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.
“This is what she did,” he cried. “Look at it.”
The girl put her feet down on the floor and looked warily from Dundy, holding Cairo’s wrist, to Tom Polhaus, standing a little behind them, to Spade, leaning against the door frame. Spade’s face was placid. When his gaze met hers, his yellow-gray eyes glinted for an instant with malicious humor, and then became expressionless again.
“Did you do that?” Dundy asked the girl, nodding at Cairo’s cut head.
She looked at Spade again. He did not in any way respond to the appeal in her eyes. He leaned against the door frame and observed the occupants of the room with the polite air of an invited spectator.
The girl turned her eyes up to Dundy’s. Her eyes were wide and dark and earnest.
“I had to,” she said in a low, throaty, almost sobbing voice. “I was all alone in here with him when he attacked me. I couldn’t — I tried to keep him off. I... I couldn’t make myself shoot him.”
“Oh, you liar!” Cairo cried, trying unsuccessfully to pull the arm that held the pistol out of Dundy’s grip. “Oh, you dirty, filthy liar!” He squirmed around to face Dundy. “She’s lying awfully. I came here in good faith, and was attacked by both of them, and when you came he went out to talk to you, leaving her here with this pistol, and then she said they were going to kill me after you left, and I called for help, so you wouldn’t leave me here to be murdered, and then she struck me with the pistol.”
“Here, give me this thing,” Dundy said, and took the pistol from Cairo’s hand. “Now let’s get this straight. What’d you come here for?”
“He sent for me.” Cairo twisted his head around to stare defiantly at Spade. “He called me up on the phone and asked me to come here.”
Spade blinked sleepily at the Levantine and said nothing.
Dundy asked:
“What’d he want you for?”
Cairo withheld his reply until he had mopped his bloody forehead and chin with a lavender-barred silk handkerchief. By then some of the indignation in his manner had been replaced by caution.
“He said he wanted — they wanted — to see me. I didn’t know what about.”
Tom lowered his head, sniffed the odor of chypre that the mopping handkerchief had released into the air, and then turned his head to scowl interrogatively at Spade. Spade winked an eye at him and went on rolling a cigarette.
Dundy asked:
“Well, what happened then?”
“Then they attacked me. She struck me first, and then he choked me and took the pistol out of my pocket. I don’t know what they would have done next if you hadn’t arrived at that moment. I dare say they would have murdered me then and there. When he went out to answer the bell he left her here with the pistol to watch over me.”
Brigid O’Shaughnessy jumped out of the armchair crying, “Why don’t you tell the truth?” and slapped Cairo on the cheek.
Cairo yelled inarticulately.
Dundy pushed the girl back into the chair with the hand that was not holding the Levantine’s arm, and growled: “None of that now.”
Spade, lighting his cigarette, grinned softly through smoke and told Tom: “She’s impulsive.”
“Yeah,” Tom agreed.
Dundy scowled down at the girl and asked:
“What do you want us to think the truth is?”
“Not what he said,” she replied. “Not anything he said.” She turned to Spade. “Is it?”
“How do I know?” Spade said. “I was out in the kitchen mixing an omelette when it all happened, wasn’t I?”
She wrinkled her forehead, studying him with eyes that perplexity clouded.
Tom grunted in disgust.
Dundy, still scowling down at the girl, ignored Spade’s speech and asked her:
“If he’s not telling the truth, how come he did the squawking for help, and not you?”
“Oh, he was scared to death when I struck him,” she replied, looking contemptuously at the Levantine.
Cairo’s face flushed where it was not blood-smeared. He exclaimed:
“Pfoo! Another lie.”
She kicked his leg, the high heel of her blue slipper striking him just below the knee. Dundy pulled him away from her while big Tom came to stand close to her, rumbling: “Behave, sister. That’s no way to act.”
“Then make him tell the truth,” she said.
“We’ll do that, all right,” he promised. “Just don’t get rough.”
Dundy, looking at Spade with green eyes hard and bright with satisfaction, addressed his subordinate: “Well, Tom, I guess we’ll take them in.”
Tom nodded gloomily.
Spade left the door and advanced to the center of the room, dropping his cigarette into a tray on the table as he passed it. His smile and manner were amiable and easy.
“Don’t be in a hurry,” he said. “Everything can be explained.”
“I bet you,” Dundy agreed, sneering.
Spade bowed to the girl.
“Miss O’Shaughnessy,” he said, “may I present Lieutenant Dundy and Detective-sergeant Polhaus?” He bowed to Dundy. “Miss O’Shaughnessy is an operative in my employ.”
Joel Cairo said indignantly: “That isn’t so. She—”
Spade interrupted him in a quite loud, but still genial voice:
“I hired her just recently, yesterday. This is Mr. Joel Cairo, a friend, anyhow an acquaintance, of Thursby’s. He came to me this afternoon and tried to hire me to find something Thursby was supposed to have on him when he was bumped off. It looked queer, the way he put it to me, so I wouldn’t touch it. Then he pulled a gun — well, never mind that, unless it comes to a point of laying charges against each other. Anyway, after talking it over with Miss O’Shaughnessy I thought maybe I could get something out of him about Miles’s and Thursby’s killings, so I asked him to come up here. Maybe we put the questions to him a little rough, but he wasn’t hurt any, not enough to have to cry for help. I’d already had to take his gun away from him again.”
As Spade talked anxiety came into Cairo’s reddened face. His eyes moved jerkily up and down, shifting their focus uneasily between the floor and Spade’s bland face.
Dundy confronted Cairo and demanded brusquely:
“Well, what’ve you got to say to that?”
Cairo had nothing to say for nearly a minute while he stared at the lieutenant’s chest. When he lifted his eyes they were shy and wary.
“I do not know what I should say,” he murmured. His embarrassment seemed genuine.
“Try telling the facts,” Dundy suggested.
“The facts?” Cairo’s eyes fidgeted, though their gaze did not actually evade the lieutenant’s. “What assurance have I that the facts will be believed?”
“Quit stalling. All you’ve got to do is swear to a complaint that they took a poke at you and the warrant clerk will believe you enough to issue a warrant that’ll let us throw them in the can.”
Spade spoke in an amused tone:
“Go ahead, Cairo. Make him happy. Tell him you’ll do it, and then we’ll swear to one against you, and he’ll have the lot of us.”
Cairo cleared his throat and looked nervously around the room, not into the eyes of anyone there.
Dundy blew breath through his nose in a puff that was not quite a snort and said:
“Get your hats.”
Cairo’s eyes, holding worry and a question, met Spade’s mocking gaze. Spade winked at him and sat on the arm of the padded rocker.
“Well, boys and girls,” he said, grinning at the Levantine and at the girl with nothing but delight in his voice and in his grin, “we put it over nicely.”
Dundy’s hard square face darkened the least of shades. He repeated, peremptorily: “Get your hats.”
Spade turned his grin on the lieutenant, squirmed into a more comfortable position on the chair arm, and asked lazily: