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.
Spade raised two fingers from the arm of his chair in a brief warning gesture and said:
“Well, that should be easily enough managed. It’s simply a matter of having a man at the hotel this evening to shadow him away when he leaves, and to keep on shadowing him till he leads us to your sister. If she comes with him, so much the better.”
Archer said: “Yeh.” His voice was heavy, coarse.
Miss Wonderly looked up quickly at Spade, puckering her forehead between her eyebrows.
“Oh, but you must be careful.” Anxiety quivered in her voice. Her lips shaped the words with little nervous jerks. “I’m deathly afraid of him, and of what he might do. She’s so young, his bringing her here from New York is such a serious — Mightn’t he — mightn’t he do — something to her?”
Spade smiled and patted the arms of his chair.
“Just leave that to us,” he said. “We’ll know how to handle him.”
“But mightn’t he?” she insisted.
“There’s always a chance.” Spade nodded judicially. “But you can trust us to take care of that.”
“I do trust you,” she said earnestly, “but I want you to know he’s a dangerous man. I honestly don’t believe he’d stop at anything. I don’t believe he’d hesitate to... to kill Corinne if he thought it necessary to save himself. Mightn’t he do that?”
“You didn’t threaten him with arrest, did you?”
“I told him all I wanted was to get Corinne home before Mama and Papa came, so they’d never know what she had done. I swore to him that I’d never say a word to them about it if he’d help me do that, but that if he didn’t Papa would certainly have him punished. I... I don’t suppose he believed me, altogether.”
“Can he cover up by marrying her?” Archer asked.
The girl blushed and said in confusion:
“He has a wife and three children in England. Corinne wrote me that, to explain why she’d gone off with him.”
“They usually do,” Spade said, “though not always in England.” He leaned forward to reach for a pencil and pad of paper lying on the desk. “What does he look like?”
“He’s thirty-five, perhaps, and as tall as you, and either naturally dark or quite sunburned. His hair is dark, too, and he has thick eyebrows. He talks in a rather loud, blustery way, and has a nervous, irritable manner. He gives an impression of being — of violence.”
Spade, scribbling on the pad, asked without looking up: “What color eyes?”
“They’re bluish gray, and watery, though not in a weak way. And... oh, yes — he has a marked cleft in his chin.”
“Thin, medium, or heavy built?”
“Quite athletic. He’s broad-shouldered and carries himself erect, what you would call a decidedly military carriage. He had on a light gray suit and a gray hat when I saw him this morning.”
“What does he do for a living?” Spade asked as he pushed the pad back and laid down the pencil.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve never had the slightest idea.”
“When’s he coming to see you?”
“At eight this evening.”
“All right, Miss Wonderly. We’ll have a man there. It’ll help if—”
“Mr. Spade, could either you or Mr. Archer?” She made an appealing gesture with both hands. “Could either of you look after it personally? I don’t mean that the man you send wouldn’t be capable, but, oh! I am so afraid of what might happen to Corrine. I’m afraid of him. Could you? I’d expect to be charged more, of course.” She opened her handbag with nervous fingers and put two hundred-dollar bills on Spade’s desk. “Will that be enough now?”
“Yeh,” Archer said, “and I’ll handle it myself.”
Miss Wonderly stood up, impulsively holding a hand out to him.
“Thank you. Thank you,” she exclaimed, and then gave Spade the hand, repeating, “Thank you.”
“Not at all,” Spade said over it. “Glad to. It’ll help some if you either wait for Thursby downstairs or come down with him when he leaves.”
“I will,” she promised, and thanked the partners again.
“And don’t look for me,” Archer cautioned her. “I’ll see you all right.”
Spade went to the outer door with Miss Wonderly. When he came back to his desk Archer nodded at the hundred-dollar bills there, growled complacently, “They’re right enough,” picked one up, folded it, and tucked it in a vest pocket. “And they had brothers in her bag.”
Spade pocketed the other bill before he sat down. Then he said:
“Well, don’t dynamite her too much. What do you think of her?”
“She’s a sweet job. And you telling me not to dynamite her.” Archer guffawed suddenly, without merriment. “Maybe you saw her first, Sam, but I spoke first.” He put his hands in his pants pockets and teetered back on his heels.
“You’ll play hell with her, you will.” Spade grinned wolfishly, showing the edge of teeth far back in his jaw. “You’ve got brains, yes, you have.” He began making a cigarette.
Chapter II
Death in the Fog
A telephone bell rang in darkness. The third time it rang bedsprings creaked, fingers fumbled on wood, something small and hard thudded on a carpeted floor, the springs creaked again, and a man’s voice said: “Hello... Yes, speaking... Dead?... Yes... Fifteen minutes. Thanks.”
A switch clicked and a white bowl, hung on three gilded chains from the ceiling’s center, filled the room with light.
Spade, barefooted in green and white checked pajamas, sat on the side of his bed. He scowled thoughtfully at the telephone on the table while his hands took from beside it a packet of brown papers and a sack of Bull Durham tobacco.
Cold, steamy air blew in through two open windows, bringing with it half a dozen times a minute the Alcatraz foghorn’s dull moaning. A tinny alarm clock, insecurely mounted on a corner of Duke’s Celebrated Criminal Cases of America, which lay facedown on the table, held its hands at five minutes past two.
Spade’s thick fingers made a cigarette with deliberate care, sifting a measured quantity of the tan flakes down into curving paper, spreading the flakes so that they lay equal at the ends with a slight depression in the middle, thumbs rolling the paper’s inner edge down and up under the outer edge as forefingers pressed it over, thumbs and fingers sliding to the paper cylinder’s ends, holding it even while tongue licked the flap, left forefinger and thumb pinching their end while right forefinger and thumb smoothed the damp seam, right forefinger and thumb twisting their end and lifting the other to Spade’s mouth.
He picked up the pigskin and nickel lighter that had been knocked off the table, worked it, and with the cigarette burning in a corner of his mouth stood up.
He took off his pajamas. The smooth thickness of his arms, legs and body, the sag of his big, rounded shoulders, made his body look like a bear’s. It looked like a shaved bear’s; his chest was hairless. His skin was childishly smooth and pink.
He scratched the back of his neck and began to dress. He put on a thin white union suit, gray socks, black garters, and dark brown shoes. When he had laced his shoes he picked up the telephone, called Graystone 4500, and ordered a taxicab. He put on a green-striped white shirt, a soft white collar, a green necktie, the gray suit he had worn that day, a loose tweed overcoat, and a dark gray hat.
The street door bell rang as he switched off the light.
Where Bush Street roofed Stockton before slipping downhill to Chinatown, Spade paid his fare and left the taxicab. San Francisco’s night fog, thin, clammy and penetrant, blurred the street. A few yards from where Spade had dismissed the taxicab a small group of men stood looking up an alley. Two women stood with a man on the other side of Bush Street, looking at the alley. There were faces at windows.