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.
Some murder case or other. What was it to him? Let the whole world murder and be murdered; he only cared about his kid and Helen. The front page furled over with the fling he had given the paper, and bared the page beneath, and after a while he became conscious of a dollar sign peering up at him from it. Next to it there was a one, and then a comma, and then three naughts. Funny, he must have been thinking so hard of one thousand dollars that he thought he was seeing it staring up at him from the printed page.
He drew the paper back toward him again. It was in a little box down at the foot, in heavier type than the rest. “Reward,” it said, and then underneath: “The Daily Reflector, in a spirit of cooperation with the police, is prepared to pay the sum of $1,000 to anyone furnishing information leading to the identification and capture of the murderer of Robert J. Ranger. Members of police force not eligible. Information must be legitimate. No telephone calls. Apply City Desk, Daily Reflector, 205 East, etc, etc.”
He turned back to the first page. He took a deep breath, pulled his chair up closer, and started to read his way through from the beginning, shading his eyes from the naked light overhead with one hand across them.
When he’d finished, he got up, went into the kitchen, and brought the previous night’s paper back with him. They kept their back-number papers to start the fire with. He read that one exhaustively too. There was a photograph in it, of someone he had never seen before. “Robert J. Ranger,” it said under it. He studied it carefully, then he closed his eyes a minute, as though he were etching it into his memory.
When he’d finally finished his recapitulation, there were three back numbers of the paper littered about the table before him, and he had obtained a composite and sketchy outline of what the whole thing was about:
A prosperous investment broker named Robert J. Ranger had been found murdered by hammer blows in the living-room of his home, in the smart suburb of Northchester, the previous Wednesday — that is to say, four days before. There were signs of a terrific struggle, and it was obvious that the man had sold his life dearly. A priceless blue porcelain Ming vase standing near the door was shattered, tables and chairs were overturned, the carpet was furrowed into corrugated ridges by the two pairs of feet that had scuffled back and forth over it.
It was fairly obvious to the police (they declared in print) that it had been committed by an intruder, someone unknown to Ranger. A nominal sum of money that had been on his person was missing, but a far larger sum within easy access had been overlooked. The intruder had apparently become terror-stricken at the sight of his own crime and fled the house without pursuing his search any further.
Ranger had had an engagement to go to dinner and the theater with his wife, had already bought the tickets (Stars in Your Eyes, Row C), and then at the last minute had been prevented from going by a vicious headache. Not wishing to disappoint Mrs. Ranger, he had arranged to have his business partner, Allen Cochrane, escort her in his place, had phoned him to meet her at a restaurant in town.
Mrs. Ranger had left shortly after dark, and distinctly remembered that the door of her car had been opened for her, unasked, by a seedy-looking individual of the type who performs that service for a pittance. It was highly probable, she thought (also in print) that this was the man who had later forced his way into the house under the mistaken impression that no one was home — Ranger had put all the lights out and lain down in the dark to ease his head — and murdered her husband when discovered ransacking it.
Unfortunately, Mrs. Ranger was unable to furnish a very exact description of this man. The fact that she was wearing most of her jewelry, and his accosting her by her car like that, made her nervous, had caused her to start the car quickly and drive off without looking closely at him.
Swanson read this passage through twice, tracing his finger under it.
At any rate, the crime did not occur for some time after her departure. She had telephoned from the Majestic Theater at 8:25, just before the curtain went up, to find out how her husband was, and he had spoken to her himself and said he felt much better. Then when she returned at midnight...
Swanson stopped reading.
“Helen!” he said. “Helen!”
She came to the door and looked out at him hopelessly.
“Get the kid ready,” he said. “Start packing your own things, too. You’re taking him with you to Tucson — right tonight.”
“But how are you ever going to clear yourself again, once you get into their clutches?” she said, when he’d finally beaten down her objections. “It isn’t just a case of spending a little time in jail for contempt of court or taking money under false pretenses. I mean, you’ll be in so deep by that time that you’ll never be able to explain your way out of it. They’ll go ahead and convict you, and — and maybe even execute you for it, Jerry. It’s too risky. Don’t do it, don’t do it!”
“That’s where you come in. You’re my living alibi. You know I wasn’t anywhere near Northchester last Wednesday night, that I was sitting here in the flat with you and the kid the whole time. Now here’s what you do: You take the boy out there and board him with someone. Then you sit tight and wait until you hear from me. When I need you I’ll send you a wire. Leave the kid out there — he’s got to have his chance — and you come on back and do your stuff.”
“But I’m your wife; suppose they won’t believe me?”
“Well, if worse comes to worst, I still have the doc to fall back on. He was up here, too, last Wednesday, treating the kid. He knows I wasn’t out murdering anyone. After all, look at it this way, Helen: All that connects me with the crime is my own say-so. That is, one person’s word. On the other hand I have two people’s words to clear me, in a pinch. One against two, those are fair enough odds. What more could anyone ask?
“Another thing, the real murderer may be turned up long before they’re ready to try me, and I won’t even have to have any help getting out of it. The kid has to have his break. I’m willing to do a short jail stretch to see that he gets it, and that’s all that’s involved. So put out the lights and let’s get started.”
He kissed them both good-by on the streetcar riding downtown, the kid bundled up in a blanket, his wife with a heavy suit-case beside her. “Now you wait there in the bus terminal until I send the money over to you. As soon as it reaches you, buy your tickets and take the next bus out; don’t stick around.”
He swung down and the streetcar went rumbling past. He walked east until he came to a chunky-looking office building, rode up on an express elevator, stepped off it and went into a reception room. “I want to see the city editor,” he told the girl at the switchboard.
“Another.” She sighed wearily. “All right, sit down over there with the rest of them.” She pointed to where three or four nondescript-looking people were ranged uncomfortably along the wall on hard wooden chairs.
A blown-glass door in the three-quarters partition that walled the reception room opened and a woman came out, forcibly escorted by an office boy. “I did so see him, I tell ye!” she declared indignantly over her shoulder. “I saw him plain as day! I was on me way to get a pail of beer and—”
A male voice came booming out after her above the clatter of typewriters: “Well, go back and get another pail; then you’ll see him twice!”
The office boy said, “He ain’t wasting his time on any more of you false alarms, so give them chairs a breath of fresh air!”
The sitters got up and drifted sheepishly out, with an air of “We didn’t think we’d get away with it, but no harm in trying anyway.”