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 thought—” She put a hand to her mouth and fresh tears filled her eyes. She came to stand beside the desk, moving with easy sure-footed grace in black slippers whose smallness and heel-height were extreme. “Be kind to me, Sam,” she said humbly.
He laughed at her, his eyes still glittering. “You killed my husband, Sam, be kind to me.” He clapped his palms together and said: “Great God!”
She began to cry audibly, holding a white handkerchief to her face.
He got up and stood close behind her. He put his arms around her. He kissed her neck between ear and coat collar. He said: “Now, Iva, don’t.” His face was expressionless.
When she had stopped crying he put his mouth to her ear and murmured: “You shouldn’t have come here today, precious. It wasn’t wise. You can’t stay. You ought to be home.”
She turned around in his arms to face him, asking:
“You’ll come tonight?”
He shook his head gently.
“Not tonight.”
“Soon?”
“Soon.”
“How soon?”
“As soon as I can.”
He kissed her mouth, led her to the door, opened it, said “Good-bye, Iva,” bowed, shut the door, and returned to his desk.
He took tobacco and cigarette papers from his vest pockets, but did not roll a cigarette. He sat holding the papers in one hand, the tobacco in the other, and looked with brooding eyes at his dead partner’s desk.
Effie Perine opened the door and came in. Her brown eyes were uneasy. Her voice was careless. She asked: “Well?”
Spade said nothing. His brooding gaze did not move from his partner’s desk.
The girl frowned and came around to his side.
“Well,” she asked in a louder voice, “how did you and the widow make out?”
“She thinks I shot Miles,” he said, only his lips moving.
“So you could marry her?”
Spade made no reply to that.
The girl took his hat from his head and put it on the desk, then leaned over and took the tobacco sack and the papers from his inert fingers.
“The police think I shot Thursby,” he said.
“Who is he?” she asked, separating a paper from the packet, sifting tobacco into it.
“Who do you think I shot?” he asked.
When she ignored the question he said: “Thursby’s the guy Miles was supposed to be shadowing for the Wonderly girl.”
Her thin fingers finished shaping the cigarette. She licked it, smoothed it, twisted the ends, and placed it between Spade’s lips.
He said, “Thanks, honey,” put an arm around her slim waist and rested his cheek wearily against her hip, shutting his eyes.
“Are you going to marry Iva?” she asked, looking down at his pale brown hair.
“Don’t be silly,” he muttered. The unlighted cigarette bobbed up and down with the movement of his lips.
“She doesn’t think it’s silly. Why should she, the way you’ve played around with her?”
He sighed and said: “I wish to God I’d never seen her.”
“Maybe you do now.” A trace of spitefulness came into the girl’s voice. “But there was a time.”
“I never know what to do or say to women, except that way,” he grumbled. “And then I didn’t like Miles.”
“That’s a lie, Sam,” the girl said. “You know I think she’s a louse, but I’d be a louse too if I could have a body like that.”
Spade rubbed his face impatiently against her hip, but said nothing.
Effie Perine bit her lower lip, wrinkled her forehead, and, bending down for a better view of his face, asked: “Do you suppose she could have killed him?”
Spade sat up straight and took his arm from her waist. He smiled at her. His smile held nothing but amusement. He took out his lighter, snapped it on, and lit his cigarette.
“You’re an angel,” he said tenderly through smoke, “a nice rattle-brained angel.”
She smiled a little wryly.
“Oh, am I? Suppose I told you that your Iva hadn’t been home very many minutes when I arrived to break the news at three o’clock this morning?”
“Are you telling me?” he asked. His eyes had become alert, though his mouth continued to smile.
“She kept me waiting at the door while she undressed or finished undressing. I saw her clothes where she had dumped them on a chair. Her coat and hat were underneath. Her singlette, on top, was still warm. She said she had been asleep, but she hadn’t. She had wrinkled up the bed, but the wrinkles weren’t mashed down.”
Spade took the girl’s hand and patted it.
“You’re a detective, darling, but” — he shook his head — “she didn’t kill him.”
Effie Perine snatched her hand away from him.
“That louse wants to marry you, Sam,” she said bitterly.
He made a careless gesture of dismissal with one hand.
She frowned at him and demanded:
“Did you see her last night?”
“No.”
“Honestly?”
“Honestly. Don’t act like Dundy, sweetheart. It ill becomes you.”
“Has Dundy been after you?”
“Uh-huh. He and Tom Polhaus stopped in for a drink at four o’clock.”
“Do they really think you killed this what’s-his-name?”
“Thursby.”
He dropped what was left of his cigarette into the brass tray and began to roll another.
“Do they?” she insisted.
“God knows.” His eyes were on the cigarette he was making. “They did have some such notion. I don’t know how far I talked them out of it.”
“Look at me, Sam.”
He looked at her and laughed so that for the moment merriment mingled with the anxiety in her face.
“You worry me,” she said, seriousness returning to her face as she talked. “You always think you know what you’re doing, but you’re too slick for your own good, and some day you’re going to find it out.”
He sighed mockingly and rubbed his cheek against her arm.
“That’s what Dundy says, but you keep Iva away from me, sweet, and I’ll manage to survive the rest of my troubles.” He stood up and put on his hat. “Have the Spade & Archer taken off the door and Samuel Spade put in its place. I’ll be back in an hour, or phone you.”
Spade went through the St. Mark’s long purplish lobby to the desk and asked a blond dandy if Miss Wonderly was in. The dandy turned away from Spade, and then back to him shaking his head.
“She checked out this morning, Mr. Spade.”
“Thanks.”
Spade walked past the desk to the alcove off the lobby, where a plump young-middle-aged man in dark clothes sat at a flat-topped mahogany desk. On the edge of the desk facing the lobby was a triangular prism of mahogany and brass inscribed Mr. Freed.
The plump man got up from his chair and came around the desk holding out his hand.
“I was awfully sorry to hear about Archer, Spade,” he said in the tone of one trained to sympathize readily without intrusiveness. “I’ve just seen it in the Call. He was in here last night, you know.”
“Thanks, Freed. Were you talking to him?”
“No. He was sitting in the lobby when I came in early in the evening. I didn’t stop. I thought he was working and I know you fellows like to be let alone when you’re busy. Did that have anything to do with his—?”
“I don’t think so, but we don’t know yet. Anyway, we won’t mix the house up in it if we can help it.”
“Thanks.”
“That’s all right. Can you give me some information about an ex-guest, and then forget I asked for it?”
“Surely.”
“A Miss Wonderly checked out this morning. I’d like to know the details.”