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.
Then Spade rose and stood close to the fat man, looking down at him. Spade’s eyes were hard and bright. He raised his glass. His voice was sharp, challenging: “Here’s to plain speaking and clear understanding.”
The fat man chuckled, and they drank. The fat man sat down. He held his glass against his belly with both hands and smiled up at Spade. He said: “Well, sir, it’s surprising, but it well may be a fact that neither of them does know exactly what that bird is, and that nobody in all this whole wide sweet world knows what it is, saving and excepting only your humble servant, Casper Gutman, Esquire.”
“Swell.” Spade stood with legs apart, one hand in his trouser pocket, the other holding his glass. “When you’ve told me, there’ll only be two of us who know.”
“Mathematically correct, sir.” The fat man’s eyes twinkled. “But” — his smile spread — “I don’t know for certain that I’m going to tell you.”
“Don’t be a damned fool,” Spade said patiently. “You know what it is. I know where it is. That’s why we’re here.”
“Well, sir, where is it?”
Spade ignored the question.
The fat man bunched his lips, raised his eyebrows, and cocked his head a little to the left.
“You see,” he said blandly, “I must tell you what I know, but you will not tell me what you know. That is hardly equitable, sir. No, no, I don’t think we can do business like that.”
Spade’s face became pale and hard. He spoke rapidly in a low, furious voice:
“Think again and think fast. I told that punk of yours that you’d have to talk to me before you got through. I’ll tell you now that you’ll do your talking today or you are through. What are you wasting my time for? You and your lousy secret — I know exactly what that stuff is that they keep in the subtreasury vaults, but what good does that do me? I can get along without you... damn you. Maybe you could have got along without me if you’d kept clear of me. You can’t now. Not in San Francisco. You’ll come in or you’ll get out, and you’ll do it today.”
He turned and with angry heedlessness tossed his glass on the table. The glass struck the wood, burst apart, and splashed its contents and glittering fragments over table and floor. Spade, deaf and blind to the crash, wheeled to confront the fat man again.
The fat man paid no more attention to the glass’s fate than Spade did: lips pursed, eyebrows raised, head cocked a little to the left, he had maintained his pink-faced blandness throughout Spade’s angry speech and he maintained it now.
Spade said, still furious:
“And another thing, I don’t want—”
The door to Spade’s left opened. The boy who had admitted Spade came in. He shut the door, stood in front of it with his hands flat against his flanks, and looked at Spade. The boy’s eyes were wide open, and dark with wide pupils. Their gaze ran over Spade’s body from shoulders to knees, and up again to settle on the handkerchief whose maroon border peeped from the breast pocket of Spade’s brown coat.
“Another thing,” Spade repeated, glaring at the boy: “Keep that gunsel away from me while you’re making up your mind. I’ll kill him. I don’t like him. He makes me nervous. I’ll kill him the first time he gets in my way. I’m afraid of him. I won’t give him an even break. I won’t give him a chance. I’ll kill him.”
The boy’s lips twitched in a shadowy smile. He neither raised his eyes nor spoke.
The fat man said tolerantly:
“Well, sir, I must say you have a most violent temper.”
“Temper?” Spade laughed crazily. He crossed to the chair on which he had dropped his hat, picked up the hat, and set it on his head. He held out a long arm that ended in a thick forefinger pointing at the fat man’s belly. His angry voice filled the room: “Think it over, and think like hell. You’ve got till five-thirty to do it in. Then you’re either in or out, for keeps.”
He let his arm drop, scowled at the bland fat man for a moment, scowled at the boy, and went to the door through which he had entered. When he had opened the door he turned and said harshly: “Five-thirty, then the curtain.”
The boy, staring at Spade’s chest, repeated the two words he had twice spoken in the Belvedere lobby. His voice was not loud. It was bitter.
Spade went out and slammed the door.
Chapter XII
Merry-Go-Round
Spade rode down from Gutman’s floor in an elevator. His lips were dry and rough in a face otherwise pale and damp. When he took out his handkerchief to wipe his face he saw his hand trembling. He grinned at it, and said, “Whew!” so loudly that the elevator operator turned his head and asked: “Sir?”
Spade walked down Geary Street to the Palace Hotel, where he had luncheon. His face had lost its pallor, his lips their dryness, and his hand its tremor. He ate hungrily without haste, and then went to Sid Wise’s office.
When Spade entered, Wise was biting a fingernail and staring at the window. He took his hand from his mouth, screwed his chair around to face Spade, and said: “ ’Lo. Push a chair up.”
Spade moved a chair to the side of the big paper-laden desk and sat down.
“Mrs. Archer come in?” he asked.
“Yes.” The faintest of lights flickered in Wise’s eyes. “Going to marry the lady, Sammy?”
Spade sighed irritably through his nose.
“—! Now you start that,” he grumbled.
A brief tired smile lifted the corners of the lawyer’s mouth.
“If you don’t,” he said, “you’re going to have a job on your hands.”
Spade looked up from the cigarette he was making and spoke sourly: “You mean you are? Well, that’s what you’re for. What did she tell you?”
“About you?”
“About anything I ought to know.”
Wise ran his fingers through his hair, sprinkling dandruff down on his shoulders.
“She told me she had tried to get a divorce from Miles so she could—”
“I know all that,” Spade interrupted. “You can skip it. Get to the part I don’t know.”
“How do I know how much she—?”
“Quit stalling, Sid.” Spade held the flame of his lighter to the end of his cigarette. “What did she tell you that she wanted kept from me?”
Wise looked reprovingly at Spade.
“Now, Sammy,” he began, “that’s not—”
Spade looked heavenward at the ceiling and groaned:
“Dear God, he’s my own lawyer that’s got rich off me and I have to get down on my knees and beg him to tell me things.” He glowered at Wise. “What the hell do you think I sent her to you for?”
Wise made a weary grimace.
“Just one more client like you,” he complained, “and I’d be in a sanatarium, or San Quentin.”
“You’d be with most of your clients. Did she tell you where she was the night he was killed?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“Following her husband.”
Spade sat up straight and blinked. He exclaimed incredulously: “—these women!” Then he laughed, relaxed, and asked: “Well, what did she see?”
Wise shook his head.
“Nothing much. When he came home for dinner that evening he told her he had a date with a girl at the St. Mark, taunting her, telling her that was her chance to get the evidence for the divorce she wanted. She thought at first that he was just trying to get under her skin. He knew—”
“I know the family history,” Spade said. “Skip it. Tell me what she did.”
“I will if you’ll give me a chance. After he had gone out she began to think that maybe he might have had that date. You know Miles. It would have been like him to—”