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.
Effie Perine leaned forward, asking earnestly:
“Is she really in danger, Sam?”
“I think she is.”
She scratched her lip with a fingernail. “That would scare Ma into a green hemorrhage. I’ll have to tell her she’s a surprise witness or something that you’re keeping under cover till the last minute.”
“You’re a darling,” Spade said. “Better take her out there now. I’ll get her key from her and bring whatever she needs from her apartment later. Let’s see. You oughtn’t to be seen leaving here with her. You go home now. Take a taxi, but make sure you aren’t tailed. You probably won’t be, but make sure. I’ll send her out in another in a little while, making sure she isn’t tailed.”
Chapter XI
Gutman
The telephone bell was ringing when Spade returned to his office after sending Brigid O’Shaughnessy off to Effie Perine’s house. He went to the telephone.
“Hello... Yes, this is Spade... Yes, I got it. I’ve been waiting to hear from you... Who?... Mr. Gutman? Oh, yes, sure... Now. The sooner the better... 12C... Right. Say fifteen minutes... Right.”
Spade sat on the corner of the desk beside the telephone and rolled a cigarette. His mouth was a hard, complacent V. His eyes, watching his fingers make the cigarette, smoldered over lower lids drawn up straight.
The door opened and Iva Archer came in.
Spade said, “Hello, honey,” in a voice as lightly amiable as his face had suddenly become.
“Oh, Sam, forgive me! Forgive me!” she cried in a choked voice. She stood just inside the door, wadding a black-bordered handkerchief in her small gloved hands, peering into his face with frightened red and swollen eyes.
He did not get up from his seat on the desk corner. He said: “Sure. That’s all right. Forget it.”
She came to him and put her hands on his shoulders.
“But, Sam,” she wailed, “I sent those policemen there. I was mad, crazy with jealousy, and I phoned them that if they’d go there they’d learn something about Miles’s murder.”
“What made you think that?”
“Oh, I didn’t, Sam, but I was mad, and I wanted to hurt you.”
“It made things damn awkward.” He put his arm around her and drew her nearer. “But it’s all right now, only, don’t get any more crazy ideas like that.”
“I won’t,” she promised, “I won’t. But you weren’t nice to me last night. You were cold and distant and wanted to get rid of me, when I had come down there and waited and waited to warn you, and you—”
“Warn me about what?”
“About Phil. He’s found out about — about you being in love with me, and Miles had told him about my wanting a divorce, though of course he never knew what for, and now Phil thinks we — you killed his brother because he wouldn’t give me the divorce so we could get married. He told me he believed that, and yesterday he went and told the police.”
“That’s nice,” Spade said softly. “And you came to warn me, and because I was busy you got up on your ear and helped this damn Phil Archer mess things up.”
“I’m sorry,” she whimpered. “I know you won’t forgive me. I... I’m sorry, sorry, sorry.”
“You ought to be,” he agreed, “on your own account as well as mine. Has Dundy been to see you since Phil did his talking? Or anybody from the Hall?”
“No.” Alarm opened her eyes and mouth.
“They will,” he said, “and it’d be just as well to not let them find you here. Did you tell them who you were when you phoned?”
“Oh, no. I just told them that if they’d go to your apartment then they’d learn something about the murder, and hung up.”
“Where’d you phone from?”
“The drug store up above your place. Oh, Sam, dearest, I—”
He patted her shoulder and said pleasantly:
“It was a dumb trick, all right, but it’s done now. You’d better run along home and think up some things to tell the police. You’ll be hearing from them. Maybe it’d be best to say, ‘No,’ right across the board.” He frowned at something in the distance. “Or maybe you’d better see Sid Wise first.” He took his arm from around her, took a card from his pocket, scribbled three lines on its back, and gave it to her. “You can tell Sid everything.” He frowned. “Or almost everything. Where were you the night Miles was shot?”
“At home,” she replied without hesitation.
He shook his head, grinning at her.
“I was,” she insisted.
“No,” he said, “but if that’s your story it’s all right with me. Go see Sid. It’s up at the next corner, the pinkish building, room 827.”
Her blue eyes tried to probe his yellow-gray ones.
“What makes you think I wasn’t home?” she asked slowly.
“Nothing, except I know you weren’t.”
“But I was, I was.” She bit her lip. Anger darkened her eyes. “Effie told you that,” she said indignantly. “I saw her looking at my clothes and snooping around. You know she doesn’t like me, Sam. Why do you believe things she tells you when you know she’d do anything to make trouble for me?”
“—, you women,” Spade said gently. He looked at the watch on his wrist. “You’ll have to trot along, precious, I’m late for an appointment now. You do what you want, but if I were you I’d tell Sid the truth or nothing. I mean, leave out the parts you don’t want to tell him, but don’t make up anything to take its place.”
“I’m not lying to you, Sam,” she protested.
“Like hell you’re not,” he said, and stood up.
She strained on tiptoe to hold her face nearer his.
“You don’t believe me?” she whispered.
“I don’t believe you.”
“And you won’t forgive me for — for what I did?”
“Sure I do.” He bent his head and kissed her mouth. “That’s all right. Now run along.”
She put her arms around him. “Won’t you go with me to see Mr. Wise?”
“I can’t, and I’d only be in the way.”
He patted her arms, took them from around his body, and kissed her left wrist between glove and sleeve. He put his hands on her shoulders, turned her to face the door, and released her with a little push.
“Beat it,” he ordered.
The mahogany door of suite 12-C at the Alexandria Hotel was opened by the boy Spade had talked to in the Belvedere lobby.
Spade said, “Hello,” good-naturedly.
The boy did not say anything. He stood aside holding the door open.
Spade went in. A fat man came to meet him.
The fat man was flabbily fat with bulbous pink cheeks and lips and chins and neck, with a great soft egg of a body that was all his torso, and pendant cones for arms and legs. As he advanced to meet Spade all his bulbs rose and shook and fell separately with each step, in the manner of clustered soap bubbles not yet released from the pipe through which they had been blown. His eyes, made small by fat puffs around them, were dark and sleek. Dark ringlets thinly covered his broad scalp. He wore a black cutaway coat, black vest, black satin ascot tie holding a pinkish pearl, striped gray worsted trousers, and patent-leather shoes.
His voice was a throaty purr. “Ah, Mr. Spade,” he said with enthusiasm, and he held out a hand like a fat pink star.
Spade shook the hand and smiled, but said nothing.
Spade sat in a soft green chair. The fat man began to fill two glasses from bottle and siphon. The boy had disappeared. Doors set in three of the room’s walls were closed. The fourth wall, behind Spade, was pierced by two windows looking out over Geary Street.