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.
Spade put his packages on the kitchen table and went into the bedroom. He sat on the bed beside the girl, kissed her smooth shoulder, and said: “I wanted to see if that kid was still on the job, and to get stuff for breakfast.”
“Is he?”
“No.”
She sighed and leaned against him.
“I awakened, and you weren’t here, and then I heard somebody coming in. I was terrified.”
Spade combed her red hair back from her face with his fingers and said: “I’m sorry, angel. I thought you’d sleep through it. Did you have that gun under your pillow all night?”
“No. You know I didn’t. I jumped up and got it when I was frightened.” He cooked breakfast, and slipped the flat brass key into her coat pocket again, while she bathed and dressed.
She came out of the bathroom whistling “En Cuba.”
“Shall I make the bed?” she asked.
“That’d be swell. The eggs need a couple of minutes more.”
Their breakfast was on the table when she returned to the kitchen. They sat where they had sat the night before, and ate heartily.
“Now about that bird?” Spade suggested presently as they ate.
She put down her fork and looked at him. She drew her eyebrows together and made her mouth small and tight.
“You can’t ask me to talk about that this morning of all mornings,” she protested. “I don’t want to, and I won’t.”
“It’s a stubborn damned hussy,” he said sadly, and put a piece of roll into his mouth.
The youth who had shadowed Spade was not in sight when Spade and Brigid O’Shaughnessy crossed the sidewalk to the waiting taxicab. The taxicab was not followed. Neither the youth nor another loiterer was visible in the vicinity of the Coronet when the taxicab arrived there.
Brigid O’Shaughnessy would not let Spade go indoors with her.
“It’s bad enough to be coming home in evening dress at this hour without bringing company. I hope I don’t meet anybody.”
“Dinner tonight?”
“Yes.”
They kissed. She went into the Coronet. He told the chauffeur: “Hotel Belvedere.”
When he reached the hotel he saw the youth who had shadowed him sitting on a lobby divan from which the elevators could be seen. Apparently the youth was reading a newspaper.
At the desk Spade was told that Cairo was not in. He frowned and pinched his lower lip meditatively. Points of yellow light began to dance in his eyes. “Thanks,” he said softly, and turned away.
Sauntering, he crossed the lobby to the divan from which the elevators could be seen, and sat down beside — not more than a foot from — the young man who apparently was reading a newspaper.
The young man did not look up from his paper. Seen at this scant distance, he seemed certainly less than twenty years old. His features were small, in keeping with his stature, and regular. His skin was very fair. The whiteness of his cheeks was as little blurred by any considerable growth of beard as by the glow of blood. His clothing was neither new nor of more than ordinary quality, but it, and his manner of wearing it, was marked by a hard masculine neatness.
Spade asked casually, “Where is he?” while shaking tobacco down into a paper curved to catch it.
The boy lowered his paper and looked around, moving with a purposeful sort of slowness, as of a more natural swiftness restrained. He looked with small hazel eyes under somewhat long curling lashes at Spade’s chest. He said, in a voice as colorless and composed and cold as his young face: “What?”
“Where is he?” Spade was busy with his cigarette.
“Who?”
“The fairy.”
The hazel eyes’ gaze went up Spade’s chest to the knot of his maroon tie, and rested there.
“What do you think you’re doing, Jack?” the boy demanded. “Kidding me?”
“I’ll tell you when I am.” Spade licked his cigarette and smiled amiably at the boy. “New York, aren’t you?”
The boy stared at Spade’s tie and did not speak. Spade nodded as if the boy had said yes, and asked:
“Baumes rush?”
The boy stared at Spade’s tie for a moment longer, then the newspaper and returned his attention to it.
“Shove off,” he said from the side of his mouth.
Spade lit his cigarette, leaned back comfortably on the divan, and spoke with good-humored carelessness: “You’ll have to talk to me before you’re through, sonny. Some of you will, and you can tell G. I said so.”
The boy put his paper down quickly and faced Spade, staring at his necktie with bleak hazel eyes. The boy’s small hands were spread flat over his belly.
“Keep asking for it and you’re going to get it,” he said, “plenty.” His voice was low and flat and threatening. “I told you to shove off. Shove off.”
Spade waited until a bespectacled pudgy man and a thin-legged blond girl had passed out of hearing. Then he chuckled and said: “That would go swell back on Seventh Avenue. But you’re not in Romeville now. You’re in my burg.” He inhaled cigarette smoke and blew it out in a long pale cloud. “Well, where is he?”
The boy spoke two words, the first a short guttural verb, the second “you.”
“People have lost teeth talking like that.” Spade’s voice was still amiable, though his face had become wooden. “If you want to hang around you’ll be polite.”
The boy repeated his two words.
Spade dropped his cigarette into a tall stone jar beside the divan and with a lifted hand caught the attention of a man who had been for several minutes standing at an end of the cigar stand.
The man nodded and came toward them. He was a middle-aged man of medium height, round and sallow of face, compactly built, tidily dressed in dark clothes.
“Hello, Sam,” he said as he came up.
“Hello, Luke.”
They shook hands, and Luke said: “Say, that’s too bad about Miles.”
“Uh-huh, a bad break.” Spade jerked his head to indicate the boy on the divan beside him. “What do you let these cheap gunmen hang out in your lobby for, with their tools bulging their clothes?”
“Yes?” Luke examined the boy with crafty brown eyes set in a suddenly hard face. “What do you want here?” he asked.
The boy stood up. Spade stood up. The boy looked at them, at their neckties, from one to the other. Luke’s necktie was black. The boy looked like a schoolboy standing in front of them.
Luke said:
“Well, if you don’t want anything, beat it, and don’t come back.”
The boy said, “I won’t forget you guys,” and went out.
They watched him go out. Spade took off his hat and wiped his damp forehead with a handkerchief. The hotel detective asked: “What is it?”
“Damned if I know,” Spade replied. “I just spotted him. Know anything about Joel Cairo, 635?”
“Oh, her.” The hotel detective leered. “I been watching him, but I ain’t caught him doing anything he oughtn’t to.”
“How long’s he been here?”
“Four days. This is the fifth.”
“What about him?”
“Search me. I got nothing against him but his looks and that’s enough.”
“Find out if he was in last night?”
“Try to,” the hotel detective promised, and went away.
Spade sat on the divan until Luke returned.
“No,” Luke said, “he didn’t sleep here. What is it, Sam?”
“Nothing.”
“Come clean. You know I’ll keep my clam shut, but if there’s anything wrong we ought to know so we can collect our bill.”
“Nothing like that,” Spade assured him. “As a matter of fact, I’m doing some work for him. I’d tell you if he was wrong.”
“You’d better. Want me to kind of keep an eye on him?”