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.
He flagged a cab, said: “Get me out to 270 Hanson Road, and get me there fast; this is police business!”
They drew a motorcycle cop presently, by the rate at which they were bulleting along, but Butler changed him into an escort by a flash of his badge and a shout of explanation from the cab window.
It was way out, in a half-built-up, weed-grown sector. “Somebody’s handed you a bum steer, guv’nor,” said the driver, tapering off uncertainly and pointing.
Butler had already seen the vacancy sign tacked up on the door-frame, himself, and noted the decrepit condition of the place. “Yeah, it was a bum steer, all right,” he said, “but it wasn’t me it was handed to.”
The cop had circled and come back. “That place is vacant,” he called out unnecessarily, from the opposite side of the dirt-surfaced street.
Butler got out and started through the ankle-high weeds toward the door. “I only wish it was,” he hollered back. “Put in a call for me from the nearest box. Then scout around until you dig up a second-hand car; here’s the license number. It ought to be around here somewhere not very far away.”
He climbed the two creaky wooden steps of the frame place, tried the door. The knob promptly came off in his hand, and he was able to get the rest of it out of the way with one good, swift kick.
There was a man’s huddled body lying just a couple of yards away from where he was standing, just far in enough to let the door swing past.
Butler just nodded his head as he crouched down by him, turned him over on his back. The blood hadn’t altogether coagulated yet from the three bullet wounds he counted, it had been so recently done. His instrument case was a little further on, where it had fallen from his hand.
He noticed an ordinary watchman’s oil lamp, that had probably been appropriated from some street excavation, hanging from a nail on the wall. He tested the chimney with his knuckles, and the glass was still faintly warm, as though that, too, had only recently been in use. He went outside and inspected the vacancy sign. It wasn’t nailed down fast, just punched on over a nail in the door-frame.
“So that’s how it was worked,” he murmured. “Took the sign down temporarily and let him see a glimmer of light coming from inside. Probably the woman who put in the call met him outside on the street somewhere and steered him in, to distract his attention. He needed patients too bad, poor devil, to turn down anything that came his way. Someone must have been waiting for him right behind the door, didn’t even let him get down two steps inside the house. Took his car and ditched it somewhere afterwards.”
He went inside again, stood looking down the beam of his light at what had been Dr. Bradley Meredith. “Somebody hasn’t been so clever about this,” he said aloud. “Planting conviction where there wasn’t even suspicion before.”
He was shown into Swanson’s cell at the unholy hour of three that same night, or the following morning rather. Swanson was a huddled cylinder, asleep under a gray blanket on the iron cot that was let down broadside from the wall like a slab on chains. “I’ll call you back when I’m ready to go,” he said, to get rid of the guard.
The reclosing of the cell gate partly roused the sleeper. He stirred; then as he made out the detective’s outline against the dim corridor-light outside the bars, he shot upright on his shelf. “Who is it?” he gasped frightenedly.
“Me,” said the dick. “I want to talk to you. Keep your voice down. Here’s something to smoke. Now, are you awake?”
Swanson swung his legs down to the floor, crouched low over his own knees. “Yeah, I guess so.”
“If you’re not, here’s something that ought to do it. Your friend, Doc Meredith, was murdered early last evening.”
Swanson jolted ruler-straight, then buckled over again, held his head. “Oh, now I am hooked!” he groaned. “First my wife, now the doctor. They were the only two who could have proved — Now there’s no one who’ll believe me! I’ll never get out of it now; I’m finished!”
“All right, quit wailing through your adenoids,” Butler told him impatiently. “You’re a lot better off than you were while Meredith was still alive.”
Swanson blinked at him stupidly in the cell twilight. “How do you mean, how could I be?”
“What his murder has managed to do is start me to thinking there may be something to your story after all. It looks too much as though someone didn’t want anyone to be able to clear you, now that you’re conveniently under indictment and the wheels have something to feed on. What happened to Meredith may just be a coincidence. The fact remains that he was lured out on a fake call, that robbery wasn’t the motive, and that he had no personal enemies of his own; the way he never pressed his patients to pay their bills is the best guarantee of that.
“Add to this the fact that his name was never spoken by you until this afternoon, to my knowledge; that it was mentioned to only one person — Ranger’s widow — and that his murder followed within a few hours, and the coincidence becomes a little too wobbly for my liking.
“You stuck your neck out,” the dick went on, “and you’re not going to be allowed to pull it in again, even if a second or third murder has to be piled on top of the original one. That’s one line of reasoning we could take — just to see where it gets us.” He stopped, thought it over. “Yeah, that’s our play: A second or third murder. Given the same circumstances, if it comes through again, it’s our pay-off.”
He took a quick turn around the cell. “That’s what I looked you up at this ungodly hour for. Isn’t there someone else who could go to bat for you like Meredith could have if he had stayed alive enough?”
“No, no one,” said Swanson mournfully. “Only the doc was up there that Wednesday night with us, and he’s dead now.”
Butler didn’t seem to be listening. “How about a guy named—” He stroked his chin thoughtfully as he went along. “Lindquist, let’s say.”
“But I don’t know anyone named Lindquist; I never did!” exclaimed Swanson in surprise.
“Oh, yes, you do!” he purred with slow emphasis. “Now get this and see that you hang onto it tight; it’s your only chance to keep from being railroaded into the hot seat or a bughouse.
“Your last possible remaining alibi is a guy named Lindquist, a doctor like the other one was. Dr. Carl Lindquist, we’ll call him. He also happens to be an old friend of yours as well; Swedish ancestry like you, and all that.
“Now Meredith called him in that Wednesday night of the murder in consultation, at you and your wife’s urgent request, because you wanted a second opinion on your boy. You’re sure he’ll remember the date, be able to vouch for you. He hasn’t come forward until now because, you understand, he moved his practice out to St. Paul soon afterwards, probably hasn’t heard about the case. Does all his reading in Swedish-language papers. You’re sure a wire from you will bring him back again, though.
“Now you tell all this to one of the other men in the department; any of ’em, it don’t matter which. I’ll arrange it so that you’re given a chance to do your pleading in that same office in the next building where you were the last time.
“Plead to be allowed to send this wire for help. Here’s what this Dr. Lindquist looks like: He’s an elderly guy, sort of a country fogey, doesn’t know his way around so good. Got a big corporation and dresses sloppy in clothes that fit him like a tent. Wears thick-lensed glasses and a little white goatee on the end of his chin. Be sure to tell whichever dick you’re talking to all that, whether he asks you or not.