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 sat sleeping with her head on her forearms, her forearms on her desk. She wore her coat and had one of Spade’s overcoats wrapped cape-fashion around her.
Spade blew out his breath in a muffled laugh, shut the door behind him, and crossed to the inner office door. The inner office was empty. He went over to the girl and put a hand on her shoulder.
She stirred, raised her head drowsily, and her eyelids fluttered. Suddenly she sat up straight, opening her eyes wide. She saw Spade, smiled, leaned back in her chair, and rubbed her eyes with the pointed tips of her fingers.
“So you finally got back?” she said. “What time is it?”
“Six o’clock. What are you doing here?”
She shivered, drew Spade’s coat closer around her, and yawned. “You told me to stay till you came back or phoned.”
“Oh, you’re the sister of the boy who stood on the burning deck?”
“I wasn’t going to—” She broke off and stood up, letting his coat slide down on the chair behind her. She looked with dark, excited eyes under his hat brim at his temple, and exclaimed: “Oh, your head! What happened, Sam?”
His right temple was dark and swollen.
“I don’t know whether I fell or was slugged. I don’t think it amounts to much, but it hurts like hell.” He barely touched it with his fingers, flinched, turned his grimace into a bitter smile, and explained: “I went visiting, was fed knock-out drops, and came to twelve hours later all spread out on a man’s floor.”
She reached up and removed his hat from his head.
“It’s terrible,” she said. “You’ll have to get a doctor. You can’t walk around with a head like that.”
“It’s not so bad as it looks, except for the headache, and that might be mostly from the drops.” He went to the cabinet in the corner of the office and ran cold water on a handkerchief. “Anything turn up after I left?”
“The District Attorney’s office phoned. He wants to see you.”
“Himself?”
“Yes, that’s the way I understood it. And a boy came in with a message that Mr. Gutman would be delighted to talk to you before five-thirty, just like that.”
Spade turned off the water, squeezed the handkerchief, and came away from the cabinet holding the handkerchief to his temple.
“I got that,” he said. “I met the boy downstairs, and talking to Mr. Gutman got me this.”
“Is that the G. who phoned, Sam?”
“Yes.”
“Well, what—?”
Spade stared through the girl and spoke as if using speech to arrange his thoughts: “He wants something he thinks I can get. I persuaded him I could keep him from getting it if he didn’t make the deal with me before five-thirty. Then — uh-huh, sure — it was after I told him he’d have to wait a couple of days that he fed me the junk. It’s not likely he thought I was dead. He’d know I’d be up and around in ten or twelve hours. So maybe the answer’s that he figured he could get it without my help in that time if I was fixed up so I couldn’t interfere.” He scowled. “I hope to — he was wrong.” His stare became less distant. “Any word from O’Shaughnessy?”
The girl shook her head no, and asked:
“Has this got anything to do with her?”
“Something.”
“This thing he wants belongs to her?”
“Or to the King of Spain. Sweetheart, you’ve got an uncle that teaches history or something over at the university?”
“A cousin. Why?”
“If we brighten his life with an alleged historical secret four centuries old, can he be trusted to keep it dark awhile?”
“Oh, yes; he’s good people.”
“Fine. Get your pencil and book.”
She got them and sat in her chair. Spade ran more cold water on his handkerchief and, holding it to his temple, stood in front of her and dictated the story of the falcon as he had heard it from Gutman, from Charles V’s grant to the Hospitallers up to, but no further than, the enameled bird’s arrival in Paris at the time of the Carlist influx. He stumbled over the names of authors and their works that Gutman had mentioned, but managed to achieve some sort of phonetic likeness. The rest of the history he repeated with the accuracy of a trained interviewer.
When he had finished, the girl shut her notebook and raised a flushed, smiling face to him.
“Oh, isn’t this thrilling?” she said. “It’s—”
“Yes, or ridiculous. Now will you take it over and read it to your cousin, and ask him what he thinks of it? Has he ever run across anything that might have some connection with it? Is it probable? Is it possible, even barely possible? Or is it the bunk? If he wants more time to look it up, O.K., but get some sort of an opinion out of him now. And for God’s sake make him keep it under his hat.”
“I’ll go right now,” she said, “and you go see a doctor about that head.”
“We’ll have breakfast first.”
“No, I’ll eat over in Berkeley. I can’t wait to hear what Ted thinks of this.”
“Well,” Spade said, “don’t start boohooing if he laughs at you.”
After a leisurely breakfast at the Palace, during which he read both morning papers, Spade went home, shaved, bathed, rubbed ice on his bruised temple, and put on fresh clothes.
He went to Brigid O’Shaughnessy’s apartment at the Coronet. Nobody was in her apartment. Nothing had been changed in it since his last visit.
He went to the Alexandria Hotel. Gutman was not in. None of the other occupants of Gutman’s suite was in. Spade learned that these other occupants were the fat man’s secretary, Wilmer Cook, and his daughter Rhea, a brown-eyed fair-haired, smallish girl of seventeen, called beautiful by the hotel staff. Spade was told that the Gutman party had arrived at the hotel, from New York, ten days ago, and had not checked out.
Spade went to the Belvedere and found the hotel detective eating in the hotel café.
“Morning, Sam, sit down and bite an egg.” The hotel detective stared at Spade’s temple. “My God, somebody maced you plenty!”
“Thanks, I’ve had mine,” Spade said as he sat down, and then, referring to his temple: “It looks worse than it is. How’s my Cairo’s conduct?”
“He went out not more than half an hour behind you yesterday, and I ain’t seen him since. He didn’t sleep here again last night.”
“He’s getting bad habits.”
“Well, a fellow like that alone in a big city. Who put the slug to you, Sam?”
“It wasn’t Cairo.” Spade looked attentively at the small silver dome covering Luke’s toast. “How’s chances of giving his room a casing while he’s out?”
“Can do. You know I’m willing to go all the way with you all the time.” Luke pushed his coffee back, put his elbows on the table, and screwed up his eyes at Spade. “But I got a hunch you ain’t going all the way with me. What’s the honest-to-God on this guy, Sam? You don’t have to kick back on me. You know I’m regular.”
Spade lifted his eyes from the silver dome. They were clear and candid.
“Sure, you are,” he said. “I’m not holding out. I gave you it straight. I’m doing a job for him, but he’s got some friends that look wrong to me and I’m a little leery of him.”
“The kid we chased out yesterday was one of his friends?”
“Yes, Luke, he was.”
“And it was one of them that shoved Miles across?”