The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps
- Автор: Anderson Lars, Barr Randolph
- Год: 2007
- Язык: английский
- Год: Vintage Books
- ISBN: 978-0-307-28048-0
- Жанр: Криминальные детективы
Электронная книга - «The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps». Краткое содержание книги:
Weighing in at over a thousand pages, containing over forty-seven stories and two novels, this book is big baby, bigger and more powerful than a freight train — a bullet couldn’t pass through it. Here are the best stories and every major writer who ever appeared in celebrated Pulps like Black Mask, Dime Detective, Detective Fiction Weekly, and more. These are the classic tales that created the genre and gave birth to hard-hitting detectives who smoke criminals like packs of cigarettes; sultry dames whose looks are as lethal as a dagger to the chest; and gin-soaked hideouts where conversations are just preludes to murder. This is crime fiction at its gritty best.
Sweet must have had eyes in the side of his head. “Hold it, Jake,” he suggested casually, without looking around.
Farnson missed all that. His high forehead had furrowed with emotion. He looked at the girl in the coffin, swallowed and was husky as he answered Sweet.
“I will not be satisfied until I know exactly why my niece is dead. You tell me it was suicide or an accident. I don’t believe you. Why should such a sweet girl want to kill herself? She was happy. Only last week she wrote my wife in Boston, saying how happy she was in her work here, and how much she was enjoying the visit of Nancy Cudahy, who used to be her best friend. And — and the next word we had was the telegram saying she was dead.”
Farnson shook his head emphatically. “No! I do not believe it!”
Jake Dennis opened his mouth to say something, and Larry Sweet beat him to it, soothingly and argumentatively.
“We only suggested suicide, Mr. Farnson. These carbon monoxide cases are hard to pin down. Folks drive into small garages and stay in there for some reason or other with the motor running and the doors closed — and before they know what’s happening it’s all over.”
“No,” said Farnson flatly. “Frances was not so careless. She was always careful. How could she have done so well as a script girl in the moving pictures if she was careless? She has written us how careful she must always be in her work. Every little detail must be considered. And now you tell me she did something that everyone who drives a car knows must not be done.”
Jake Dennis muttered under his breath and rolled his eyes helplessly. Larry Sweet gave him a warning look and went on in the same patient manner.
“We’ve thought of all that. But we’ve checked on your niece at NGN, and among her friends outside. She had no love troubles. She was getting ahead at NGN and on the verge of moving into the writing end on a contract. They tell us her voice didn’t register well or she’d have had a chance at the acting end. No troubles — and more important, she had no enemies. Doesn’t leave much choice but accidental death, does it?”
“This Cudahy girl who was visiting her from the East says it couldn’t have been anything else but an accident,” Jake Dennis grunted, and his look at Lew Ryster and me was a scowl. “So you’re wasting any money you pay the Blaine Agency. They’ll charge you plenty, an’ tell you in the end just what we’ve told you.”
“That,” said Farnson stiffly, “is my business, gentlemen.”
Jake Dennis lifted his hands helplessly. Larry Sweet asked patiently: “Is there anything you’ve forgotten to suggest to us? Anything we may have overlooked before you leave for the East with your niece’s body?”
Farnson was hurt and helpless, but he was stubborn too.
“I am not taking Frances back East until I know why she was murdered,” he stated heavily.
I thought Jake Dennis was going to explode. Larry Sweet stared at him for a moment, and then nodded smoothly.
“You understand, Mr. Farnson, that we’re anxious to do everything we can. Perhaps it would be better if we worked with the Blaine people too. No objections to that, I suppose.”
Lew Ryster grinned.
“Glad to have you help, Sweet — for what it’s worth — and as long as we get credit for what we do. Jake, that’s agreeable, I suppose?”
“What do you think?” Jake Dennis growled. “And now you’ve got that settled, what are you going to do that we ain’t done?”
Lew looked solemn.
“We’re going to bring all the facilities of our organization to bear on this, Dennis. With our usual success, I hope. Suppose you two drop around to the office late this afternoon for a conference. Mr. Harris has some matters to check, and then we’ll be in a position to collaborate on any steps that we may be taking.”
