
We had better luck here, though. Dr. Kyne said that Penn had been dead for at least thirty-six hours and that the slug was a .32, and undoubtedly the same gun which killed Hanes had killed Penn. I reminded myself to check with John Harvey of the Babylon Gazette on the slug which had killed Wilbur Penn. There was an avenging angel on the trail somewhere and it would be a good idea if we stopped him. Murder is a habit when you do too much of it, the killer might easily leave a line of dead behind him, getting scared and more scared on the way. It’s fear that makes murder, in one way or another.
Martin Penn had been a shrewd man, so shrewd that even in death he had pointed out a clue to the identity of his killer.
Sitting in that chair, with a bullet in his body, he had not died at once. This isn’t strange, for I have seen men shot through the heart with a high-power copper-jacket still stumble on and fire several shots, although they were already dead. In man, there is sometimes an unconquerable will which makes him perform even after a mortal wound has been inflicted. In any case, with his own finger, dipped in the blood of his own wound, Martin Penn had traced something upon the maple arm of the chair in which he sat.
It was a flat-sided arm, wide enough to take a pad for sketching, and the blood had dried black upon the wood, leaving his handiwork quite plain there by his right hand.
It was the sketch, crude and macabre, of an ear. Just one ear.
But it was enough to start me thinking and I remembered the alarm clock and suddenly I said, “Poppa, I think I get it.”
“You’re a smarter guy than I am if you do,” Poppa said sourly.
“An ear,” I said. “Well, what about an ear? It would just be guessing if we had this killing alone. But we’ve got the Fenwick Hanes murder too, and to me, the distinctive thing about that one was the alarm clock. Did you know that the alarm had run down on the thing? And the alarm hand was set for eight o’clock. Now it’s my guess — guess, mind you — that Hanes wanted to make an evening performance at eight-thirty in some theater. He told the desk to wake him at eight. He didn’t trust them, but set the clock for eight himself. Everything happened at eight. There was a killer in there who shot him. The elevator boy heard the bell ringing even when the shot was fired. Which would mean the alarm went off before Hanes was killed. And it was allowed to run down! Now, Poppa — look me in the eye and imagine me a killer. I’m standing here and I’m going to bump you off. Just as I’m getting up nerve, an alarm clock goes off. What do I do?”
“You instinctively turn off the alarm because it’s noisy and you’re afraid of two things: You’re afraid it’ll wake up your victim and you’re afraid it will attract outside attention.”
“Fine,” I said, “and right. I never saw a man yet who didn’t dive for an alarm clock to turn it off when it started to holler. Yet this killer stood there, heard the alarm, shot Hanes, then scrammed, and the alarm kept going to advertise things. What does that mean to you?”
“It means,” said Hanley heavily, “that the killer was deaf.”
“It sure does,” I said. “And Martin Penn didn’t sweat out his last seconds drawing this ear for no other reason but that.”
Hanley grunted. “Well, you don’t have to look so pleased about it. I still don’t see how it gives us a lead. All we have to do is find a guy with a .32 caliber gun which fits these bullets, the guy being deaf. Huh. That’s all we have to do.”
“I think,” I said, “that when you get a line on the Penns and Hanes, it will narrow down your choice considerably. But as for now, I see nothing to keep me from returning to the gay white way. So long, Pater, I’m to pick up Dinah and see the sights. Tomorrow I’ll buzz John Harvey in Babylon and see what he has to offer on the murder of Wilbur Penn.”
At the city room of the New York Chronicle, next morning at ten a.m., I gladdened the Old Man’s heart by pounding out the dope on the stories of the night before, and then I telephoned the Babylon Gazette out in Iowa — at the Chronicle’s expense — and asked to speak with John Harvey. I got a man named Wooley who apparently worked on the sheet and he said, “Gosh, Mr. Dill, it’s funny you should call him. He’s not here. He left for New York yesterday morning and he’ll be arriving on the Golden Arrow sometime this morning in Pennsylvania Station. This murder out here is raising a lot of fuss, and when he didn’t hear from you in answer to his telegram, he decided to go on to New York himself and see Wilbur Penn’s brother. There are some folks here think Martin Penn shot his own brother, and John wants to be first on the spot to make sure. He said he’d go see you and maybe you could help him find Martin Penn. I think the train gets in at eleven.”
“I can show him Martin Penn all right,” I said. “Mr. Penn is now residing in the morgue. There’s a headline for your rag. Martin Penn was shot and killed two days ago in his New York apartment. He was killed before his brother Wilbur was, only nobody knew it. I’ll meet Harvey at the train. So long.”
How I was going to pick John Harvey out of the welter getting off the Golden Arrow I didn’t know, but I made a try. I went up to Pennsy and tipped a porter to page John Harvey when the crowd came off the ramp. But I didn’t locate him in the crowd and no one answered the name. I had lunch at a drugstore fountain and then went downtown again.