The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps
- Автор: Anderson Lars, Barr Randolph
- Год: 2007
- Язык: английский
- Год: Vintage Books
- ISBN: 978-0-307-28048-0
- Жанр: Криминальные детективы
Электронная книга - «The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps». Краткое содержание книги:
Weighing in at over a thousand pages, containing over forty-seven stories and two novels, this book is big baby, bigger and more powerful than a freight train — a bullet couldn’t pass through it. Here are the best stories and every major writer who ever appeared in celebrated Pulps like Black Mask, Dime Detective, Detective Fiction Weekly, and more. These are the classic tales that created the genre and gave birth to hard-hitting detectives who smoke criminals like packs of cigarettes; sultry dames whose looks are as lethal as a dagger to the chest; and gin-soaked hideouts where conversations are just preludes to murder. This is crime fiction at its gritty best.
Out in the street the green sign blinked seductively:
III
Sergeant Otto Bettdecken was eating a frankfurter and roll when MacBride barged into Headquarters followed by Moriarity and Cohen, and Kennedy of the Free Press.
MacBride said, “Otto, that guy’s full name was Salvatore Barjo; age, twenty-six; address, the Atlantic Hotel. Stabbed twice in the front of the neck.”
Bettdecken filled out a blue card and his moon face clouded. “Crime of passion, Cap?”
“Ha!” chirruped Kennedy.
“We don’t know yet,” said MacBride. “The morgue bus picked the stiff up and I closed the joint for the night.”
“How about the Greek?”
MacBride shrugged. “He’s free. I want to give him some rope first. He ain’t tough enough to worry about. He came across with the names of the three broads. Mary Dahl — the one they call Bunny; there was a red-head named Flossy Roote, and the other broad, the one that was originally with Barjo — she’s Freda Hoegh. Flossy’s this guy Chibbarro’s woman, and I understand Freda’s a friend of Bunny’s. Chibby lived with Flossy in a flat at number 40 Brick Street. We went down there, but of course they weren’t there. I parked Corson on the job. Freda and Bunny have a flat at number 28 Turner Street, but they haven’t shown up either. I put De Groot on that job. No doubt they’re hiding out, along with Dominick Maratelli.”
Bettdecken shook his head. “This’ll drive Tony crazy.”
“Yeah,” said MacBride, and headed for his office.
Moriarity and Cohen and Kennedy trailed after him, and MacBride got out of his overcoat and hung it up. He started a fresh cigar and took a turn up and down the room.
Kennedy leaned against the wall and tongued a cigarette from one side of his mouth to the other.
“That guy Barjo always was a bum welter anyhow.”
MacBride snapped, “Which is no reason why he should be knifed in the throat! And this young Dominick—”
“A wise guy,” drawled Kennedy. “A young wop just out of his diapers and trying to be a man about town. I know his kind. In fact, I know Dom. Flash. Jazz. He’s not the only slob this jazz racket has taken for a buggy ride. And take it from me, old tomato, he’s not going to get out of this with a slap on the wrist.”
Moriarity said, “The thing is, after all your gas, Kennedy, who... who did poke Barjo in the throat?”
“Well, first the broad — this Bunny Dahl — goes in,” said Kennedy. “Then Barjo. Then Dominick. Well — I’d say Dominick.”
“Nix,” popped Ike Cohen, swinging around from the window.
“No?”
“The broad,” said Cohen. “The other guys were just covering her. Cripes, from what Cap says, they were all pretty tight. And the broad, having not much brains, would be the first to pull a dumb stunt like that. What do you say, Cap?”
“Not a hell of a lot,” growled MacBride. “I’ll leave the theory to you bright boys. I’m just waiting till we nail one of those babies. But as for the broad rating no brains, I don’t know. And I don’t see where Dominick rates big in brains, either.”
Moriarity sat on the desk, dangling his feet. He said, “Anyhow, I’m inclined kind of to think it was the broad. It looks like a dizzy blonde’s work.”
