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.
“Yes,” Spade growled. “And when you’re slapped you’ll take it and like it.” He released Cairo’s wrist and with a thick open hand struck the sides of his face three times, savagely.
Cairo tried to spit into Spade’s face, but the dryness of his mouth made it only an angry gesture. Spade slapped the mouth, cutting Cairo’s lower lip.
The door bell rang.
Cairo’s eyes jerked into focus on the passageway that led to the corridor door. His eyes had become unangry and wary. The girl had gasped and turned to face the passageway. Her face was frightened.
Spade stared gloomily for a moment at the blood trickling from Cairo’s lip, and then stepped back, taking his hand away from the Levantine’s throat.
“Who is it?” the girl whispered, coming close to Spade; and Cairo’s eyes asked the same question.
“I don’t know,” Spade replied in an irritable voice.
The bell rang again, more insistently.
“Well, keep quiet,” Spade said, and went out of the room, shutting the door behind him.
Spade turned on the light in the passageway and opened the door to the corridor. Lieutenant Dundy and Tom Polhaus were there.
“Hello, Sam,” Tom said. “We thought maybe you wouldn’t’ve gone to bed yet.”
Dundy nodded, but said nothing.
“Hello,” Spade said good-naturedly. “You guys pick swell hours to go calling. What is it this time?”
Dundy spoke quietly: “We want to talk to you, Spade.”
“Well?” Spade stood in the doorway, blocking it. “Go ahead and talk.”
Tom Polhaus advanced, saying: “We don’t have to do it standing here, do we?”
Spade stood still in the doorway and said: “You can’t come in.” His tone was very slightly apologetic.
Tom’s thick-featured face, even in height with Spade’s, took on an expression of friendly scornfulness, though there was a bright gleam in his small shrewd eyes.
“What the hell, Sam?” he protested, and put a big playful hand on Spade’s chest.
Spade leaned against the pushing hand, grinned wolfishly, and asked: “Going to strong-arm me, Tom?”
Tom grumbled, “Aw, for God’s sake,” and stopped pushing.
Dundy clicked his teeth together and said through them:
“Let us in.”
Spade’s lip twitched over an eyetooth. He said:
“You’re not coming in. What do you want to do about it? Try to get in? Or do your talking here? Or go to hell?”
Tom groaned.
Dundy, still speaking through his teeth, said:
“It’d pay you to play along with us a little, Spade. You’ve got away with this and you’ve got away with that, but you can’t keep it up forever.”
“Stop me when you can,” Spade replied arrogantly.
“That’s what I’ll do.” Dundy put his hands behind him and thrust his hard face up toward the private detective’s. “There’s talk going around that you and Archer’s wife were cheating on him.”
Spade laughed. “That sounds like something you thought up yourself.”
“Then there’s not anything to it?”
“Not anything.”
“The talk is,” Dundy said, “that she tried to get a divorce out of him so she could put in with you, but he wouldn’t give it to her. Anything to that?”
“Nothing.”
“There’s even talk,” Dundy continued stolidly, “that that’s why he was put on the spot.”
Spade seemed mildly amused.
“Don’t be a hog,” he said. “You oughtn’t try to pin more than one murder at a time on me. Your first notion that I knocked Thursby off because he’d killed Miles falls apart if you blame me for killing Miles too.”
“You haven’t heard me say you killed anybody,” Dundy replied. “You’re the one that’s been bringing that up. But suppose I did. You could have blipped them both. There’s a way of figuring it.”
“Uh-huh. I could have butchered Miles to get his wife, and then Thursby so I could hang Miles’s murder on him. That’s a swell system, or will be when I get around to killing somebody else so I can accuse them of Thursby’s murder. Am I supposed to keep that up? What are you going to do? Charge me with all the killings in San Francisco from now on?”
Tom said: “Aw, cut the comedy, Sam. You know damned well we don’t like this any more than you do, but we got to do our work.”
“I hope you’ve got something to do besides pop in here early every morning asking me a lot of damned fool questions.”
“And getting damned lying answers,” Dundy added deliberately.
“Easy now,” Spade cautioned him.
Dundy looked him up and down and then looked him straight in the eyes.
“If you say there was nothing between you and Archer’s wife,” Dundy said, “you’re a liar, and I’m telling you so.”
A startled look came into Tom’s small eyes.
Spade moistened his lips with the tip of his tongue and asked:
“Is that the hot tip that brought you here at this ungodly time of night?”
“That’s one of them.”
“And the others?”
Dundy drew down the corners of his mouth. “Let us in.” He nodded significantly at the doorway in which Spade stood.
Spade frowned and shook his head.
Dundy’s mouth-corners lifted a little in a smile of grim satisfaction.
“There must’ve been something in it,” he told Tom.
Tom shifted his feet, and, not looking at either man, mumbled: “God knows.”
“What’s this?” Spade asked. “Charades?”
“All right, Spade, we’re going.” Dundy buttoned up his overcoat. “We’ll be in to see you now and then. Maybe you’re right in bucking us. Think it over.”
“Uh-huh,” Spade said, grinning. “Glad to see you any time, Lieutenant, and whenever I’m not busy I’ll let you in.”
A voice in Spade’s living-room screamed:
“Help! Help! Police! Help.”
The voice, high and thin and shrill, was Joel Cairo’s.
Lieutenant Dundy stopped turning away from the door, confronted Spade again, and said decisively: “I guess we’re going in.”
The sounds of a brief struggle, of a blow, of a subdued cry, came to the men.
Spade’s face twisted into a smile that held little of joy.
He said, “I guess you are,” and stood out of the way.
When the police detectives had entered, he shut the corridor door and followed them back to the living-room.
Chapter VIII
Horsefeathers
Brigid O’Shaughnessy was huddled in the armchair by the table. Her forearms were up over her cheeks, her knees drawn up until they hid the lower part of her face. Her eyes were white-circled and terrified.
Joel Cairo stood in front of her, bending over her, holding in one hand the pistol Spade had taken from him. His other hand was clapped to his forehead. Blood ran through its fingers and down under them to his eyes. A smaller trickle from his cut lip made three wavy red lines across his chin.
Cairo did not heed the detectives. He was glaring at the girl huddled before him. His lips were working spasmodically, but no coherent sound came from between them.
Dundy, the first of the three into the room, moved swiftly to Cairo’s side, put a hand on his own hip under his overcoat, a hand on the Levantine’s wrist, and growled:
“What are you up to here?”
Cairo took the red-smeared hand from his forehead and waved it close to the lieutenant’s face. Uncovered by the hand, his forehead showed a three-inch ragged tear.