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.
There was no one else waiting in it; the detective evidently intended to do his own driving. He shoved his protégé’s bag in the back and got in under the wheel. “Sit in front with me, Doc,” he suggested friendly. “Keep me company getting there; we’ve got quite a ride ahead of us.”
They started off. The detective made little attempt at conversation, in spite of what he had said about wanting to be kept company; the doctor made even less.
“Have a hard trip?” he asked his charge after a while.
“It cost so much,” lamented the doctor. “And I ain’t doing so well out there, neider. If it wasn’t that Swanson is an old friend of mine...” He wagged his head. “Nothing but trouble that poor fellow’s had. How did he get mixed oop in such a t’ing?”
“Sorry,” said the detective pleasantly but firmly. “I’m under orders not to discuss the case with you beforehand, until you’ve been questioned.” He switched back to their former topic, which seemed to interest him more. “So you’re not so well off, eh, Doc?” he suggested understandingly.
“Who iss?” sighed Lindquist, folding his hands mournfully across his vibrating middle.
“Ever think of going back to the old country, to try your hand at building up a practice there?” the detective went on, apparently at random.
The pupils behind the doctor’s bulgy lenses flicked sidewise toward him, then back to center again. Then he showed postponed enthusiasm. Like Mrs. Ranger’s anger at the time of her interview with Swanson, the timing was a little slow. But then, maybe his mental processes weren’t so quick on the trigger.
“Yah!” he agreed vehemently. “Now you talking! But you know vhat it cost to make the trip over there? Vhere vould I get the money?”
“I guess it does come high,” said the man at the wheel, and the discussion was allowed to languish for the time being.
They drew up finally before what, for a District Attorney’s residence, was a singularly isolated and poorly kept little bungalow, on a remote, wooded Northchester lane far from all the main highways and any neighboring habitation. To make it even more uninviting it was rapidly growing dusk.
“In here?” said Lindquist, as the dick threw the car door open.
“Yeah, get out,” was the taut answer. The detective’s hand slithered from the wheel down toward his own hip joint, as if he expected opposition, but Lindquist was evidently a trustful sort; he struggled acquiescently out without further ado. The detective followed him, again carrying his bag, and they went up toward the entrance together.
The detective opened the door, motioned him through, closed it after them. He set the bag down, led him down the hall toward a room at the back. “Just wait in here,” he said tersely.
“He issn’t here yet?” asked Lindquist.
“No, he’ll be here in a few minutes.” He closed the door on him, left him in there alone.
Lindquist moved toward the closed door with surprising agility and stealth for anyone so bulky; tried the knob. It was locked. That didn’t seem to disturb him particularly. He touched his hip bone, then crouched, put one eye to the keyhole, tilting his glasses out of the way. The key blocked the hole effectively.
He straightened, put his ear to the door-seam instead. Voices came through, from one of the other rooms near-by. One was a woman’s, sharply recriminatory. “What’d you bring him here for? Now you’ll only have to take him out with you again, do it somewhere else!”
“I’m going to try it another way first,” he heard the man who had met him at the train say. “I think I can fix it without having to do what we did last time.”
Lindquist was seated in a large wing-chair at the far side of the room, patiently steepling his fingers together, when the lock clicked and the door reopened. The detective came back in alone, closed it behind him.
“He didn’t come yet?” asked the doctor ruefully.
“Forget about him,” said the dick curtly. “Now, Dr. Lindquist, just what form is this evidence in that your friend Swanson is so confident will clear him? Documentary, or just verbal?”
“Vell, partly one, partly the other. I got my little book here, in which I keep my calls written, with his name and the date and the hour. But mostly it should be enough I tell them I vas vith him the whole time that night; I ain’t never told a lie in my life—”
“Lemme see the written stuff,” said the dick. Lindquist placidly fumbled, brought out a dog-eared memorandum book.
The detective glanced at it, raised his eyes craftily. “This won’t do him much good; it could have been written afterwards. It’s not worth a damn. On the other hand, it could be worth a good deal — to you.”
“So?” said the doctor stupidly.
“How would you like to go back to Sweden, all expenses paid, and stay there?”
“Very mooch,” Lindquist admitted stolidly. “Who vould pay the expenses?”
“I would.” The other man took out a wallet, shuffled bills out of it, dealt them rapidly on the table before them like playing cards. “Two thousand bucks. Enough to set you up for life in Swensky money.”
Lindquist took it very matter-of-factly; nothing seemed able to surprise him. “Thank you very much.” He nodded. “So soon I see the D.A., find out vether I can do anything for this poor fellow Swanson, I take the next boat to Stockholm, you bet.”
A single note of harsh mirthless laughter rasped in the other man’s throat. “No, you take the next boat to Stockholm-you-bet, right away, without going near the D.A. or Swanson or anyone else — that’s what the whole proposition is. You also leave this little appointment book of yours with me, and keep your mouth closed over on the other side.”
Lindquist seemed to ponder the matter, took his time about answering. “But then if I don’t go and tell them vhat I know, Swanson might get the chair, and he’s an old friend of mine.” He looked up finally. “No, I can’t do it that vay,” he said imperturbably. “If I got to do vithout going back to Sweden, all right I got to, but I couldn’t turn my back on an innocent man.”
“Is that your final answer?”
“Yuss. I only give one answer, never two, to anyt’ing.”
“I told you so!” a voice said stridently from the doorway. A woman came slowly forward into the room. She was blond and might have been pretty ordinarily, but her face wasn’t pretty just then. “Now you see? You’ll have to!”
“I’m going to, don’t worry,” he said softly out of the corner of his mouth. “Just take it easy, will you? This place is in my name.”
He addressed Lindquist. “All right, Doc. Let’s forget the whole thing. Come on, get your bag; I’ll drive you back to town again, drop you off at a hotel. You better come too, Rose.”
Lindquist, whom nothing seemed to surprise, went with them out into the hall, picked up his heavy bag, and carried it out to the doorstep. The woman came out on one side of him, her two hands thrust into a small barrel-muff now, the man on the other.
“You sit in front, next to me, like before,” the detective said dryly.
“I put my bag in the back, yah?” the doctor said, and waddled over with it. He heaved it in, set it on the floor, fingered its latches and straps carefully as if to make sure it was securely fastened. Then he climbed in next to the detective. The woman got into the back from the opposite side of the car.
They started off, but instead of turning and going back the way they had come previously, they continued on up-country in the same direction as before.
“This is far enough, Allen,” the woman remarked finally. “No use taking all night!”