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.
Swanson got up, too, but he went the other way, toward the inner door. “Take me in with you,” he said. “I’m no fake.”
The office boy looked at him for a minute; there must have been something convincing about his taut manner. He hitched his head, led him across a great open barn of a place, subdivided by innumerable wooden rails and buzzing with typewriters, into a cubicle at the opposite end with City Editor blacked on the door.
A disheveled-looking man was sitting in there, hair awry, coat off, elastics holding up his shirt sleeves. He swung his arm wearily. “Get out. Every crack-pot in town—” But Swanson’s silent tenseness got to him too. “Well, what d’you think you know?” he said impatiently. “You seen him? You know who he is?”
“I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t,” was the tight-lipped answer.
“Well, d’you know where he is?” He wanted to save his paper a thousand bucks if he could. It had been his idea, after all.
Swanson tapped a fingernail on the desk. “I know where he is at this very minute.”
The editor jack-knifed his hands closed, then open again, in a grasping gesture. “Well, let me have it quick! If it’s any good we can still make the midnight final with it!”
“Wait a minute. Just when, and in what form, do I get the thousand?”
“Our check will be mailed to you just as soon as we’ve verified the information — and if it has resulted in the arrest of this guy.”
Swanson narrowed his eyes. “I thought that was coming. Trying to welsh out of it, eh? Nope, I want it in cash, I want it right here and now while I’m in the office with you, I want a bonded messenger standing outside the door to deliver it to a certain place, and I also want your word that where it was delivered won’t be revealed to the police afterwards.”
“I can’t do that. How do I know your information is valid? Our terms are the guy has to be apprehended first be—”
“You’ll know how valid it is as soon as you hear it. You don’t have to worry about verifying it, it’s self-verifying. The whole works is bound up in it automatically, whereabouts, identity, and apprehension. Now take it or leave it. Because I can go across the street to the Daily Views office and get as much or more for it.”
The disheveled one got even more disheveled than before, if possible, at this last threat. He did a good deal of hectic telephoning, to the managing editor at his home, to the treasurer, to the press room in the basement.
Fifteen minutes later twenty fifty-dollar bills lay on his desk in a manila envelope, a messenger’s form was silhouetted outside the glass of the door, and the typewriters were breathlessly holding their fire all over the place as though esoterically aware something momentous was in the air.
“This better be good.” The editor heaved an exhausted sigh. “O.K., O.K., now spill it! Where is this Ranger murderer at the present time?”
“He’s standing right across your desk looking square at you,” said Swanson calmly.
“Wha-at? Y-y-you mean you?” The editor jolted his chair back, partly in surprise, partly in sudden precautionary retreat.
“I’m turning myself over to you. Here I am. Now come on with your money.”
The editor dazedly picked up the manila envelope, partly extended it toward him. But he held on to a corner of it tightly without letting go. “Where you been hiding out since then?”
“Movie shows from morning to midnight, the subways from midnight to morning. If I gotta read another cough-drop ad I’ll go wacky!”
“Well, just a minute, I gotta be sure; what was on the left side of the living-room doorway up at the Ranger place, as you went in?”
“A big blue vase; I knocked it over and busted it in the scrap.”
“What’d you do with the hammer?”
“I slanted it against the curb about a block away from their place. Then I jumped on it and snapped the handle off short with my foot. I shoved the wooden part down a sewer opening; it must be floating outside the harbor by now. I carried the hammer head around in my clothing for a while, wrapped in a piece of paper so — you know, it wouldn’t leave any stains. I finally got rid of that in a refuse can on one of the subway platforms. Don’t ask me which one. I’ve got a headful of arithmetic from watching them tick past the last few days.”
“I guess you’re the ticket, all right,” the editor said ruefully. “But why did you do it?”
“For dough. What else? Didn’t get much, though.” Swanson jerked the envelope out of his reluctant grasp. “Call the messenger in here. Is he bonded?”
“Don’t worry about him, he’s O.K.”
Swanson sealed the gummed flap of the envelope. He drew the messenger aside out of earshot, said in a low voice: “Take this down to the Transcontinental Bus Terminal. There’ll be a woman in the waiting-room, with a kid wrapped up in a blanket. Give it to her. That’s all. Don’t talk to her; come right back.”
The messenger hurried out. The editor looked after him longingly. “Your moll — er, sweetheart, that who’s getting it? Gee, that would make a swell human-interest angle.”
“The agreement was that’s to be kept from the police and out of the paper,” Swanson said harshly. “I haven’t got any girl; I’m a lone wolf. I’ll tell you as a man, but not as an editor, just so you won’t think there’s any mystery about it. It’s — it’s a conscience fund, to try to make amends before I take my medicine. I told him to give it to the first needy-looking mother and child he came across at a certain place. Now go ahead, bring on your cops, I’m ready.”
“Whoa!” The editor semaphored alarmedly, both arms in air. “We want an exclusive on this first, we can’t keep you to ourselves forever.” He grabbed up a phone, barked into it: “Rip out your first page down there! Get ready for an extra. I’m sending you down a slue of pictures!” He jumped over to the door, bawled out: “Rewrite man! Pix! Tearjerker! All of you! Everybody in here! I’ve got the Ranger murderer with me in my office!”
The small office was suddenly gorged with people, jostling, staring over one another’s shoulders, banked solidly around Swanson, who was passively seated now in a chair. They were all talking at once to him, elbowing one another aside, jockeying to get next to him.
“Quiet, everybody! What is your name, we haven’t even got that yet.”
“Jerome Swanson.”
“All right, let’s get going. The presses are waiting. Stand back and give him air. Let’s have it, Swanson.”
Swanson’s eyes sought the ceiling, which was the only clear space there was in the cubicle, in search of fluency. “Last Wednesday night, about six p.m. in the evening...” he began, and a sudden reverent hush fell on the yapping pack.
Policemen came in with a fine authoritative surge at about two in the morning, streaming across the newspaper office like a tide that has been held back past its time. Two plainclothesmen in the lead pounced on a haggard unshaven reporter by mistake, first of all.
“No, no, no!” wailed the city editor. “That’s one of my feature writers. Him — over there.”
They desisted and came on at Swanson, but not without a backward look of suspicion at their first objective. Swanson was the only calm person in the place, still sitting there on the chair, smoking quietly, one ankle hoisted to the opposite knee.
“So this is the guy, eh?”
They all said it in turn, with slight variations. A manacle clicked and fastened itself around his wrist. He looked down at it fascinatedly, changed the impeded cigarette he was holding over to his other hand.
He was jerked to his feet by the man on the other end of the manacle, with a proprietary “Come on, baby!” They formed themselves into a phalanx around him, one on each side, one leading the way, one behind him.