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.
The cop filled the glass from a broken-lipped pitcher. “You been bleeding like a stuck pig.”
Teccard paused with the tumbler at his lips. Was that a pair of shoes lying on the floor behind the patrolman? He shook his head, to clear away the blurriness. “Who in the hell is that?” he cried.
Taylor’s jaw went slack. “That’s the lad you was battling with. You fixed his wagon, all right!”
“I wasn’t fighting with anybody! Someone slugged me from behind that door, before I could even get my gun out.” The lieutenant got his elbows under him, propped himself up. The man on his back was T. Chauncey Helbourne — and his skin was a leaden blue.
The officer nodded sympathetically. “A crack on the conk will do that, sometimes. Make you forget what’s been goin’ on, when you snap out of it.”
Teccard felt of the back of his neck. His fingers came away wet and sticky, the ache at the top of his skull was nauseating. “I didn’t kill him, you dope!”
“Geeze! You had a right to drop him, didn’t you! He was resistin’ arrest, wasn’t he?”
Teccard crawled on hands and knees to the dead man’s side. There was an irregular dark blot on Helbourne’s vest, just inside the left lapel; in the center of the blot something gleamed yellow-red, under the naked bulb overhead. The lieutenant touched the fat man’s face. It was still close to normal body temperature.
“You got him first clip out of the box.” Taylor pointed to the gun on the floor, by the side of the iron cot.
Teccard stood up shakily, sat down again, suddenly, on the sagging edge of the cot. Taylor, the corpse on the floor, the barren furnishings of the room — all seemed oddly far away. He bent over to let the blood get to his head again. “Where’s the other gent who was in here? The one in shorts?”
The uniformed man squinted as if the light hurt his eyes. “The only lug I saw is this stiff, Lieutenant.”
Teccard closed his eyes to stop the bed from shimmying. “He let me in here. How’d he get downstairs, past you?”
Taylor put up a hand to cover his mouth, his eyes opened wide. “Now I swear to God there wasn’t a soul on them stairs when I come up. If there’d been a guy with his pants off—”
“How’d you happen to come up, anyway?”
“Why, geeze, Lieutenant. When this dame comes scuttling down to the front door, yelling for ‘Police’ naturally I hotfoot over from next door.”
“A woman? What kind of a woman?” Teccard demanded.
“Why, just an ordinary mouse like you’d expect to find in one of these joints. Kind of blond and plump — I don’t know.”
“What’d she say?”
“She says, ‘Officer, come upstairs quick. There’s a couple of men fighting and making a terrible racket right over my room.’ She says, ‘Hurry!’ So I figure it’s you subduing this Willard and maybe needing a hand. I come up on the jump.”
Teccard started to shake his head, thought better of it. “Where is she now? Bring her here.”
The policeman pounded out in the hall, downstairs. He left the door open. There was an excited hum of voices from the corridor.
Teccard took a pencil out of his pocket, stuck it in the barrel of the pistol, lifted it off the floor. He wrapped his handkerchief carefully about the butt, broke his weapon. Only one chamber had been fired from the .38. The bullet hole in Helbourne’s chest would be about right for that caliber.
Taylor came clumping upstairs. “She put one over on me. That room underneath ain’t even occupied. And she’s scrammed, anyway.”
“So has the jerk who was half undressed.” The lieutenant put down the revolver, poured himself another drink of water. “That’s over the dam, don’t get gidgety about it. You were right, according to the way you figured it.”
The cop wiped sweat off his forehead. “It’s all balled up in my mind. Was this Willard the one who shot the fat boy, here?”
“Might have been. The gun was still in my pocket when I went down. Somebody took it out and used it on T. Chauncey Helbourne. Somebody else. Not me.” Teccard gazed grimly around the room. “The worse of it is, I couldn’t absolutely identify Willard, even now. He was covering his smush with a towel and he sort of kept his back to me, anyhow.”
He didn’t bring up the point that bothered him most — it was a cinch Willard hadn’t been the one who crowned Teccard from behind that door. Maybe his unseen assailant had been Helbourne. In any case, what was the proprietor of the Herald of Happiness doing up here, when he had claimed complete ignorance of Willard!
A siren wailed, out in the street.
“Holler down to the doc, Taylor. Tell him all he needs to bring up is a few stitches for my scalp.”
“You’d ought to go to the hospital, Lieutenant. Have an X-ray, to be sure there ain’t any fracture.”
Teccard went over to the closet door, opened it. “There’s nothing more the matter with my head than’s been wrong with it for thirty-seven years. Did you buzz the station, too, Taylor?” he said.
“Yes, sir. Cap Meyer is coming right over, himself, with a couple of the boys.” Taylor went out into the hall, shouted down the stairwell.
The lieutenant sniffed at the empty closet. The only things in it were a few coat hangers and a sweet scent that made him think of church. Queer thing to find in a place like this, probably came from clothing that had been hung up here.
He looked around the room for the weapon with which he had been slugged. There wasn’t anything heavier than a cane wastebasket. The wastebasket was empty, too, except for a crumpled piece of cellophane stripped from a pack of cigarettes. He fished it out with the point of his fountain-pen, put it on the bureau.
The interne arrived, went to work with needle and sutures. Meyer and two plain-clothesmen came up. While the doctor jabbed the needle through his scalp, Teccard told the captain what was wanted.
“Box up that cellophane, run it down to my office. There might be prints on it. Get a photographer up here from Homicide. Have him powder the knobs, the bureau drawers, the iron part of the bed, those hangers in the closet. Run a vacuum over the floor, ship the dust down to the lab for examination.”
Meyer crouched over the fat man. “Who’s this guy, Lieutenant?”
“Crumb who ran a matrimonial agency. That’s what’s back of those bones your boys dug up today. Go through his pockets, will you? And mark someone down for going through the house, here, to see what they can get on Willard. Taylor, you learn anything about him from the landlord?”
The patrolman scratched his head. “Not much. Oh, one funny thing. He must have a night job. Because he only comes here in the daytime. And he must write a lot of letters, because practically the only thing old Halzer remembers his having up here, outside his clothes, is a box of writing paper and a bottle of ink.”
“Yair? See can you find if he threw any of his scribbling in the wastebasket. Maybe some of it is still in the trashcan.”
Meyer said: “Not much dough, but plenty of unpaid bills, on this fella. He’s been hitting the high spots, you ask me. Here’s a credit-jewelry store summons for non-payment on a diamond wristwatch. And a bunch of duns from department stores and an automobile company.” He tossed the sheaf of papers on the bed. “Eleven fish and some chickenfeed, a cheap ticker, two nickel cigars, a silk handkerchief stinking of whiskey, and a bunch of keys.”
“No weapon?”
“Not even a pen-knife, Lieutenant. You’re pretty positive he wasn’t the fella cut up that girl’s body?”
“He’d have been well-padded with folding money, in that case, Cap. No. You rustle around, get a description of Harold Willard.”