Larry Sweet’s lip curled slightly in amusement. Jake Dennis looked his disgust at the smear of Hollywood oil Lew had given them. But Farnson was pleased.
“Just what I want, gentlemen,” he said eagerly. “I will be at the Ambassador waiting for any word from you.”
So that was our interview. I took a last look at the dead girl as we all went out. She made our cross-talk seem poison and useless. And I was scathing when I drove Lew away.
“So you dragged me back for a carbon monoxide case that probably was an accident like the police have decided. Any mug on your payroll could handle this.”
“But not satisfy Farnson,” said Lew cheerfully. “He’s a Boston investment banker and lousy with money. He’ll spend high to prove he’s right about this. That girl meant more to him than a daughter. He and his wife reared her. And if he thinks it’s murder, we might as well try to prove that it’s murder.”
“Maybe you are a rat!” I snapped. “You’ve been around Hollywood too long. You know damn well the Blaine Agency never chisels for money if they’re sure there’s not a case. And to think I let you scramble my vacation on a play like this!”
Lew chuckled.
“Jake Dennis is a headline hog, Mike. Never give that guy a break or he’ll break you. I’ve done business with him before. And Larry Sweet is so smooth he’ll be around you before you know it.” Lew pursed his lips. “I only hope Larry really believes it is suicide and thinks we’re giving Farnson a run-around for his money.”
“Aren’t you?” I said disgustedly.
“Maybe,” said Lew. “You saw the dead girl and heard most of the fact. She made a try for pictures, and when her voice didn’t click, she tossed society life back in Boston overboard, rolled up her sleeves out here and went to work with the lower third. Was making good on it too, and then yesterday morning she was found dead in her coupe at the bungalow court where she lived. Garage doors closed, car windows open, the girl behind the steering wheel with her hat on, cigarette between her first and second fingers, just as if she’d driven in and sat there smoking and thinking and forgetting to cut the motor off.
“I guess, Mike, you didn’t notice it there in the coffin, and I didn’t want to point it out with Dennis and Sweet around. There was a mark on her finger where the cigarette had burned down against the flesh.”
“I didn’t notice it,” I said. “So what?”
Lew grinned.
“If you’d looked close, Mike, you’d have seen that there was the slightest sign of cigarette stain on the other side of her second finger, and on the inside of her third finger. She had an awkward way of holding a cigarette, between her second and third fingers, instead of the usual first and second fingers. And yet she died, holding a cigarette the usual way. As near as I can figure it, Kid, that little fact is going to turn you into a screwball and make you a disciple of the Great Truth, Father Orion.”
Chapter II
Peace, Brother
A truck cut over in front of me and I stood the coupe on its nose, and shaved a wreck and said violently:
“Somebody around here is a screwball — and it’s not me! What kind of tripe is this about the Great Truth, Father Orion? And how do you know so much about cigarette stains on that girl’s fingers?”
“I’m good,” says Lew smugly. “The body was found by the girl friend, Nan Cudahy — who’s due to inherit a couple of million one of these days, if that makes her any more attractive.”
“It doesn’t,” I said. “What’s the dope on the cigarette stains?”
“You know me,” says Lew. “Always on the spot at the right time. When Farnson retained me, I ducked around for a talk with this Nan Cudahy. She was taking it hard and didn’t have any more to tell me than Sweet and Dennis know. But she let slip one thing. She’d been thinking, she said, how terribly symbolic it was that her friend should have been holding a cigarette between the first and second fingers when all the girl friends had teased her so much about the awkward way she had always smoked. Wasn’t it symbolic, the Cudahy gal asked, with her eyes big and round, that Miss Farnson should have changed an old habit that way just when she died? Crossing the threads of the subconscious like that just as the threads of life got all tragically mixed. The Great Truths of existence, Miss Cudahy said tearfully, get all tangled up like that unless they are interpreted right. And maybe if the dead girl had been a little more of a believer in some things, the terrible accident wouldn’t have happened.”