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.
The grating and rattling of the elevator door being opened and closed came from the corridor. Spade sighed again and moved toward the corridor door. Soft, heavy footsteps sounded on the carpeted floor outside, the footsteps of two men. Spade’s face brightened. His eyes were no longer harassed. He opened the door quickly.
“Hello, Tom,” he said to the barrel-bellied tall detective with whom he had talked in Burritt Street, and, “Hello, Lieutenant,” to the man beside him. “Come in.”
They nodded together, neither saying anything, and came in. Spade shut the door and ushered them back into his bedroom. Tom sat on an end of the sofa by the window. The lieutenant sat on a chair beside the table.
The lieutenant was a compactly built man with a round head under short-cut grizzled hair and a square face behind a short-cut grizzled mustache. A five-dollar gold piece was pinned to his necktie, and there was a small, elaborate diamond-set secret-society emblem on his lapel.
Spade brought two wineglasses in from the kitchen, filled them and his own with Bacardi, gave one to each of his guests, and sat down with his on the side of the bed. Spade’s face was placid and incurious. He raised his glass, said, “Success to crime,” and drank it down.
Tom emptied his glass, set it on the floor beside him, and wiped his mouth with the back of a muddy finger. He stared at the foot of the bed as if he were trying to remember something of which it vaguely reminded him.
The lieutenant looked at his glass for a dozen seconds, took a very small sip of the rum, and put the glass on the table at his elbow. He examined the room with hard, deliberate eyes, and then looked at Tom.
Tom moved uncomfortably on the sofa and without looking up asked: “Did you break the news to Miles’s wife, Sam?”
Spade said: “Uh-huh.”
“How’d she take it?”
Spade shook his head. “I don’t know anything about women.”
Tom said softly: “The hell you don’t!”
The lieutenant put his hands on his knees and leaned forward. His greenish eyes looked at Spade with a peculiarly rigid stare, as if their focus was a matter of mechanics, to be changed only by pulling a lever or pressing a button.
“What kind of a gun do you carry?” he asked.
“None. I don’t like them much. There are some in the office, of course.”
“I’d like to see one of them,” the lieutenant said. “You don’t happen to have one here?”
“No.”
“You sure of that?”
“Look around.” Spade smiled and waved his empty glass a little. “Turn the dump upside-down if you want. I won’t squawk, if you’ve got a search warrant.”
Tom protested: “Oh, hell, Sam!”
Spade put his glass on the table and stood up facing the lieutenant.
“What do you want, Dundy?” he asked in a voice hard and cold as his eyes.
Lieutenant Dundy’s eyes had moved to maintain their focus on Spade’s. Only his eyes had moved.
Tom shifted his bulk on the sofa again, blew a deep breath out through his nose, and growled plaintively: “We’re not wanting to make any trouble, Sam.”
Spade, ignoring Tom, said to Dundy:
“Well, what do you want? Talk turkey. Who in hell do you think you are, coming in here trying to rope me?”
“All right,” Dundy said in his chest. “Now sit down and listen.”
“I’ll sit or stand as I damned please,” said Spade, not moving.
“For God’s sake be reasonable,” Tom begged. “What’s the use of us having a row? If you want to know why we didn’t talk turkey, it’s because when I asked you who this Thursby was you as good as told me it was none of my business. You can’t treat us that way, Sam. It ain’t right, and it won’t get you anywheres. We got our work to do.”
Lieutenant Dundy jumped up, stood close to Spade, and thrust his square, pink face up at the taller man’s.
“I’ve told you before your foot was going to slip one of these days.”
Spade made a deprecative mouth, raising his eyebrows.
“Everybody’s foot slips sometime,” he said with derisive mildness.
“And maybe this is your time?”
Spade smiled and shook his head.
“No. I’ll do nicely, thank you.” He stopped smiling. His upper lip, on the left side, twitched over his eyetooth. His eyes became narrow and sultry. His voice came out deep as the lieutenant’s. “I don’t like this. What are you sucking around for? Tell me, or get out and let me go to bed.”
“Who’s Thursby?” Dundy snapped.
“I told Tom what I knew about him.”
“You told Tom damned little.”
“I knew damned little.”
“Why were you tailing him?”
“I wasn’t. Miles was, for the swell reason that we had a client who was paying good United States money to have him tailed.”
“Who’s the client?”
Placidity came back to Spade’s face and voice.
“Now, now,” he said reprovingly. “You know I can’t tell you that until I’ve talked it over with the client.”
“You’ll tell it to me or you’ll tell it in court,” Dundy said hotly. “This is murder, and don’t forget it.”
“Maybe. And here’s something for you to not forget, sweetheart. I’ll tell it or not as I damned please. It’s a long while since I burst out crying because policemen didn’t like me.”
Tom came over and sat on the foot of the bed. His carelessly shaven mud-smeared face was tired and lined.
“Be reasonable, Sam,” he pleaded. “Give us a chance. How can we turn up anything on Miles’s killing if you won’t give us what you’ve got?”
“You needn’t get a headache over that,” Spade told him. “I’ll bury my dead.”
Lieutenant Dundy sat down and put his hands on his knees again. His eyes were warm green discs.
“I thought you would,” he said. He smiled with grim content. “That’s just exactly why we came to see you. Isn’t it, Tom?”
Tom groaned, but said nothing articulate.
Spade watched Dundy warily.
“That’s just what I said to Tom,” the lieutenant went on. “I said, ‘Tom, I’ve got a hunch that Sam Spade’s a man to keep the family troubles in the family.’ That’s just what I said to him.”
Spade put the wariness out of his eyes. He made them look bored. He turned his face to Tom and asked with great carelessness: “What’s itching your boy friend now?”
Dundy jumped up and tapped Spade’s chest with the ends of two bent fingers.
“Just this,” he said, taking pains to make each word very distinct, emphasizing them with repeated taps: “Thursby was shot down in front of his hotel just thirty-five minutes after you left Burritt Street.”
Spade spoke, taking equal pains with his words:
“Keep your — damned dirty paws off me.”
Dundy withdrew the tapping fingers, but there was no change in his voice.
“Tom says you were in too much of a hurry to even stop for a look at your partner.”
Tom growled apologetically: “Well, damn it, Sam, you did run off like that.”
“You didn’t go to Archer’s house to tell his wife,” the lieutenant’s accusing voice went on. “We called up and that girl in your office was there, and said you sent her.”
Spade nodded. His face was stupid in its blankness.
Lieutenant Dundy raised the two bent fingers toward the private detective’s chest, quickly lowered them, and said: “I give you ten minutes to get to a phone and do your talking to the girl. I give you ten to fifteen minutes to get to Thursby’s joint — Geary near Leavenworth — you could do it easy in that time. And that gives you ten or fifteen minutes of waiting before he showed up.”