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:
It was a job to look heroic beside her, but the livid scar on Prentice Nola’s right cheek and his fierce blue eyes and the combination of sun-whitened hair and black bushy beard got him by.
“Looks more than twenty-seven, don’t he?” Slip commented. “The beard hides all but that one scar. He was a pilot. He was strafing some Jappies on a move and cracked right up into them. Busted his legs but got a gun going and held ’em till his buddies come up. Nervous as hell. He can drink two bottles of Scotch and walk away from ’em. He just come from the old man’s funeral.”
“Never saw the girl before,” Slabbe decided.
“Her first time here was Saturday night,” Slip said. “She’s staying at the Carleton Arms, registered from New York City. She picked the hero up, only he thinks he picked her up. Watch when she turns her head.”
Slabbe watched, grunted. “What a beaut. Somebody must’ve hit that left eye with a roundhouse. She get it here?”
“G’wan, we don’t let stuff like that happen here. She come in with it Monday night, says she bumped into a something, but not a fist. Barney McPhail, the houseman at the Carleton Arms, says no commotion around her except wolves she brushes off like nothing. Ruby Reed. New York City. We don’t worry so much about babes as guys.”
Slabbe tongued his gum out of a cavity and got it going again, said, “Thanks,” and started for the door. Then he murmured: “Seen Jake George lately?”
Fudge Burke said: “Well, well. That’s what you want, eh?”
“Guess I wasn’t so cute,” Slabbe sighed.
The chocolate broke and Fudge tilted his head back to let the cherry syrup ooze down a favorite channel. He smacked his lips, started scouting for another cherry and said: “Tell you what, Slabbe, come back when Dink’s here. He saw Jake George. He’ll tell you all he knows. He’ll tell you when Jake was in last, what he ate and drank, who he went out with, what happened to him, all of it.”
Slabbe’s gray eyes were opaque. “Cooperation with a capital C. How come?”
For just a second Fudge’s candy-eaten teeth showed. Then he turned it into a grin and chuckle. “Well, like you said when you came in . . . when they’re dead you can talk.”
“Yeah.” Slabbe took a step, stopped. He did a double take. He licked his lips. “I heard it right, what you said?”
Fudge nodded.
“Then Jake’s dead?”
Fudge nodded again.
Slabbe took a breath. “What—”
Fudge flapped his hand at him. “Don’t heckle me. I told you Dink’ll tell you. He’ll be here at eight.”
Slabbe glanced at his railroader’s watch. It was three-thirty. “Eight o’clock, hell,” he growled. “Where’s Dink now?”
“Give ’em an inch and they want – Hell with it!” Fudge snapped. “Fairview Hotel.”
Halfway through the metal door Slabbe caught himself, held out his hand to the guard. “Gimme my gun back.”
Slabbe got out of the elevator in the casino and headed for the bar. At three-thirty in the afternoon a mere handful of fifty-odd citizens were anaesthetizing themselves. Slabbe jostled a half-dozen aside and came up beside Prentice Nola’s football shoulders.
He said: “You’re in a mood, Mr Nola, but this is important. Can I talk to you?”
The flick of the blue eyes was sharp enough to shave with, then dull. “A character,” Prentice Nola said to his and Ruby Reed’s reflections in the bar mirror. “A little man mountain who says I’m in a mood.” He sipped his Scotch and soda. “Take off.”
“I like Fred Allen, personally,” Slabbe said. “But you’re funny, too. So are dead men. So is life. So’s your old man.”
He moved back from the bar, fast, behind Nola. His hands made clamps on Nola’s biceps, which were hard-packed as cables. It looked like a friendly gesture, but Nola couldn’t move. Slabbe was set in case the bearded youngster put a knee against the bar and heaved backwards, but it didn’t happen.
Nola said: “The longer you hold me, the harder I’ll hit you when you let go.”
“I take it back about your old man. It slipped,” Slabbe said. He looked at Ruby Reed. She was ready for something but waiting for the right spot. “Talk to him,” Slabbe told her. “This is kid stuff. Two guys are dead so far. I’m a private dick.”
Ruby’s lips, red as red, parted ever so slightly. “It’s absurd, Prentice, but let’s not have a scene.”
“OK?” