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.
The Reflector staff followed them in a body as far as the elevator bank. He looked around, and a scrub woman had climbed up on one of the desks to look over everybody’s heads at him. His last impression was of the long lines of luminous white bowls in the ceiling converging toward a distant point.
They took him far down below the lighted theatrical and night-life district to a gloomy, castellated silhouette on a dark, lifeless street, and in through various shabby rooms and along bleak corridors, where the few denizens to be met with were all uniformed. The surreptitious excitement among them in his wake was only less than up at the newspaper office; policemen turned to stare after him, sergeants at desks leaned out across them to get a better look as he went by.
The momentum of the arrest finally came to a stop in some sort of a back room, with windows that hadn’t been washed in years and a green-shaded light throwing the upper half of it into dismal shadow. The handcuff was detached, and he was deposited on a chair under the circle of light like a package that has been brought in.
Finally the disconnected activities crystallized once more, and he found himself again at their center. A high official, hastily summoned from bed and non-uniformed, came in and seated himself before him, but outside the radius of light. Other figures, some new, some already familiar, ranged themselves about. The atmosphere became charged with impending drama, gathered to a head, and finally dissolved into a downpour of questions.
His complete lack of reticence, his willingness — even overanxiety — to answer them all to the best of his ability, threw them off-key time and again. That is to say, they would gather themselves up to batter into denial, contradiction, and then flounder when nothing met them in opposition.
His rehearsal in the newspaper office stood him in good stead, but even so he got into a number of uncomfortably tight places. Such as when one of them asked him, although in a minor key immediately after a far more leading question, “But if you spent all that time riding the subways, how is it your clothes ain’t more rumpled than they are?”
Helen had always worked hard to keep this one suit of his in as good shape as she could. He got good and frightened for a minute, held his breath while the whole structure he’d laboriously built threatened to come toppling down around his ears.
“Well, you see, I didn’t lie down and sleep in the cars, I was afraid I’d attract the guards’ attention if I did; I rode them sitting up. It was the movie houses where I slept, and they’ve got upholstered seats, not as hard on the clothes.”
“Why’d you kill him?”
“I went in to rob him. He caught me at it, put up a battle. I had to. And all for a few lousy bucks!”
All in all, he was glad when it was over, as glad as a man attempting to prove his innocence instead of his guilt would have been. A police stenographer came in and they ran through the whole thing again, with his help. When he went astray once or twice, they put it down to fatigue. Then there was a wait while it was being typed. It was brought in and read back to him, and a few final polishing touches were added, in which he again cooperated. Finally he was brought forward to sign it.
They took him out now and stood him up before one of the desks, and he had to give his name and address. He took the precaution of not giving the one he and Helen had been living at until tonight. He gave the one they’d been dispossessed from three months before. “My last address,” he qualified it; let them think he’d been homeless since then.
That seemed to conclude the formalities for the time being, and he was taken into an adjoining building, which communicated with the first but where the floors were at a different level, and led into a cell, where he was asked if he would like a sandwich and a cup of coffee.
So many things had happened all night long that he hadn’t had time to notice until now whether he was hungry or not, but he remembered that Helen and he had had one of their usual scanty suppers, and it was now nearly his usual breakfast time, so he assented gladly.
They were brought in to him, and they were excellent; the coffee was a much better quality than they could afford at the flat. They also provided him with a whole pack of cigarettes, without the usual obligation he felt under to ration himself on them for days on end. And the bunk, when he stretched out on it, was definitely no harder than that broken-down iron bedstead of theirs at home.
The bus must be way out by now, way out beyond recall, he thought contentedly. He fell effortlessly into a deep tranquil sleep.
“What’re they going to do to me now?” he asked, riding out to the re-enactment several hours later with four officials in the car around him, a second car following, and an escort of two motorcycle policemen.
“Make you do it over in front of the cameras, so you can’t welsh out of it afterwards,” one of his escorts said in answer to his whispered question.
When they finally arrived there, he was given terse instructions to do exactly as he had done Wednesday night, retrace his steps and repeat his movements. One of the detectives was to substitute for the vanished Ranger.
Suddenly, as the ice-green lights flared up around him, he knew stage fright in its worst form. This was going to be far worse than the questioning last night at Headquarters had been; that, by comparison, had been confined to generalities; this permitted no slightest deviation.
One of them passed him a hammer which had abruptly materialized from nowhere, but he accepted it unhesitatingly instead of shrinking away from it, and that, he could see, left them non-plussed once more. He thrust it absently into his inner coat-pocket, head-downward, as though it were no more than a fountain pen. He had to keep up the pretense a while longer, he reasoned. Suppose the messenger boy was followed; suppose they got his wife back before she settled the boy out there... The screen test commenced. He “felt” his way along, step by step, mentally consulting the newspaper texts he had absorbed, like a cheating Latin student with a pony concealed behind his Caesar.
The encounter with the synthetic Ranger was not particularly abhorrent to him; he certainly felt no qualms about it. It was mostly a matter of jockeying him into position so that he would fall in the right place. The papers had been accommodatingly explicit about this, even publishing diagrams marked with large X’s to keep their readers geographically informed.
He saw them shake their heads slightly at his cold-blooded lack of emotion. Unfortunately, he swung the hammer in an entirely wrong arc, having no past experience in homicidal attacks, and when this was pointed out to him he nearly blew up altogether.
“He must have turned the other way, I guess, to get away from me,” he said after a bad moment. “Everything gets blurred when you’re seeing red.”
The crime safely on celluloid, as if to prove unarguably to everyone’s satisfaction that there had actually been one, he was whisked back down again downtown.
In the afternoon he was taken over to the adjoining building again and made to confront a personable blond young woman seated in the midst of detectives and officials in one of the rooms over there.
They looked at one another. There was, for a fleeting moment, an equally detached, impersonal curiosity on both sides. Then she quickly took refuge in a balled-up handkerchief at hand.
“Is this the man you saw outside your house the night of the murder?”
“Yes, that’s the man. I positively identify him.”
She took a deep breath into her handkerchief, as though nerving herself for something she felt obliged to do but would have preferred not to. Then she jumped suddenly from her chair, ran out at him.