The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction
- Автор: Якубовски Максим, Беллем Роберт
- Год: 2014
- Язык: английский
- Год: Constable & Robinson
- ISBN: 9781472111807
- Жанр: Крутые детективы
Электронная книга - «The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction». Краткое содержание книги:
“Don’t worry about him,” Slabbe said. “He can back me up any day.”
“He shouldn’t mind just one,” the pathologist said. “Monday we had – how many was it, Joe?” he asked the other medic.
“Twenty-six. Twenty passengers and the crew.”
Slabbe nodded. A Lockheed Constellation had cracked up on the take-off Monday at the airport and burst into flames. Everyone aboard had perished.
Slabbe pointed a frankfurter-thick finger at the operating table “That his thigh?”
The pathologist peered. “Yeah.”
“Bullet in it?”
“See for yourself.”
“Hard to tell,” Slabbe said. “How about an X-ray? A slug, even if it was there, could fall out or melt up. There’s supposed to be one in his left thigh, though.”
“Oh, this is the right one. Here’s the left.”
“Still can’t tell,” Slabbe shrugged. “Check it, will you? Check too, if he was pushed around, slugged or like that before he died. A good sock knocks loose fat deposits and the blood takes ’em to the lungs, right?”
The medic looked up sharply. “How did you know?”
“Read it in a book,” Slabbe said. He left.
Carlin had his pacing area of the corridor blue with cigar smoke. He grimaced. “I helped out with those bodies at the airport Monday and didn’t even flutter, but today I had kidneys for lunch. Come on upstairs.”
In his gopher-hole-sized office upstairs in the Homicide Bureau he went to the window and nursed two tall green bottles of ale in off the outside sill. He dealt one to Slabbe, fished for an opener.
Slabbe absently uncapped his bottle with his teeth. “How did you make him, Pat?” he asked. “Car license?”
“You’re gonna bust your teeth some day.” Carlin caught foam. “Yeah,” he said. “The jalopy had a Pennsylvania license tag and I phoned Harrisburg and it was registered in Lorenz’s name Saturday: ’41 Chevvy, two-door sedan. What was he up to?”
“Well, I can’t just say.”
“That’s dandy.”
“Don’t pop off now. He was a grifter and that’s for sure, so he didn’t just come here for the mountain air; but why he did come, I don’t know. He got out of Lewisburg Saturday, which accounts for him buying a jalopy in Pennsylvania. This is good ale.”
“What little bird told you this?” Carlin murmured.
“No little bird, an old buzzard – the New York manager of the Zenith Detective Agency. How come I had the weather eye out for Lorenz is I got a sort of tie-in with Zenith. No retainer, no contract or anything, understand. It’s just that I passed along some dope on a guy they had on one of their readers once and they sent me a check for fifty bucks and said I was an alert investigator that they’d remember if ever they were interested in this neck of the woods again. So last week they wanted a line on Lorenz and called me. They don’t want him for anything he did, they just want to keep him spotted for whatever he might do. Big outfits like Zenith find it pays to get there first sometimes.”
“Don’t educate me,” Carlin sniffed.
Slabbe drank. “They probably had a plant at Lewisburg and found out that Lorenz was heading this way, and the old buzzard in the New York office remembers that I’m an alert investigator—”
“You said that.”
“If I don’t, who will? Anyhow, I didn’t find out what Lorenz was up to here. I didn’t even see the guy in the flesh.”
“You saw the flesh, though. What was his rap in Lewisburg for?”
Slabbe held up an open palm, not quite as heavy and gray as a small granite grave marker. “The Zenith telegram didn’t say. All it said was he was about forty, probably armed, always dangerous. Five feet eight, a hundred and sixty pounds, light complected, blond, natural teeth, brown eyes, a limp in the left leg from a slug in the thigh picked up in a heist of some kind, years back. I told the medics to X-ray for the slug.”
Carlin stopped drinking abruptly. “You think it ain’t him?”
Slabbe’s shoulders moved like ponderous sides of beef, in a shrug that said nothing. “Today’s Wednesday. He was sprung Saturday morning. It would take time to buy the jalopy and transfer the tags and about ten hours to drive here from Lewisburg. He could have hit here late Saturday night or Sunday morning, but I put some lines out as soon as I got the Zenith telegram Saturday and none of my people saw him . . . or so they say. That’s why I contacted you and asked did you spot any strangers in town.”
Slabbe put his bottle on the scarred desk. “The doc says Lorenz fluffed off Monday. Maybe the guy wasn’t in a hurry to get here. Maybe he got drunked up along the road to celebrate and took his time, and never got to town at all. We should find out if he was in and did his stuff, whatever it was, and was on the way out again when he piled up, or if he was just heading in. Which way was the car going?”
Carlin’s dark eyes were as gloomy as his voice. “No can tell. Bleeker’s Canyon is a seventy-foot drop from the road. A car turns over going down and you can’t say where it was heading unless skid marks show on the road, which they don’t. The guard rail is gone in a couple spots and there’s curves that if you come around too fast, blooie. The fire sure as hell made smoke and a blaze, though, but nobody reported it.”
“Lonely stretch there,” Slabbe reminded. “You might see smoke in the daytime, but the way the road overhangs the cliff along there, at night you wouldn’t see any flames unless you had your head out the car window and had giraffe blood in your neck.”
Slabbe got his bulk vertical again, tossed a gumdrop into the air and caught it on his tongue. “I’ll talk to my people again. Maybe with Lorenz dead, they’ll remember something.”
“You’ll also phone Zenith and say that the circumstances of Lorenz’s death are highly suspicious, that the local police are baffled and that the services of an alert investigator are for hire.”
“You’re a cynical so-and-so, Pat,” Slabbe said mildly, and went back to his office and did it.
The voice of the Zenith Detective Agency’s New York City manager, one Enoch Oliver, purred as smoothly over the wire as one of the phone company’s dynamos. It informed Slabbe that it would be most gratifying indeed if Max Lorenz were really kaput – but by all means to make sure.
Lorenz had first attracted Zenith’s attention in 1922 when he burgled a New Jersey warehouse protected by them. He was committed to the New Jersey state reformatory May 8, 1922, and paroled December 20, 1925.
On August 12, 1928, he was committed to Elmira reformatory from Dutchess County, N.Y., for five years, for grand larceny. He was transferred to Dannemora, Auburn and Clinton prisons, being paroled from the latter March 10, 1931. Declared delinquent of parole, he was returned to Sing Sing September 16, 1931, transferred to Clinton and reparoled July 7, 1932. He was again declared delinquent of parole December 9, 1932, and returned to Sing Sing where he made an unsuccessful attempt to escape.
Transferred back to Clinton and paroled November 22, 1933, he was taken in custody by Dutchess County officers and sentenced to five years for burglary. Again he was paroled, on September 23, 1935.
He was arrested February 9, 1936, by Troy police for the Saratoga Springs headquarters, charged with grand larceny and the possession of a concealed weapon in connection with a hot car setup. He went the circuit of prisons and was released by commutation November 19, 1940.
“Busy little bee, wasn’t he?” Slabbe told the phone.
Mr Oliver agreed absently, concluded the biography with: “In June 1942, Lorenz was arrested in Pennsylvania in connection with black market operations in nylon hose, sentenced September 12 to from four to seven years in Lewisburg, from which penitentiary he was released July 6, 1946.”