The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps
- Автор: Anderson Lars, Barr Randolph
- Год: 2007
- Язык: английский
- Год: Vintage Books
- ISBN: 978-0-307-28048-0
- Жанр: Криминальные детективы
Электронная книга - «The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps». Краткое содержание книги:
Weighing in at over a thousand pages, containing over forty-seven stories and two novels, this book is big baby, bigger and more powerful than a freight train — a bullet couldn’t pass through it. Here are the best stories and every major writer who ever appeared in celebrated Pulps like Black Mask, Dime Detective, Detective Fiction Weekly, and more. These are the classic tales that created the genre and gave birth to hard-hitting detectives who smoke criminals like packs of cigarettes; sultry dames whose looks are as lethal as a dagger to the chest; and gin-soaked hideouts where conversations are just preludes to murder. This is crime fiction at its gritty best.
They let him go and told him to keep the bar closed until they were sure they didn’t want to do any more printing. He shook hands all around and grinned and said he guessed the killing would be good for business after all, because nobody believed a newspaper account of anything and people would come to him for the story and buy drinks while he was telling it.
“There’s a guy won’t ever do any worrying,” Copernik said, when he was gone. “Over anybody else.”
“Poor Waldo,” I said. “The prints any good?”
“Kind of smudged,” Copernik said sourly. “But we’ll get a classification and teletype it to Washington some time tonight. If it don’t click, you’ll be in for a day on the steel picture racks downstairs.”
I shook hands with him and his partner, whose name was Ybarra, and left. They didn’t know who Waldo was yet either. Nothing in his pockets told.
Two
I got back to my street about 9 p.m. I looked up and down the block before I went into the Berglund. The cocktail bar was farther down on the other side, dark, with a nose or two against the glass, but no real crowd. People had seen the law and the morgue wagon, but they didn’t know what happened. Except the boys playing pinball games in the drugstore on the corner. They know everything, except how to hold a job.
The wind was still blowing, oven-hot, swirling dust and torn paper up against the walls.
I went into the lobby of the apartment house and rode the automatic elevator up to the fourth floor. I unwound the doors and stepped out and there was a tall girl standing there waiting for the car.
She had brown wavy hair under a wide-brimmed straw hat with a velvet band and loose bow. She had wide blue eyes and eyelashes that didn’t quite reach her chin. She wore a blue dress that might have been crepe silk, simple in lines but not missing any curves. Over it she wore what might have been a print bolero jacket.
I said: “Is that a bolero jacket?”
She gave me a distant glance and made a motion as if to brush a cobweb out of the way.
“Yes. Would you mind — I’m rather in a hurry. I’d like—”
I didn’t move. I blocked her off from the elevator. We stared at each other and she flushed very slowly.
“Better not go out on the street in those clothes,” I said.
“Why, how dare you—”
The elevator clanked and started down again. I didn’t know what she was going to say. Her voice lacked the edgy twang of a beer-parlor frill. It had a soft light sound, like spring rain.
“It’s not a make,” I said. “You’re in trouble. If they come to this floor in the elevator, you have just that much time to get off the hall. First take off the hat and jacket — and snap it up!”
She didn’t move. Her face seemed to whiten a little behind the not-too-heavy make-up.
“Cops,” I said, “are looking for you. In those clothes. Give me the chance and I’ll tell you why.”
She turned her head swiftly and looked back along the corridor. With her looks I didn’t blame her for trying one more bluff.
“You’re impertinent, whoever you are. I’m Mrs. Leroy in Apartment Thirty-one. I can assure—”
“That you’re on the wrong floor,” I said. “This is the fourth.” The elevator had stopped down below. The sound of doors being wrenched open came up the shaft.
“Off!” I rapped. “Now!”
She switched her hat off and slipped out of the bolero jacket, fast. I grabbed them and wadded them into a mess under my arm. I took her elbow and turned her and we were going down the hall.
“I live in Forty-two. The front one across from yours, just a floor up. Take your choice. Once again — I’m not on the make.”
She smoothed her hair with that quick gesture, like a bird preening itself. Ten thousand years of practice behind it.
“Mine,” she said, and tucked her bag under her arm and strode down the hall fast. The elevator stopped at the floor below. She stopped when it stopped. She turned and faced me.
“The stairs are back by the elevator shaft,” I said gently.
“I don’t have an apartment,” she said.
“I didn’t think you had.”
“Are they searching for me?”
“Yes, but they won’t start gouging the block stone by stone before tomorrow. And then only if they don’t make Waldo.”
She stared at me. “Waldo?”
“Oh, you don’t know Waldo,” I said.
She shook her head slowly. The elevator started down in the shaft again. Panic flicked in her blue eyes like a ripple on water.
“No,” she said breathlessly, “but take me out of this hall.”
We were almost at my door. I jammed the key in and shook the lock around and heaved the door inward. I reached in far enough to switch lights on. She went in past me like a wave. Sandalwood floated on the air, very faint.
I shut the door, threw my hat into a chair and watched her stroll over to a card table on which I had a chess problem set out that I couldn’t solve. Once inside, with the door locked, her panic had left her.
“So you’re a chess player,” she said, in that guarded tone, as if she had come to look at my etchings. I wished she had.
We both stood still then and listened to the distant clang of elevator doors and then steps — going the other way.
I grinned, but with strain, not pleasure, went out into the kitchenette and started to fumble with a couple of glasses and then realized I still had her hat and bolero jacket under my arm. I went into the dressing room behind the wall bed and stuffed them into a drawer, went back out to the kitchenette, dug out some extra-fine Scotch and made a couple of highballs.
When I went in with the drinks she had a gun in her hand. It was a small automatic with a pearl grip. It jumped up at me and her eyes were full of horror.
I stopped, with a glass in each hand, and said: “Maybe this hot wind has got you crazy too. I’m a private detective. I’ll prove it if you let me.”
She nodded slightly and her face was white. I went over slowly and put a glass down beside her, and went back and set mine down and got a card out that had no bent corners. She was sitting down, smoothing one blue knee with her left hand, and holding the gun on the other. I put the card down beside her drink and sat with mine.
“Never let a guy get that close to you,” I said. “Not if you mean business. And your safety catch is on.”
She flashed her eyes down, shivered, and put the gun back in her bag. She drank half the drink without stopping, put the glass down hard and picked the card up.
“I don’t give many people that liquor,” I said. “I can’t afford to.”
Her lips curled. “I supposed you would want money.”
“Huh?”
She didn’t say anything. Her hand was close to her bag again.
“Don’t forget the safety catch,” I said. Her hand stopped. I went on: “This fellow I called Waldo is quite tall, say five-eleven, slim, dark, brown eyes with a lot of glitter. Nose and mouth too thin. Dark suit, white handkerchief showing, and in a hurry to find you. Am I getting anywhere?”
She took her glass again. “So that’s Waldo,” she said. “Well, what about him?” Her voice seemed to have a slight liquor edge now.
“Well, a funny thing. There’s a cocktail bar across the street... Say, where have you been all evening?”
“Sitting in my car,” she said coldly, “most of the time.”
“Didn’t you see a fuss across the street up the block?”
Her eyes tried to say no and missed. Her lips said: “I knew there was some kind of disturbance. I saw policemen and red searchlights. I supposed someone had been hurt.”