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 crossed the sidewalk between iron-railed hatchways that opened above bare, ugly stairs, went to the parapet and, resting his hands on the damp coping, looked down into Stockton Street.
An automobile popped out of the tunnel beneath him with a roaring swish, as if it had been blown out, and ran away. Not far from the tunnel’s mouth a man was hunkered on his heels before a billboard that held advertisements of a moving picture and gasoline across the front of a gap between two store buildings. The hunkered man’s head was bent almost to the sidewalk so he could look under the billboard. A hand flat on the sidewalk, a hand clenched on the billboard’s green wooden frame, held him in this grotesque position.
Two other men stood awkwardly close together at one end of the billboard, peeping through the few inches of space between it and the building at that end. The building at the other end had a blank gray sidewall that looked down on the lot behind the billboard. Lights flickered on the sidewall, and the shadows of men moving among lights.
Spade turned from the parapet and walked up Bush Street to the alley where men were grouped. A uniformed policeman, chewing gum under an enamel sign that said Burritt St. in white against dark blue, put out an arm and asked: “What do you want here?”
“I’m Sam Spade. Tom Polhaus phoned me.”
“Sure you are.” The policeman’s arm went down. “I didn’t know you at first. Well, they’re back there.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Bad business.”
“Bad enough,” Spade agreed, and went up the alley.
Halfway up it, not far from the entrance, a dark ambulance stood. Behind the ambulance, on the left, the alley was bounded by a waist-high fence, three strips of rough boarding. From the fence dark ground fell away steeply to the billboard on Stockton Street below.
A ten-foot length of the fence’s top rail had been torn from a post at one end, and hung dangling from the other. Fifteen feet down the slope a flat boulder stuck out. In the notch between boulder and slope Miles Archer lay on his back. Two men stood over him. One of them held an electric torch’s beam on the dead man. Other men with lights moved up and down the slope.
One of them hailed Spade, “Hello, Sam,” and clambered up to the alley, his shadow running up before him. He was a barrel-bellied tall man with shrewd, small eyes, a thick mouth, and carelessly shaven dark jowls. His shoes, knees, hands and chin were daubed with brown loam.
“I figured you’d want to see it before we took him away,” he said as he stepped over the broken fence.
“Yes. Thanks, Tom,” Spade said. “What happened?”
He put an elbow on a fence post and looked down at the men below, nodding to those who nodded to him.
Tom Polhaus poked his own left breast with a dirty finger.
“Got him right through the pump, with this.” He took a fat revolver from his coat pocket and held it out to Spade. Mud inlaid the depressions in the revolver’s surface. “A Webley. English, ain’t it?”
Spade took his elbow from the fence post and leaned down to look at the weapon, but he did not touch it.
“Yes,” he said. “Webley-Fosbery semi-automatic revolver. That’s it. Thirty-eight, eight shot. They don’t make them any more. How many gone out of it?”
“One shot.” Tom poked his breast again. “He must’ve been dead when he cracked the fence.” He raised the muddy revolver. “You’ve seen this before?”
Spade nodded.
“I’ve seen Webley-Fosberys,” he said indifferently, and then spoke rapidly: “He was shot up here, huh? Standing where you are, with his back to the fence. The man that shot him stands here.” He went around in front of Tom and raised a hand breast-high with leveled forefinger. “Lets him have it and Miles goes back, taking the top off the fence and going on through and down till the rock catches him. That it?”
“That’s it,” Tom replied slowly, working his brows together. “The shot burnt his coat.”
“Who found him?”
“The man on the beat, Shilling. He was coming down Bush, and just as he got here a machine turning around threw headlights up here and he saw the top rail off. So he came up and found him.”
“What about the machine that was turning around?”
“Not a damned thing about it, Sam. Shilling didn’t pay much attention to it, not knowing anything was wrong. He says nobody didn’t come out of here during the time it took him to come down from Powell, or he’d’ve seen them. The only other way out would be under the billboard on Stockton. Nobody went that way. The fog’s got the ground soggy, and the only marks are where Miles slid down and where this here gun rolled.”
“Didn’t anybody hear the shot?”
“For the love of God, Sam, we only just got here. Somebody must’ve heard it, when we find them.” He turned and put a leg over the fence. “Coming down for a look at him before he’s moved?”
Spade said: “No.”
Tom halted astride the fence to look back at Spade with surprised, small eyes.
Spade said: “You’ve seen him. You’d see everything I could.”
Tom, still looking at Spade, nodded doubtfully and withdrew his leg over the fence.
“His gun was tucked away on his hip,” he said. “It hadn’t been fired. There was a hundred and sixty-some bucks in his clothes. Was he working, Sam?”
Spade, after a moment’s hesitation, nodded.
Tom asked: “Well?”
“He was supposed to be tailing a fellow named Floyd Thursby,” Spade said, and described Thursby as Miss Wonderly had described him.
“What for?”
Spade put his hands into his overcoat pockets and blinked sleepy eyes at Tom.
Tom repeated impatiently: “What for?”
“He was an Englishman, maybe. I don’t know what his game was, exactly. We were trying to find out where he lived.” Spade grinned softly and took a hand from his pocket to pat Tom’s shoulder. “Don’t crowd me.” He put the hand in his pocket again. “I’m going out to break the news to Miles’s wife.” He turned away.
Tom, scowling, opened his mouth, closed it without having said anything, cleared his throat, put the scowl off his face and spoke with a husky sort of gentleness: “It’s tough, him getting it like that. Miles had his faults same as the rest of us, but I guess he must’ve had his good points, too.”
“I guess so,” Spade agreed in a tone that was utterly meaningless, and went out of the alley.
In an all-night drugstore on the corner of Bush and Taylor streets Spade used a telephone.
“Precious,” he said into it sometime after he had given central a number, “Miles has been shot... Yes, he’s dead... Now don’t get excited... Yes... You’ll have to break it to Iva... No, I’m damned if I will. You’ve got to do it... That’s a good girl... And keep her away from the office. Tell her I’ll see her... uh... some time... Yes, but don’t tie me up to anything... That’s the stuff. You’re an angel. Bye.”
Spade’s tinny alarm clock said three-forty when he turned on the light in the suspended bowl again. He dropped his hat and overcoat on the bed and went into his kitchen, returning to the bedroom with a wineglass and a tall, dark bottle of Bacardi. He poured a drink and drank it standing. Then he put bottle and glass on the table, sat down on the side of the bed facing them and rolled a cigarette.
He had drunk his third glass of Bacardi and was lighting his fifth cigarette when the street doorbell rang. The hands of the alarm clock stood at four thirty.
He sighed, rose from the bed, and went to the telephone box beside his bathroom door. He pressed the button that released the street door lock. He muttered, “Damn her,” and stood scowling at the black telephone box, breathing irregularly while a dull flush grew in his cheeks.