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.
The boy in the doorway tightened the corners of his mouth in what may have been a minute smile. Spade’s proposal seemed to have no other effect on him.
Joel Cairo’s dark face was openmouthed, open-eyed, yellowish, and amazed. He breathed through his mouth, his round effeminate chest rising and falling, while he gaped at Spade.
Brigid O’Shaughnessy had moved away from Spade a little and had twisted herself around on the sofa to stare at him. There was a suggestion of hysterical laughter behind the startled confusion in her face.
Gutman remained still and expressionless for a long moment. Then he decided to laugh. He laughed heartily and lengthily, not stopping until his sleek eyes had borrowed merriment from his laughter. When he stopped laughing he said:
“By Gad, sir, you’re a character, that you are.” He took a white handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his eyes. “Yes, sir, there’s never any telling what you’ll do or say next, except that it’s bound to be something astonishing.”
“There’s nothing funny about it.” Spade did not seem offended by the fat man’s laughter, nor in any way impressed. He spoke in the manner of one reasoning with a recalcitrant, but not altogether unreasonable, friend. “It’s our best bet. With him in their hands, the police will—”
“But, my dear man,” Gutman objected, “can’t you see? If I even for a moment thought of doing it — But that’s ridiculous too. I feel toward Wilmer just exactly as if he were my own son. I really do. But if I even for a moment thought of doing what you propose, what in the world do you think would keep Wilmer from telling the police every last detail about the falcon and about you and me and all of us?”
Spade grinned with stiff lips.
“If we had to,” he said softly, “we could have him killed resisting arrest. But we wouldn’t have to go that far. Let him talk his head off. I promise you nobody’ll do anything about it. That’s easy enough to fix.”
The pink flesh on Gutman’s forehead crawled in a frown. He lowered his head, mashing his chins together over his collar, and asked: “How?” Then, with an abruptness that set all his fat bulbs to quivering and tumbling against one another, he raised his head, squirmed around to look at the boy, and laughed merrily. “What do you think of all this, Wilmer? It’s funny, eh?”
The boy’s eyes were cold hazel gleams under his lashes. He said in a low distinct voice:
“Yes, it’s funny, the—”
Spade was talking to Brigid O’Shaughnessy: “How do you feel now, angel? Any better?”
“Yes, much better, only” — she reduced her voice until the last words were inaudible two feet away — “I’m frightened.”
“Don’t be,” he said carelessly and put a hand on her round gray-stockinged knee. “Nothing very bad’s going to happen. Want a drink?”
“Not now, thanks.” Her voice became barely audible again. “Be careful, Sam.”
Spade grinned and looked at Gutman, who was looking at him. The fat man smiled genially, saying nothing for a moment, and then asked:
“How?”
Spade was stupid. “How what?”
The fat man considered more laughter necessary then, and an explanation:
“Well, sir, if you’re really serious about this... this... suggestion of yours, the least we can do, in common politeness, is to hear you out. Now how are you going about fixing it so that Wilmer” — he paused here to laugh again — “won’t be able to do us any harm?”
Spade shook his head.
“No,” he said, “I wouldn’t want to take advantage of anybody’s politeness, no matter how common, like that. Forget it.”
The fat man puckered up his facial bulbs.
“Now, come, come,” he protested, “you make me feel decidedly uncomfortable, sir. I shouldn’t have laughed, and I apologize most humbly and sincerely. I wouldn’t want to seem to ridicule anything you’d suggest, Mr. Spade, regardless of how much I disagreed with you, for you must know that I have the greatest amount of respect and admiration for your astuteness. Now, mind you, I don’t see how this suggestion of yours can be in any way practical — even leaving out the fact that I couldn’t feel any different toward Wilmer if he was my own flesh and blood — but I’ll consider it a personal favor, sir, as well as a sign that you’ve accepted my apology, if you’ll go ahead and tell me the rest of it.”
“Fair enough,” Spade said. “Bryan is like most district attorneys. He’s more interested in how his record will look on paper than in anything else. He’d rather drop a doubtful case than try it and have it go against him. I don’t know that he ever deliberately framed anyone he believed innocent, but I can’t imagine his letting himself believe them innocent if he could scrape up, or twist into shape, proof of their guilt. To be sure of convicting one man he’ll let half a dozen equally guilty accomplices go free, if trying to nail them all might confuse his case.
“That’s the choice we’ll give him, and he’ll gobble it up. He wouldn’t want to know about the falcon. He’ll be tickled to death to persuade himself that anything the punk tells him about it is a lot of hooey, an attempt to muddle things up. Leave that end to me. I can show him that if he starts fooling around trying to gather up everybody, he’s going to have a tangled case that no jury will be able to make heads or tails of; while if he sticks to the punk he can get a conviction standing on his head.”
Gutman wagged his head sidewise in a slow smiling gesture of benign disapproval.
“No, sir,” he said, “I’m afraid that won’t do, won’t do at all. I don’t see how even this district attorney of yours could link Thursby and Jacobi and Wilmer together without having to—”
“You don’t know district attorneys,” Spade told him. “The Thursby angle is easy. He was a gunman and so’s your punk. Bryan’s already got a theory about that. There’ll be no catch there. Well, — ! They can only hang the punk once. Why try him for Jacobi’s murder after he’s been convicted of Thursby’s? They just close the record by writing it up against him, and let it go at that. If, as is likely enough, he used the same gun on both of them, the bullets will match up. Everybody will be satisfied.”
“Yes, but,” Gutman began, and stopped to look at the boy.
The boy advanced from the doorway, walking stiff-legged, with his legs apart, until he was between Gutman and Cairo, almost in the center of the floor. He halted there, leaning forward slightly from the waist, his shoulders raised toward the front. The pistol in his hand still hung at his side, but his knuckles were white over its grip. His other hand was a small, hard fist down at his other side. The indelible youngness of his face gave an indescribably vicious, an inhuman, turn to the white-hot hatred and the cold white malevolence in his face. He said to Spade in a voice cramped by passion:
“You—, get up on your feet and go for your heater.”
Spade smiled at the boy. His smile was not broad, but the amusement in it seemed genuine and unalloyed.
The boy said: “You—, get up and shoot it out if you’ve got the guts. I’ve taken all the riding from you I’m going to take.”
The amusement in Spade’s smile deepened. He looked at Gutman.
“Young Wild West,” he said in a voice that matched his smile. “Maybe you’d better remind him that shooting me before you get your hands on the falcon would be bad for business.”