Kennedy laughed wearily. “Well, if it was, Mory, we’ll have a nice time in Richmond City. All the sob-sisters will sharpen up their pencils. Bunny will put a crack in her voice and try to look like a virgin that this guy Barjo tried to ruin. “I did it to save my honor!” Like that. As if she ever had any honor. Listen, I saw that little trollop in a burlesque show one night, down near the river and—”
“All right, all right,” horned in MacBride. “We can imagine.”
“Anyhow,” said Kennedy, “I’ll bet it wasn’t the broad.”
The papers had it next morning. Dominick Maratelli’s name was prominent — “wayward son of Alderman Antonio Maratelli.”
MacBride, who had gone home at two, was back on the job at noon. There were reports on his desk, but nothing of importance. Chibbaro and Dominick and the three girls were still missing, and none of them had been to their flats following the murder.
The city was being combed thoroughly by no less than a dozen detectives, and every cop was on the lookout too. The fade-away had probably been maneuvered by Chibby. MacBride thought so, anyway, and it struck him as a pretty dumb move on Chibbaro’s part. For why should Chibby entangle himself in a murder with which, apparently, he was not vitally concerned?
Tony Maratelli blundered into Headquarters a little past noon. He was shaking all over. He was hard hit.
“Cap, for the love o’ God, what am I gonna do?”
“You can’t do a thing, Tony.”
“Yes, yes. I mean — but I mean, can’t I do something?”
“No. Calm yourself, that’s all. Dominick’s in Dutch, and that’s that. I can’t save him, Tony.”
“But, Holy Mother, the disgrace, Cap! And my wife, you should see her!”
“I know, I know, Tony. I’m sorry as hell for you and the wife, but the kid pulled a bone, and what can we do?”
Tony walked around the office and then he sat down and put his head in his hands and groaned. MacBride creaked in his chair and looked at Tony and felt sorry for him. Here was a wop who had kept his hands clean and tried to attach some dignity to his minor office. His record was a good one. He was a good husband, a square shooter and a conscientious alderman. But what mattered all that to the public when his son ran with a bum like Chibbarro and got mixed up in a drunken brawl that terminated in the killing of Kid Barjo the popular welter?
“You go home, Tony,” said MacBride. “There’s nothing to do but hope for the best.”
Tony went home. He dragged his feet out of Headquarters, and he looked dazed. This was tragedy, no less. It was the tragedy of a good man tainted by the blood of his kin. And it is the warp and woof of life; you can’t choose your heritage, nor can you choose your offspring. A man in public office is a specimen eternally held beneath the magnifying glass of public opinion, and public opinion can metamorphose a saint into a devil.
The police net which MacBride had caused to be flung out, seemed not very effective. Three days and three nights passed. No one was apprehended. Kid Barjo was buried, and Moriarity and Cohen attended the funeral — not from any feeling of sorrow or respect for the newly dead. But — sometimes — killers turn up when the dead go down. That was one of the times they didn’t.
At the end of a week the News-Examiner printed a neatly barbed editorial relative to the inability of certain police officials to cope with existing crime conditions. The innuendo was thrown obliquely at MacBride, who took it with a curse. The editorial made much of the fact that a representative of the law had been in the Club Naples at the time of the killing...
“Of course I was there,” MacBride told Kennedy. “But I had no reason to suppose that a murder was in the wind. Drunks will be drunks, and I give any guy a decent break.”
“Some folks think you’re getting soft, Cap,” smiled Kennedy.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
MacBride creaked in his chair and wagged a finger at Kennedy. “You tell those — folks, Kennedy, that I’m just as tough today as I was twenty years ago.”
“Have you seen any more of Tony Maratelli?”
“No — not since the day after the killing. I told him to go home and calm down.”
There was a knock on the door, but before MacBride could reply, it burst open and Sergeant Bettdecken stood there, a banana in one hand and his face all flushed.