Электронная книга - «The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories». Краткое содержание книги:
An unstoppable anthology of crime stories culled from Black Mask magazine the legendary publication that turned a pulp phenomenon into literary mainstream. 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.
“Why did you do it? Why did you take my husband from me?” she screamed tinnily. She made flailing motions toward his unprotected face; she was quickly restrained, drawn back by the men around her. But something had been faulty about the timing of the scene. She had had ample time to get in at least one good raking claw down his cheeks, and she hadn’t; she had just held her magenta-lacquered nails poised in clawing position, as if waiting for them to be restrained.
“She’s not sore at me,” Swanson said to himself with sudden deep-seated inner conviction; “she’s glad he’s gone. She’s play-acting just as much as — I am.”
And more than that, he even had a fleeting impression that she was afraid of him. Like someone is when you both know something that no one else does, and one of you is afraid the other will give it away.
She was led out with her head stiffly averted, as though she couldn’t get away quickly enough. Well, the whole thing was too involved and deep for his mental processes to be able to cope with.
The next day he had a visitor in his cell. He was a rather awe-inspiring man, with a short, neat graying beard and spectacles on a black cord.
“I’m Markovitz,” he said bluntly. “I’ve been appointed by the state to defend you.” He rested a paternal hand on Swanson’s bony shoulder. “You should not have taken a life; you know that, don’t you? But I am going to do the best I can for you. We must be practical. In a case like this we must use whatever weapons are put into our hands.” He removed his glasses, polished them, pointed toward the hypnotized Swanson.
“Insanity, of course,” he stated bluntly.
His client sprang to his feet, stood there white to the gills, shaking from head to foot in a sudden ungovernable horror. Like many ignorant people, he had dreadful formalized visions of strait jackets, straw pallets, and clinking chains, in connection with mental derangement of any sort. “Oh, don’t do that to me!” he wailed. “Don’t! Don’t put me in one of those places, I’ll never get out alive again! I will go insane!”
“You committed murder,” the lawyer reminded him coldly. He stood up. “I’ll petition to have you examined by alienists, as the first step toward entering a plea of insanity for you.” He left abruptly, all smiling encouragement.
As soon as he was gone, Swanson began to rattle the bars desperately, to call the guard back again. The latter, when he finally came, was surprised to see this erstwhile phlegmatic, untroubled prisoner suddenly turned into a white-faced, panic-stricken hysteric.
“Malloy,” he panted. “Oh, for the love of heaven, get me a piece of paper and a pencil right away, will you? I’ve got to send a wire!”
And when the guard had acceded to his request, this is what he handed back to him through the cell grate:
Mrs. Helen Swanson,
c/o General Delivery,
Tucson, Arizona.
Come back right away, I’m in for bad trouble.
Jerry.
“Send this right off for me, will you, Malloy?” he pleaded.
“What’s the matter, what’s come over you all of a sudden?” asked the guard, trying to calm him down. “Here, want to read the paper? Here’s today’s paper.” He thrust it through the bars at him, turned to go and get permission to file the message. He had hardly reached the end of the corridor when a deep groan sounded in the cell he had just left. He turned and went trotting back again.
Swanson was sitting where he had left him, white as chalk and shaking uncontrollably from head to foot. The paper that he had just opened across his knees had fallen to the floor and he was staring with glazed, horrified eyes at the blank cell wall opposite him.
The guard, alarmed, unlocked the grate and let himself in to find out what was the matter with him. He picked up the paper and read: “Seven Dead in Arizona Bus Crash.” And under that a list of casualties!
The boy had escaped injury; his name was among the survivors. Swanson was on his feet, pawing pathetically at the guard’s uniform. “Lemme out of here! What am I doing in here now? My kid’s alone in the world. I’ve got to get out of here! I didn’t do it, I tell you, I didn’t do it. I didn’t do it!”
“Did you want to see me, Swanson?” the dick named Butler asked gruffly, as he entered the cell.
“Any one of you fellows, I don’t care which one. They told me you were the most human of the lot; that’s why I asked for you.”
“Most human, eh?” The detective grunted. “What was I supposed to be, chromium-plated? I feel a favor coming up.” He grunted again.
“If your kid was dying by inches under your eyes, if your wife was starving, and you were broke and had no job, and you read in a paper that you could get a thousand bucks just by telling them you killed someone, what would you do?”
“A man can’t answer that truthfully until he’s been in that same fix,” Butler told him gravely. “And I haven’t, so I can’t say. Are you trying to tell me that’s why you’re in here?”
“Trying is right.”
The dick fanned his hand scornfully between their faces. “The attempt is unsuccessful.”
“I figured it would be,” Swanson said desolately, biting the tips of both thumbs at once. “But that isn’t why I asked to see you. I’ve got to have a chance to talk to Mrs. Ranger again.”
“What do you want from her?”
“Mister, I know what I know. I don’t ask you or anyone else to believe me. Mrs. Ranger is mistaken about my coming up to her outside her house when she was leaving for the theater that night. She may have been excited, high-sterical; just because she saw me handcuffed in front of her, she thought it was me. In fairness to me, won’t you let her give it another try? She may be ashamed, in front of all of you, to admit she was wrong the first time. Won’t you let me see her alone, without any of you guys around? Won’t you give me that one chance? It’s my only one. That’s all I’m asking; I won’t ask another thing.”
Butler got up and went toward the cell door to be let out, left Swanson hanging on his delayed answer. He didn’t give it to him until after he was already outside in the corridor. “See what I can do for you.” Which meant yes.
Mrs. Ranger came into the room with one of the other dicks, not Butler. At sight of Swanson, she turned to her escort displeased. “I didn’t know I’d have to face this — this criminal again. It’s very painful for me. I was under the impression I was simply wanted down here to—” Then as she saw the guard with Swanson about to withdraw: “You’re not going to leave me alone in here with him, are you? Why, this man’s dangerous; he’s liable to—”
“There’ll be somebody within call, Mrs. Ranger, just a few steps down the hall. He’s asked to be permitted to speak to you alone. It may be to your interest to hear what he has to say.”
“I still don’t like the idea at all,” she complained querulously. The dick and Swanson’s guard strolled out of the room without seeming to hear her, softly closed the door after them.
She sat down as far across the room from him as she could get. “Well, what is it you want of me, murderer?” she said brittlely, lighting a cigarette. “Make it snappy.”
“Mrs. Ranger.” Swanson faltered. “Please take another look at me. Look closely. Look good. Look at my height when I’m standing straight like this. Look at the shape of my face. Look at the distance between my eyes. I know there are plenty of people that look like somebody else, but can’t you see I’m not that man that came up to your car outside your house that night? You know I’m not.”
