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.
She hung her head and wept.
He made a growling animal noise in his throat and went to the table for his hat.
“You won’t,” she begged in a small choked voice, not looking up, “go to the police?”
“Go to them!” he exclaimed, his voice loud with rage. “They’ve been running me ragged since four o’clock this morning. I’ve made myself God knows how much trouble standing them off. For what? For some crazy notion that I could help you. I can’t. I won’t try.” He put his hat on his head and pulled it down tight. “Go to them? All I’ve got to do is stand still and they’ll be swarming all over me. Well, now I’ll tell them what I know, and you’ll have to take your chances.”
She rose from the settee and held herself straight in front of him though her knees were trembling, and she held her white panic-stricken face up though she couldn’t hold the twitching muscles of mouth and chin still. She said: “You’ve been patient. You’ve tried to help me. It is hopeless and useless, I suppose.” She stretched out her right hand. “I thank you for what you’ve tried to do. I... I’ll have to take my chances.”
Spade made the growling animal noise in his throat again and sat down on the settee.
“How much money have you got?” he asked.
The question startled her. Then she bit her lip and answered reluctantly: “I’ve about five hundred dollars left.”
“Give it to me.”
She hesitated, looking timidly at him. He made angry gestures with eyebrows, mouth, hands and shoulders. She went into her bedroom, returning almost immediately with a thin sheaf of paper money in her hand.
He took the money from her, counted it, and said:
“There’s only four hundred here.”
“I had to keep some to live on,” she explained meekly, putting a hand to her breast.
“Can’t you get any more?”
“No.”
“You must have something you can raise money on,” he insisted.
“I’ve some rings, a little jewelry.”
“You’ll have to hock them,” he said, and held out his hand. “The Remedial’s the best place, Mission and Fifth.”
She bit her lip, looking pleadingly at him. His yellow-gray eyes were hard and implacable. Slowly she put her hand inside the neck of her green dress, brought out a slender roll of bills, and put them in his waiting hand.
He smoothed the bills out and counted them, four twenties, four tens, and a five. He returned two of the tens and the five to her. The others he put in his pocket. Then he stood up and said: “I’m going out and see what I can do for you. I’ll be back as soon as I can, with the best news I can manage. I’ll ring four times — long, short, long, short — so you’ll know it’s me. You needn’t go to the door with me. I can let myself out.”
He left her standing in the middle of the room looking after him with dazed blue eyes.
Spade went into a reception room whose door bore the legend Wise, Merican & Wise. The red-haired girl at the switchboard said: “Oh, hello, Mr. Spade!”
“Hello, darling,” he replied. “Is Sid in?”
He stood beside her with a hand on her plump shoulder while she manipulated a plug and spoke into the mouthpiece: “Mr. Spade to see you, Mr. Wise.” She looked up at Spade. “Go right in.”
He squeezed her shoulder by way of acknowledgment, crossed the reception room to a dully lighted inner corridor, and passed down the corridor to a frosted door at its far end. He opened the door and went into an office where a small olive-skinned man with a tired oval face under thin dark hair dotted with dandruff sat behind an immense desk on which bales of paper were heaped.
The small man waved a cold cigar stub at Spade and said:
“Push a chair around. So Miles got his last night?” Neither his tired face nor his rather shrill voice held any emotion.
“Uh-huh. That’s what I came in about.” Spade frowned and cleared his throat. “I think I’m going to have to tell a coroner to go to hell, Sid. Can I hide behind the sanctity of my client’s identity and secrets and whatnot, like a priest or a lawyer?”
Sid Wise lifted his shoulders and lowered the ends of his mouth.
“Why not?” he said. “An inquest is not a court trial. You can try, anyway. You’ve gotten away with more than that before now.”
“I know, but Dundy’s getting snotty, and it’s a little bit thick this time. Get your hat, Sid, and we’ll go see the right people. I want to be safe.”
Sid Wise looked at the mass of papers on his desk and groaned, but he got up from his chair and went to the closet by the window.
“You’re a son of a gun, Sammy,” he said as he took his hat from its hook.
Spade returned to his office at ten minutes past five that evening. Effie Perine was sitting at his desk reading Time. Spade sat on the desk and asked: “Anything stirring?”
“Not here. You look like you’d swallowed the canary.”
Spade grinned contentedly.
“I think we’ve got a future. I always had an idea that if Miles would go off and die somewhere we’d stand a better chance of thriving. Will you take care of sending flowers for me?”
“I did.”
“You’re an invaluable angel. How’s your woman’s intuition today?”
“Why?”
“What do you think of Wonderly?”
“I’m for her,” the girl said without hesitation.
“She’s got too many names — Wonderly, Leblanc, and she says the right one’s O’Shaughnessy.”
“I don’t care if she’s got all the names in the phone book. That girl is all right, and you know it.”
“I wonder.” Spade blinked sleepily at Effie Perine. Then he chuckled. “Anyway, she’s given up seven hundred bucks in two days, and that’s all right.”
Effie Perine sat up straight and said:
“Sam, if that girl’s in trouble, and you let her down, or take advantage of it to bleed her, I’ll never forgive you, never have any respect for you, as long as I live.”
Spade smiled unnaturally. Then he frowned. The frown also was unnatural. He opened his mouth to speak, but the sound of someone coming in at the corridor door stopped him.
Effie Perine rose and went into the outer office. Spade took off his hat and sat in his chair. The girl returned with a card: Mr. Joel Cairo.
“This guy is queer,” she said.
“In with him, then, darling,” said Spade.
Mr. Joel Cairo was a small-boned dark man of medium height. His hair was black and smooth and very glossy. His features were Levantine. A square-cut ruby, its sides paralleled by four baguette diamonds, gleamed against the deep green of his cravat. His black coat, cut tight to narrow shoulders, flared a little over slightly plump hips. His trousers fit his round legs more snugly than was the current fashion. The uppers of his patent-leather shoes were hidden by fawn spats. He held a black derby hat in a chamois-gloved hand and came toward Spade with short mincing, bobbing steps. The fragrance of chypre came with him.
Spade inclined his head at his visitor and then at a chair, saying: “Sit down, Mr. Cairo.”
Cairo bowed elaborately over his hat, said, “I thank you,” in a high-pitched thin voice, and sat down. He sat down primly, crossing his ankles, placing his hat on his knees, and began to draw off his yellow gloves.
Spade rocked back in his chair and asked: “Now what can I do for you, Mr. Cairo?” The amiable negligence of his tone, his motion in the chair, were precisely as they had been when he had addressed the same question to Brigid O’Shaughnessy on the previous day.
Cairo turned his hat over, dropped his gloves into it, and placed it bottom up on the corner of the desk nearest him. Diamonds twinkled on the second and fourth fingers of his left hand, a ruby that matched the one in his tie even to the surrounding diamonds on the third finger of his right hand. His hands were soft and well cared for. Though they were not large, their flaccid bluntness made them seem clumsy. He rubbed his palms together, and said over the whispering sound they made: