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.
He stood up cursing her. Then he said:
“—! It’ll be easier on my head than sitting here listening to you squawk.” He looked at his watch. “You might as well lock up and go home.”
She said:
“I won’t. I’m going to wait until you come back.”
He said, “Do as you damned please,” put his hat on, flinched, took it off, and went out carrying it in his hand.
An hour and a half later, at twenty minutes past five, Spade returned. He was cheerful. He came in asking: “What makes you so hard to get along with, sweetheart?”
“Me?”
“Yes, you.” He put a finger on the tip of Effie Perine’s nose and flattened it. He put his hands under her elbows, lifted her straight up, and kissed her chin. He set her down on the floor again and asked: “Anything happen while I was gone?”
“Luke — what’s his name? — at the Belvedere called up to tell you Cairo has returned. That was about half an hour ago.”
Spade snapped his mouth shut, turned with a long step, and started for the door.
“Did you find her?” the girl called.
“Tell you about it when I’m back,” he replied without pausing, and hurried out.
A taxicab deposited Spade at the Belvedere within ten minutes of his departure from his office. He found Luke in the lobby. The hotel detective came grinning and shaking his head to meet him.
“Fifteen minutes late,” he said. “Your bird has fluttered.”
Spade cursed.
“Checked out — gone, bag and baggage,” Luke said. He took a battered memorandum book from a vest pocket, licked his thumb, thumbed pages, and held the book out open to Spade. “There’s the number of the taxi that hauled him. I got that much for you.”
“Thanks.” Spade copied the number on the back of an envelope. “Any forwarding address?”
“No. He just come in carrying a big suitcase, and went upstairs and packed, and come down with his stuff, and paid his bill, and got a taxi and went without anybody hearing what he told the driver.”
“How about his trunk?”
Luke’s lower lip sagged.
“By God,” he said, “I forgot that. Come on.”
They went up to Cairo’s room.
The trunk was there. It was closed, but not locked. They raised the lid. The trunk was empty.
Luke said: “What do you know about that!”
Spade did not say anything.
Spade went back to his office. Effie Perine’s eyes questioned him.
“Missed him,” he grumbled, and passed into his private room.
She followed him in. He sat in his chair and began to roll a cigarette. She sat on the desk in front of him and put her toes on a corner of his chair-seat.
“What about Miss O’Shaughnessy?” she demanded.
“I missed her, too,” he replied, “but she had been there.”
“On the La Paloma?”
“The La is a lousy combination,” he said.
“Stop it. Be nice, Sam. Tell me.”
He set fire to his cigarette, pocketed the lighter, patted her shins, and said: “Yes, La Paloma. She got down there at a little after noon yesterday.” He drew his brows down. “That means she went straight there after leaving the cab at the Ferry Building. It’s only a few piers away. The Captain wasn’t there. His name’s Jacobi, and she asked for him by name. He was uptown on business. That would mean he didn’t expect her, or not at that time, anyhow. She waited there till he came back at four o’clock. They spent the time from then till meal time in his cabin, and she ate with him.”
He inhaled and exhaled smoke, turned his head aside to spit a yellow tobacco flake off his lip, and went on: “After the meal Captain Jacobi had three more visitors. One of them was Cairo, and one was Gutman, and one was the kid who delivered Gutman’s message to you yesterday. Those three came together, while Brigid was there, and the five of them did a lot of talking in the Captain’s cabin. It’s hard to get anything out of the crew, but they had a row, and somewhere around eleven that night a gun went off there, in the Captain’s cabin. The watchman beat it down there, but the Captain met him outside and told him there was nothing the matter. There’s a fresh bullet hole in one corner of the cabin, up high enough to make it likely that the bullet didn’t go through anybody to get there. As far as I could learn, there was only that one shot fired. But as far as I could learn wasn’t very far.”
He scowled and inhaled smoke again.
“Well, they left at around midnight, the Captain and his four visitors, all together, and all of them seem to have been walking all right. I got that from the watchman. I haven’t been able to get hold of the Custom House men who were on duty there then. That’s all of it. The Captain hasn’t been back since. He didn’t keep a date this noon with some shipping agents, and they haven’t found him to tell him about the fire.”
“And the fire?”
Spade shrugged. “I don’t know. It was discovered in the hold, aft — in the rear basement — late this morning. The chances are it got started sometime yesterday. They got it out all right, though it did damage enough. Nobody would talk about it much while the captain’s away. It’s the—”
The corridor door opened. Spade shut his mouth. Effie Perine jumped down from the desk, but a man opened the connecting door before she could reach it.
“Where’s Spade?” he asked.
His voice brought Spade up erect and alert in his chair. It was a voice harsh and rasping with agony and with the strain of keeping two words from being smothered by the liquid bubbling that ran under and behind them.
Effie Perine, frightened, stepped out of the man’s way.
He stood in the doorway with his soft dark hat crushed between his head and the top of the door-frame: he was nearly seven feet tall. A black overcoat cut long and straight like a sheath, buttoned from throat to knees, exaggerated his leanness. His shoulders stuck out, high, thin and angular. His bony face — weather-coarsened, age-lined — was the color of damp sand and was damp with sweat on cheeks and chin. His eyes were dark and bloodshot and mad above lower lids that hung down to show pink inner membrane.
Held tight against the left side of his chest by a black-sleeved forearm that ended in a yellowish claw was a brown-paper-wrapped parcel, bound with thin rope — an ellipsoid somewhat larger than an American football.
The tall man stood in the doorway and there was nothing to show that he saw Spade.
He said, “You have,” and then the liquid bubbling came up in his throat and submerged whatever else he said.
He put his other hand over the hand that held the ellipsoid. Holding himself straight, rigid, and not putting his hands out to break his fall, he fell forward as a tree falls.
Spade, wooden-faced and nimble, sprang from his chair and caught the falling man. When Spade caught him the man’s mouth opened and a little blood spurted out and the brown-wrapped parcel dropped from the man’s hands and rolled across the floor until a foot of the desk stopped it. Then the man’s knees bent, and he bent at the waist and his thin body became limber inside the sheathlike overcoat, sagging in Spade’s arms so that Spade could not hold it up from the floor.
Spade lowered the man gently until he lay on the floor on his left side. The man’s eyes, dark and bloodshot but not now mad, were wide open and still. His mouth was open as when blood had spurted from it, but no more blood came from it, and all his long body was as still as the floor on which it lay.
Spade said:
“Lock the door.”
While Effie Perine, her teeth chattering, fumbled with the corridor door’s lock, Spade knelt beside the thin man, turned him over on his back and ran a hand down inside his overcoat. When he withdrew his hand presently it came out smeared with blood. The sight of his bloody hand brought not the least nor briefest of changes in Spade’s face.