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.
“Do I?” she said mockingly.
“This is just between us—”
“Is it?”
“We’re alone now by ourselves, there isn’t anyone in here with us.”
She pronounced each word with the slow clarity of a death sentence. “You are the man I saw!”
“But I know I couldn’t be, because I wasn’t there where you say you saw me that night. Don’t you see you must be mistaken?” In his despair he groped for any argument that might possibly convince her, blurted out the first thing that came to his mind. “There’s a doctor somewhere in this town will tell you—” He stopped suddenly, checked himself.
“Will tell me what?” She held her cigarette poised half-way to her lips.
He finished it, as long as he’d gone that far. “Will tell you I couldn’t have been there at the time, because he was up at my flat, my wife’s and my flat, that Wednesday night working over our kid, from nine until nearly midnight, and I was up there with him the whole time. He’ll tell you more, he put the idea into my head—”
She was staring at him with fixed intensity, but that wasn’t unnatural. “He put the idea into your head of going out and killing my husband?”
“No, no. He first put the idea into my head of getting the money in any way I could, by hook or crook. But he’ll remember that he was up there, he must keep a record of his calls.”
“A likely story!” she sneered, but her eyes, hard, glittering, calculating, kept roving the room, along its baseboards and its ceiling joints.
“It’s true, I tell you!” Swanson burst out helplessly. “Meredith is his name, Dr. Bradley Meredith. Please! You call him up for me. You ask him! He’ll tell you I wasn’t out that night. Then you can tell the cops you were mistaken. Please call him!”
Again she stared at him inscrutably. “Dr. Bradley Meredith,” she repeated mechanically. Then she let the cigarette fall out of her hand, put the tip of her shoe over it, stood up. She adjusted the silver fox piece over her shoulder. “I will do no such thing! I still say I saw you, and” — very low, almost inaudibly as she moved toward the door — “it’s my word against yours.”
Then suddenly anger seemed to strike at her, as though held in leash until now. As though she had not thought it worthwhile to waste it on just one onlooker, desired a larger audience. She flung the door open and stormed indignantly out. Her raised voice filled the corridor with angry remonstrance.
“I won’t be subjected to such an experience again! It’s outrageous and inconsiderate! I wouldn’t have agreed to come down here in the first place if I’d known that was what was wanted of me! It’s an imposition!”
Butler clicked off the dictaphone in the adjoining room, straightened up, with a lopsided mouth. “The lady doth protest too much, methinks,” he murmured pensively. “She only got sore after she was outside in the hall where she could be heard.”
He picked up a phone on the desk, said to the Headquarters operator: “Get me the office address of a Dr. Meredith, Bradley Meredith.” It rang back shortly and he jotted something down, said, “Thanks.” He started to pick it up a second time, then thought better of it, put on his hat instead and went out of the room.
He had to travel a considerable distance uptown to reach his destination. The doctor’s office turned out to be his home too. He wasn’t, judging by the appearance of the McKinley-era apartment building it was located in, prospering. That, reflected Butler, pushing the bell of the ground-floor rear flat, was nothing against a man these days.
A young housewife opened the door after a wait of several minutes; Meredith couldn’t even afford an office assistant, evidently.
“Dr. Bradley Meredith?”
“You just missed him!” she said regretfully. “He was called away, stepped out only a minute or two before you got here. It was an emergency call, but I don’t believe he’ll be gone long. Would you care to come in and wait?” She motioned him into a forlorn little waiting-room, snapped on a bleak light that didn’t dress it up much. “Did you have an appointment?” she asked. “The doctor’s without an assistant right now and — er, sometimes things get a little mixed up.”
“I’m not a patient,” he said, to ease her embarrassment. He didn’t tell her he was from Headquarters either, in order not to frighten her unnecessarily. “But as long as I’m here, I wonder if you could tell me whether he had a patient by the name of Jerome Swanson? I want to make sure I’ve come to the right man.”
“I’ll look among the unpaid bills; that’s the quickest way of finding out. Most of them are un—” She didn’t finish it, but she didn’t have to.
There must have been an awful lot of unpaid bills to wade through; it took her a good five or ten minutes to riffle through them. Finally she came out again, said, “Yes, there’s a Jerome Swanson down among his patients. I can’t find any record of his calls, though.” She sniffed the air suspiciously. “Oh, the doctor’s supper!” she wailed. “Excuse me!” and ran down a long inner hall to the back.
Butler shook his head pityingly. This Meredith couldn’t be anything but a square-shooter, to let his patients get away with their bills the way he seemed to. He killed time thumbing through a number of 1935 magazines strewn about the waiting-room. Fifteen minutes went by. Half an hour. Not once did the phone ring, nor the doorbell.
The little housewife ventured back again finally, anxiously twisting her apron. “Didn’t he come back yet? I can’t understand it. He told me he’d be back in five or ten minutes at the most. These are supposed to be his office hours, and I know he wouldn’t stay out at this time of the day if he could possibly avoid it.”
Butler was beginning to have an uneasy feeling himself, that he couldn’t understand and at the same time couldn’t quite shake off. “Was the call from one of his usual patients?” he asked her.
“I don’t believe so, or he would have mentioned the name to me. He simply said it was some woman whose child had swallowed something; it simply needed to be stood on its head and spanked. He took the call himself; I was in the back.”
“Where was he to go? Take a look, will you, and see if he jotted it down on his pad.”
She came back with it in her hand. “The pad’s blank. He must have torn off the top leaf and stuffed it in his pocket, to make sure of not forgetting the address.”
The uneasy feeling was deepening in Butler minute by minute. “Let me have that pad a minute just as it is. Can you get me a pinch of coal dust or soot of some kind from your kitchen, any dark substance?”
She came hurrying back with a little held in the hollow of a torn scrap of paper. He took it from her, sifted it over the top of the pad, then breathed on that very lightly, barely enough to clear it off again. It remained seamed in the identations left by the doctor’s pencil point pressing down on the leaf above. A gray tracery, faint but not too indistinguishable to be read, was the result.
“Karpus,” he said, squinting closely at it, “270 Hanson Road. That’s a little far out, isn’t it, for an emergency call to an unknown doctor? Does he use a car when he goes out on calls?”
“Yes. It’s not much of one, but it gets him there.”
“Then all the more reason why he should have been back by now. Let me have its license number.” He got to his feet and started for the door. “I’m going out there myself and see what’s what. If I miss him and he comes back while I’m gone, have him wait here for me. But—” He felt like saying, “But something tells me he won’t come back,” but he didn’t; she was badly enough frightened already without that.