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.
I had a sandwich and a piece of pie in the hotel restaurant and bundled up and went out and got in the car and started for LA.
I didn’t get up till around eleven o’clock Tuesday morning. I had breakfast in my room and wired a connection in Chi to send me all he could get on Miss Mackay and her brother. I called the desk and got the number of Gard’s room and on the way down stopped in to see him.
He was sitting in his nightshirt by the window, reading the morning papers. I sat down and asked him how he was enjoying his vacation and he said swell, and then he said: “I see by the papers that our friend Healey had an accident.”
I nodded.
Gard clucked: “Tch, tch, tch. His wife will sure be cut up.”
I smiled a little and said, “Uh-huh,” and Gard looked up and said: “What the hell are you grinning about and what do you mean: Uh-huh?”
I told him that according to my paper Mrs. Healey was the lady who had rubbed Healey — the lady who was on her way back East in a box.
Gard shook his head intelligently and said: “Wrong. That one was an extra. Mrs. Healey is alive and kicking and one of the sweetest dishes God ever made.”
I could see that he was going to get romantic so I waited and he told me that Mrs. Healey had been the agency’s client in the East and that she’d come in from Chicago Monday morning by plane and that he’d met her in the agency office, and then he went on for five or ten minutes about the color of her eyes and the way she wore her hair, and everything.
Gard was pretty much of a ladies’ man. He told it with gestures.
Along with the poetry he worked in the information that Mrs. Healey, as he figured it, had had some trouble with Healey and that they’d split up and that she wanted to straighten it all out. That was the reason she’d wired the Salt Lake office of his agency to locate Healey. And almost as soon as they’d found Healey he’d shoved off for LA and the agency had wired her in Chicago to that effect. She’d arrived the morning Healey had been spotted in Caliente and had decided to wait in LA for him.
Gard said he had helped her find an apartment. He supposed the agency had called her up and told her that bad news about Healey. He acted like he was thinking a little while and then asked me if I didn’t think he ought to go over and see if he could help her in any way. “Comfort her in her bereavement,” was the way he put it.
I said: “Sure — we’ll both go.”
Gard didn’t go for that very big, but I told him that my having been such a pal of Healey’s made it all right.
We went.
Mrs. Healey turned out a great deal better than I had expected from Gard’s glowing description. As a matter of fact she was swell. She was very dark, with dark blue eyes and blue-black hair; her clothes were very well done and her voice was cultivated, deep. When she acknowledged Gard’s half-stammered introduction, inclined her head towards me and asked us to sit down, I saw that she had been crying.
Gard had done pretty well in the way of helping her find an apartment. It was a big luxurious duplex in the Garden Court on Kenmore.
I said we wanted her to know how sorry we were about it all and that I had known Healey in Detroit, and if there was anything we could do — that sort of thing.
There wasn’t much else to say. There wasn’t much else said.
She asked Gard to forgive her for bothering him so much the previous evening with her calls, but that she’d been nervous and worried and kept thinking that maybe Healey had arrived in LA after the agency was closed and that she hadn’t been notified. They’d been watching the trains of course.
Gard said that was all right and got red and stammered some more. He was stunned by the lady. So was I. She was a pip.
She said she thought she’d stay in California and she told us delicately that she’d made arrangements for Healey’s body to be shipped to his folks in Detroit.
Finally I said we’d better go and Gard nodded and we got up. She thanked us again for coming and a maid helped us with our coats and we left.
Gard said he had to go downtown so I took a cab and went back to the hotel. There was a wire from Chicago:
JEWEL MACKAY TWO CONVICTIONS EXTORTION STOP WORKS WITH HUSBAND ARTHUR RAINES ALIAS J L MAXWELL STOP LEFT CHICAGO WEDNESDAY FOR LOS ANGELES WITH RAINES STOP DESCRIPTION MACKAY FOUR ELEVEN ONE HUNDRED TWO BLONDE GRAY EYES RAINES FIVE SIX ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-FIVE RED BROWN EYES STOP MAY LOCATE THROUGH BROTHER WILLIAM RAINES REAL ESTATE SOUTH LABREA REGARDS