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.
He made noises in his throat and shook his head. “He tried to talk me out of the plate down there in the hall. But you — you have to humor the boss’ brother, huh?”
“Finished?” purred Blaine. And when Casey remained silent, “Satisfied now, are you?”
He leaned forward in his chair, smiled a smile that held no mirth, spoke in a voice that was brittle.
“I don’t have to make explanations to a camera. But sometimes I like to humor you, Flash. And I’m going to tell you the answer to this one; because you amuse me, and because it helps illustrate my original and permanent contention — that you are a thick-headed sap.”
Blaine reached for one of the telephones on the desk, spoke a few words. When he looked back at Casey, he said:
“You sneaked this picture over on Captain Judson. And the reason we are killing it, sweetheart, is because Judson called Fessendon and told him if we printed it he’d close us out at Headquarters for a month.”
“Judson called—” Casey broke off and a slow flush crept into his lean cheeks. His widened eyes looked chagrined, incredulous.
In another moment, J. H. Fessendon, brother of Lee, son of the new owner, and managing editor of the Globe, swung through the doorway of a corridor behind the desk. He accepted the photograph from Blaine with a manicured hand, studied it.
Casey’s flushed face knotted in a scowl as he watched Fessendon. He did not like him or his pseudo go-getter methods. A plump, baldish man of forty-five: pink skin that looked as if a massage was part of his daily ritual; expensive tweeds, tailored with a tight vest and waistband, as though to control and mold the paunch.
“Yes — yes.” Fessendon said crisply. “This must be the one. Too bad we can’t use it. Where’s the plate?” He glanced at Blaine, who eyed him narrowly, then at Casey. “Get the plate, Casey.”
Casey fastened contemptuous eyes on Blaine, wheeled and left the desk. In the photographic department, he asked Tom Wade if he had made an extra print. Wade said he had, and Casey growled:
“Swell. I’ll paste it in my diary.” At the doorway, he turned. “Put it in my desk.”
Fessendon was pacing back and forth beside Blaine’s desk, followed by surreptitious glances from the crew in the “slot,” the half dozen rewrite men scattered about the city room. Casey handed Fessendon the plate, and he held it up to the light. Grunting in approval, he struck the glass against the corner of the desk. The plate shattered in a dozen pieces. Then Fessendon tore up the print.
“Got to make sure,” he said easily, picking up the pieces and dropping them in a wastebasket, “got to make sure, you know.”
Blaine turned in his chair and watched Fessendon through the doorway, as did every other eye in the room. When he turned back, he met Casey’s humid, searching gaze for a moment, and his face flushed. Then he busied himself with some copy, said:
“Don’t stand there gawking. If you got legitimate shots we’d have something to print.”
Casey opened his mouth and rage kept it open. But he did not speak. He could not think of the right thing to say.
2
Tom Wade was talking on the telephone when Casey returned to the anteroom of the photographic department and slid into the chair behind his desk. He lit a cigarette, puffed once, then let it hang from his half opened lips.
The hot anger which streaked through his brain when Fessendon smashed the plate was a smoldering, cancerous growth now. A heaviness that was a mixture of dejection and disappointment weighed upon him. It was not so much the loss of the plate; that had happened before; it was the way Blaine had let him down — and Fessendon’s gesture, as though he could trust neither Casey nor the city editor.
Wade talked for nearly five minutes longer, and when he hung up Casey told him what had happened.
“It’s like I told you before,” he finished. “The sheet’s goin’ to seed since Fessendon bought it. And I still think Lee is the guy that gyped us out of the shot. He probably called Blaine and Blaine gave me the song about Judson—”
“That don’t sound like Blaine to me,” Wade said slowly.
“And Fessendon,” Casey rasped. “Bustin’ the plate like we was crooks or something.” He began to curse, and after a moment said: “Who the hell were you talkin’ with so long?”
“Alma Henderson.”
“That tramp that was—”
“Wait a minute!” Wade’s voice was unnaturally harsh. A blond, round-faced youth with a guileless manner and a happy-go-lucky philosophy, Wade’s ordinarily good-natured face was now flushed, his blue eyes snapping.
“Oh,” said Casey and his brows came up. “So that’s the way it is.”
“No,” Wade said doggedly, flushing at his burst of temper, “but she’s no tramp. She’s a good kid and—”
Casey’s mind flashed back to the raid. To get the second picture, the one Haley had taken, he and Wade had crashed into the office of the Blue Grass Products, which was separated from the race-track room by an airshaft. Casey had been in the building before, knew there was an air-shaft and had crossed this to get to the men’s room of the gambling hall.
Alma Henderson was apparently in charge of the Blue Grass office. It had surprised Casey that Wade knew her, because heretofore the youth had but little time for women. But Casey, intent on getting another picture, dismissed his curiosity and had left Wade arguing with the girl while he crossed the airshaft with his camera.
He said: “She’s a good kid, huh? Okey. But she works for the Blue Grass outfit, and Moe Nyberg runs it. A cheap tout, a first-class thug. Why, the heel; everything he touches stinks. He’s probably hooked up with that race-track dive, now that I think of it. And he plays with Mike Handy who runs the biggest gyp stable in the East. So what does that make this Henderson dame?”
“What the hell?” Wade flung out. “A girl’s got to eat.”
“All right, all right. I don’t care. I got troubles of my own.”
Casey lit another cigarette, puffed at it until his head was shrouded in blue. But it wasn’t all right. Wade was impulsive, and he had a lot to learn. To get mixed up with any woman connected with Nyberg might put him on the skids.
He said: “What did she want?”
“She wants me to come over to her place.”
“What for? She knows you’re workin’, don’t she?”
“She’s got a story.” Wade said jerkily. “She wouldn’t tell me over the phone, but she says it’s a job for the cops.”
“Hah!” rasped Casey. “Then why don’t she go down to Headquarters and spill it?”
“Here’s why.” Wade took a newspaper from his desk, opened it, pointed to a single column head on page 12.
Casey read:
Brought to the State Hospital in East Concord Street for a physical examination, Miss Mary Merkle, 21, serving a sentence at the Reformatory for Women until 1937, escaped today from the office of Doctor...
Casey looked up. “I told you she was a tramp.”
Wade flushed. “You’re wrong, Flash. She gave me part of the story over the phone. She came down from Vermont three years ago. She got mixed up in a bad crowd, there was a raid, she had no near relatives—”
Wade went on with his story and Casey looked at the date line of the paper. May 17th.
“When she escaped,” Wade went on, “she had no place to go, so she looked up one of the guys she used to know and he got her a job with Moe Nyberg. If she goes to the cops with her story, bingo. Back to the Reformatory.”
“That’s probably where she belongs,” growled Casey, and was half ashamed of his words when he saw the hurt look in Wade’s eyes.