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.
Holding that hand up where it would touch nothing, he took his lighter out of his pocket with his other hand. He snapped on the flame and held the flame close to first one and then the other of the thin man’s eyes. The eyes — lids, balls, irises and pupils — remained frozen, immobile.
Spade extinguished the flame and returned the lighter to his pocket. He moved on his knees around to the man’s side, and using his one clean hand, unbuttoned the tubular overcoat and opened it. The inside of the overcoat was wet with blood and the double-breasted blue jacket beneath it was sodden. The jacket’s lapels where they crossed over the man’s chest and both sides of his coat immediately below that point were mangled as if chewed.
Spade rose and went to the washbowl in the outer office.
Effie Perine, wan and trembling and holding herself upright by means of a hand and her back against the door, whispered: “Is... is he—?”
“Yes. He’s been shot through the chest, maybe half a dozen times.”
Spade began to wash his hands.
“Oughtn’t we—?” she began, but he cut her short.
“It’s too late for a doctor now, and I’ve got to think before we do anything.” He finished washing his hands and began to rinse the bowl. “He couldn’t have gone far with those in him. If he— Why in hell couldn’t he have stood up long enough to tell us something?” He frowned at the girl, rinsed his hands again and picked up a towel. “Pull yourself together. For God’s sake, don’t get sick on me now.” He threw the towel down and ran fingers through his hair. “We’ll have a look at that bundle.”
He went into the inner office again, stepped over the dead man’s legs, and picked up the brown-paper-wrapped parcel. When he felt its weight his eyes glowed. He put it on his desk, turning it over so that the knotted part of the rope was uppermost. The knot was hard and tight. He took out his pocket knife and cut the rope.
The girl had left the door and, edging around the dead man with her face turned away, had come to Spade’s side. As she stood there, with her hands on a corner of the desk, watching him pull the rope loose and push aside the brown paper, excitement began to supplant nausea in her face.
“Do you think it is?” she whispered.
“We’ll soon know,” Spade said, his big fingers busy with the inner husk of coarse gray paper, three sheets thick, that the brown paper’s removal had revealed. Though his face was hard and dull his eyes were shining.
When he had put the gray paper out of his way he had an egg-shaped mass of pale excelsior wadded tight. His fingers tore the wad apart and then he had the foot-high figure of a bird, black as coal and shiny where its polish was not dulled by wood-dust and fragments of excelsior.
Spade laughed. He put a hand down on the bird, a hand whose wide-spread fingers had ownership in their curving. He put his other arm around Effie Perine and crushed her body to his.
“We’ve got the damned thing, angel,” he said.
“Ouch! You’re hurting me!”
He took his arm away from her, picked the black bird up in both hands, and shook it to dislodge clinging excelsior. Then he stepped back, holding it up in front of him, blowing dust off it, regarding it triumphantly.
Effie Perine made a horrified face and screamed, pointing at his feet.
He looked down at his feet. His last backward step had brought his left heel into contact with the dead man’s hand, pinching a quarter inch of flesh at a side of the palm between heel and floor.
Spade jerked his foot away from the hand.
The telephone bell rang.
He nodded at the girl. She turned to the desk, and put the receiver to her ear. She said: “Hello... Yes... Who?... Oh, yes!” Her eyes became large. “Yes... Yes... Hold the line...” Her mouth suddenly stretched wide and fearful. She cried, “Hello! Hello! Hello!” into the telephone. She rattled the hook and cried, “Hello!” twice. Then she sobbed and jumped around to face Spade, who was close beside her now.
“It was Miss O’Shaughnessy!” she said wildly. “She wants you. She’s in danger. She’s at the Alexandria. Her voice was — oh, it was awful, Sam! — and something happened to her before she could finish. Go help her, Sam!”
Spade put the falcon on the desk and scowled gloomily.
“I’ve got to take care of this fellow first,” he said, pointing his thumb at the thin corpse on the floor.
She beat his chest with her fists, crying:
“No, you’ve got to go to her. Don’t you see, Sam? He had the thing that was hers, and he came to you with it. Don’t you see? He was helping her, and they killed him, and now she’s — Oh, you’ve got to go, Sam.”
“All right.” Spade pushed her away and bent over his desk, putting the black bird back into its nest of excelsior, bending the paper around it, working swiftly, making a larger and clumsy package. “As soon as I’ve gone, phone the police. Tell them how it happened, but don’t drag any names in. You don’t know. I got the phone call, and I told you I had to go out, but I didn’t say where.” He cursed the rope for being tangled, yanked it into straightness, and began to bind up the package.
“Forget this thing. Tell it as it happened, but forget he had a bundle.” He chewed his lower lip. “Unless they pin you down. If they seem to know about it, you’ll have to admit it. But that’s not likely. If they do, then I took the bundle away with me, unopened.” He finished tying the knot, and straightened up with the parcel under his left arm. “Get it straight, now. Everything happened the way it happened, but without this dingus unless they already know about it. Don’t deny it — just don’t mention it. And I got the phone call — not you. And you don’t know anything about anybody else having any connection with this fellow. You don’t know anything about him, and you can’t talk about my business until you see me. Got it?”
“Yes, Sam. Who — do you know who he is?”
He grinned wolfishly.
“Uh-uh,” he said, “but I’d guess he was Captain Jacobi, late master of La Paloma.” He picked up his hat and put it on. He looked thoughtfully at the dead man and then around the room.
“Hurry, Sam,” the girl begged.
“Sure,” he promised absentmindedly, “I’ll hurry. Might not hurt to get those few scraps of excelsior off the floor before the police come. And maybe you ought to try to get hold of Sid. No.” He rubbed his chin. “We’ll leave him out of it for a while. It’ll look better. I’d keep the door locked till they come.” He took his hand away from his chin and rubbed her cheek.
“You’re a damned good man, sister,” he said, and went out.
Chapter XVII
Saturday Night
Carrying the parcel lightly under his arm, walking briskly, with only the ceaseless shifting of his eyes denoting wariness, Spade went, partly by way of an alley and a narrow court, from his office-building to Kearney and Post streets, where he hailed a passing taxicab. The taxicab carried him to the Pickwick Stage terminal in Fifth Street.
He checked his parcel at the Parcel Room there, put the check into a stamped envelope, wrote M. F. Holland and a San Francisco Post Office box number on the envelope, sealed it, and dropped it into a mail box. Then he entered another taxicab and was driven to the Alexandria Hotel.
Spade went up to suite 12-C and knocked on the door.
The door was opened, when he had knocked a second time, by a small fair-haired girl in a shimmering yellow dressing gown, a small girl whose face was white and dim, and who clung desperately to the inner knob with both hands and gasped: “You’re Mr. Spade?”