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.
Chibbarro flung off Kennedy and bolted, but MacBride, having knocked his own man out, dived for Chibbarro and caught him by the tail of the coat. Chibbarro cursed and tried to get out of his coat, and then he pivoted and his gun swung close. MacBride let go of the coat-tail and caught Chibbarro’s gun hand as the gun went off. The shot walloped the floor, and then MacBride swung Chibbarro’s arm up and backward and clouted him over the head with the barrel of his own gun. Chibbarro went down like a felled tree.
Kreischer came up on the run, big-footed, and then stopped and watched Chibbarro fall. Then he looked at MacBride and grinned with his beet-red face.
“Himmel!” he said.
“I guess that’s that, Fritz,” said MacBride. “Hey, Haviland, how is Mendelwitz?”
“He’s laying back here and cursing like hell.”
“Okey. Then he’s all right. Harrigan, find a telephone and call the hospital and then call the wagon. Hey, Sokalov, for God’s sake, don’t keep pointing that gun this way! It’s all over. Put it away.”
“All right... I forgot, Cap.”
MacBride looked around and saw Kennedy leaning against the wall and lighting a cigarette. Kennedy’s hat was twisted sidewise on his head, and two buttons were gone from his coat, and his face was dirty. He looked comical. MacBride chuckled bluntly.
“How come you’re alive, Kennedy?”
“There is a Providence,” said Kennedy with mock gravity, “that watches over fools, drunks and bum reporters.”
“I always said you were a bum reporter,” put in Moriarity.
Kennedy spun away his match. “Imagine a guy like that!”
XII
Dawn was breaking, but the light in the office still streamed down over the flat, shiny desk.
Chibbarro sat in a chair within the radius of the light, his hair plastered down over his ears and forehead and a streak of dried blood on his cheek. His brows were bent, and he scowled at the top of the flat shiny desk.
Moriarity stood with his back to the radiator, and Kennedy had reversed a chair and now straddled it with his arms crossed on the back and his chin on his crossed arms.
MacBride sat in the swivel-chair and looked at Chibbarro.
“You did wrong, Chibby,” he said, “to come to Richmond City. It’s a tough town.”
“Tough hell!”
“Tougher than you are, Chibby. I always wondered why you came here. I’m wondering now why you tried to kill Bunny Dahl.”
“She was a chicken-hearted broad!”
“Bad... doing what you did, Chibby.”
Chibbarro took out his handkerchief and blew his nose. “I been framed all around. That boy scout Dominick—”
“Didn’t spring a thing.”
“Bah!”
“It was Al.”
“The lousy pup!”
MacBride leaned back and put his hands behind his head. “So you didn’t kill Barjo.”
“No, of course I didn’t kill him! D’ you think I’m a fool, to put a knife in a guy at a souse party?”
“I didn’t think you were so much of a fool. But why did you try to put Bunny out of the way?”
Chibbarro turned his back on MacBride. “You can ask my lawyer all them things.”
“That’s all right by me, Chibby. But it won’t help your case.”
The door opened and Ike Cohen walked in. “Hello, Cap — Mory — Kennedy.” He looked at Chibbarro. “Hello, Chibby, you small-time greaseball!”
“Go to hell!” said Chibbarro.
“Funny, you are!”
MacBride said, “What news, Ike?”
“The frail just died.”
Chibbarro looked up with a start, and his dark eyes widened and horror bulged from the pupils. Then he pulled his face together and crouched sullenly in the chair.
Cohen drew a folded piece of paper from his pocket and handed it to MacBride.
“She regained consciousness long enough to spring this, Cap. It’s signed by her and witnessed by the doctor and me.”
MacBride unfolded the paper and spread it on the desk. He read it over carefully, then settled back in his chair holding it in one hand.
“Listen to this, gang,” he said, and read aloud:
“ ‘I killed Salvatore Barjo. He was drunk. He followed me into a room in the Club Naples and tried to attack me. I picked up a paper cutter that was laying on the table and stabbed him. Then Dominick came in. Then Chibby came in. Chibby cursed hell out of me, and Dominick yelled at him and said I had to be got out of the jam. Chibby said like hell. Then I said he’d get me out of it or I’d tell what I knew about him. That’s why he got me out of it. So we hid out. Then Dominick and Chibby got in a fight and Dominick skinned out. He was a good guy, Dominick. He didn’t know what Chibby had up his sleeve. He thought Chibby was just a bootlegger.
“ ‘Then Chibby got his gang together and they hunted for Dominick to bump him off before the cops got him. Chibby thought Dominick knew more than he did. Chibby came here from Chicago. He was one of the Rizzio gang, and he came here to work up a white slave trade. He got me to work with him, and in the month here I helped him get twelve girls for houses in Dayton and Columbus. That was his real racket, but he wanted to try booze on the side, and he wanted to be friends with Dominick because his old man was alderman, and that might help.
“ ‘When we heard the cops had Dominick I wanted to go to Headquarters and get him out. I was sick of the whole rotten business. Chibby swore he’d kill me, and I dared him. I said I was going, and that I’d say nothing about him. But he didn’t believe me. He got me tight and then he shoved my head down by the gas-heater. I guess he always was a bum.’ ”
“Hell’s bells!” said Kennedy.
MacBride dropped the letter to the desk and got up and walked around the room.
“So that was it, Chibby,” he said. “White slaving, eh?”
Chibbarro stared darkly at the shiny top of the desk.
MacBride said, “And you only protected the girl because you knew it was the only way of protecting yourself. God, but you’re a louse!”
“Imagine this guy wanting a lawyer!” said Moriarity.
“Yeah,” said Cohen. “Ain’t he the optimistic slob?”
MacBride picked up the telephone and called a number. After a moment he said, “Hello, Tony. This is MacBride... Now hold your horses. We’ve got the kid here... Yeah, yeah, he’s all right, and he’ll get out after a while... What’s that?... No, I’m not going to comfort him. I’ll leave that to you. If he was my kid I’d fan him... All right, come around when you feel like it.”
He put down the telephone and sighed and stared at it for a long moment.
Kennedy pulled a photograph out of his pocket and stared at it.
“She wasn’t such a bad-looking frail.”
MacBride looked at him. “Where’d you get that?”
“In her bedroom. We’ll smear it on the front page of the noon editions.”
MacBride went to the window and looked out and saw the red sun coming up over the rooftops. And it occurred to him, without any blur of sentimentality, that Chibby and Dominick and Al were small-timers, and that the girl — this Bunny Dahl — had been stronger than all of them put together.
Kennedy was saying, “It’s tough the way sometimes a broad has to die to get her picture in the paper.”
Murder Picture
George Harmon Coxe
It can be no surprise that George Harmon Coxe (1901–1984) began his career as a newspaperman, since his two major literary creations, Jack “Flashgun” Casey (mostly known as “Flash” Casey) and Kent Murdock were both photo-journalists.