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.
“I knew where he lived?” Spade asked. “And I knew he hadn’t gone straight home after killing Miles?”
“You knew what you knew,” Dundy replied stubbornly. “What time did you get home?”
“Twenty minutes to four. I walked around thinking things over.”
The lieutenant wagged his round head up and down.
“We knew you weren’t home at three-thirty,” he said. “We tried to get you on the phone. Where’d you do your walking?”
“Out Bush Street a way and back.”
“Did you see anybody that—?”
“No. No witnesses,” Spade said and laughed, but pleasantly now. “Sit down, Dundy. You haven’t finished your drink. Get your glass, Tom.”
Tom said: “No, thanks.”
Dundy sat down, but paid no attention to his glass of rum.
Spade filled his own glass, drank, put the empty glass on the table, and resumed his seat on the side of the bed.
“I know where I stand now,” he said, looking with friendly eyes from one police detective to the other. “I’m sorry I got up on my hind legs. But you birds made me nervous, coming in and trying to put the work on me. Having Miles knocked off bothered me, and then you birds cracking foxy. That’s all right now, though, now that I know what you’re up to.”
Tom said: “Forget it.”
The lieutenant said nothing.
Spade asked: “Thursby dead?”
While the lieutenant hesitated Tom said: “Yes.”
Then the lieutenant said angrily: “And you might just as well know it — if you don’t — that he died before he could tell anybody anything.”
Spade was rolling a cigarette. He asked, without looking up:
“What do you mean by that? You think I did know it?”
“I meant what I said,” Dundy replied bluntly.
Spade looked up at him and smiled, holding the finished cigarette in one hand, his lighter in the other.
“You’re not ready to pinch me yet, are you, Dundy?” he asked.
Dundy shook his head no.
“Then,” said Spade, “there’s no particular reason why I should give a damn what you think, is there?”
Dundy looked at Spade with hard green eyes and said nothing.
Tom said: “Aw, be reasonable, Sam.”
Spade put the cigarette in his mouth, set fire to it, and laughed smoke out.
“I’ll be reasonable, Tom,” he promised. “How’d I kill this Thursby? I’ve forgotten.”
Tom grunted disgust. Lieutenant Dundy said:
“He was shot four times in the back, with a .44 or .45, from across the street, when he started to go into his hotel. That’s the way it figures, though nobody saw it.”
“And he was wearing a Lüger in a shoulder holster,” Tom added. “And it hadn’t been fired.”
“What do the hotel people know about him?” Spade asked.
“Nothing except that he’d been there a week.”
“Alone?”
“Alone.”
“What did you find on him? Or in his room?”
Dundy drew his lips in and asked:
“What’d you think we’d find?”
Spade made a careless motion with his limp cigarette.
“Something to tell you who he was, what his store was. Did you?”
“We thought you could tell us that.”
Spade looked at the lieutenant with yellow-gray eyes that held an almost exaggerated amount of candor.
“I’ve never seen Thursby,” he said, “dead or alive.”
Lieutenant Dundy stood up looking dissatisfied. Tom rose yawning and stretching.
“We’ve asked what we came to ask,” Dundy said, frowning over eyes hard as green pebbles. He held his mustached upper lip tight against his teeth, letting his lower lip push the words out. “We’ve told you more than you’ve told us. That’s fair enough. You know me, Spade. If you did or you didn’t you’ll get a square deal out of me, and most of the breaks. I don’t know that I’d blame you a hell of a lot for dropping him, but that won’t keep me from nailing you.”
“Fair enough,” Spade agreed evenly. “But I’d feel better about it if you’d drink your drink.”
Lieutenant Dundy turned to the table, picked up his glass, and slowly drained it. Then he said, “Good night,” and held out his hand. They shook hands with marked formality. Tom and Spade shook hands with marked formality. Spade let them out. Then he undressed, turned off the lights, and went to bed.
Chapter III
Three Women
When Spade reached his office at ten the following morning Effie Perine was at her desk opening the morning mail. Her boy’s face was pale under its sunburn. She put down the handful of envelopes and the paperknife she held, and said: “She’s in there.” Her voice was low and warning.
“I asked you to keep her away,” Spade complained irritably, though he too kept his voice low.
Effie Perine’s brown eyes opened wide and her voice was sharp as his: “Yes, but you didn’t tell me how.” Her eyelids went together a little, and her shoulders drooped. “Don’t be cranky, Sam,” she said wearily. “I had her all night.”
Spade came over and stood beside the girl, putting a hand on her hair, smoothing it away from the part.
“Sorry, angel, I haven’t—”
He broke off as the inner door opened.
“Hello, Iva,” he said to the woman who had opened it.
“Oh, Sam!” she said.
She was a blonde woman of a few years more than thirty. Her facial prettiness was perhaps five years past its best moment. Her body, for all its sturdiness, was finely modeled and exquisite. She wore black clothes from hat to shoes. They had as mourning an impromptu air.
Having spoken, she stepped back from the door and stood waiting for Spade. He took his hand from Effie Perine’s head and entered the inner office, shutting the door.
Iva came quickly to him, raising her face for his kiss. Her arms were around him before his held her. When they had kissed he made a little motion as if to release her, but she pressed her face to his chest and began to sob.
He stroked her round back, saying: “Poor darling.”
His voice was tender. His eyes, squinting at the desk that had been his partner’s, across the room from his own, were angry. He drew his lips back over his teeth in an impatient grimace and turned his chin aside to avoid contact with the crown of her hat.
“Did you send for Miles’s brother?” he asked.
“Yes. He came over this morning.” The words were blurred by her sobbing and his coat against her mouth.
He grimaced again and bent his head for a surreptitious look at the watch on his wrist. His left arm was around her, the hand on her left shoulder. His cuff was pulled back far enough to leave the watch exposed. It showed ten-thirteen.
The woman stirred in his arms and raised her face again. Her blue eyes were wet, round, and white-ringed. Her mouth was moist.
“Oh, Sam,” she moaned, “did you kill him?”
Spade stared at her with bulging eyes. His bony jaw sagged. He took his arms from around her and stepped back out of her arms. He scowled at her and cleared his throat.
She held her arms up as he had left them. Anguish clouded her eyes, partly closed them under eyebrows pulled up at the inner ends. Her soft damp red lips trembled.
Spade laughed a harsh syllable. “Ha,” and went to the buff-curtained window. He stood there with his back to her, looking through the curtain into the court, until she started toward him. Then he turned quickly and went to his desk. He sat down, put his elbows on the desk, his chin between his fists, and looked at her. His yellowish eyes glittered between narrowed lids.
“Who,” he asked coldly, “put that bright idea into your head?”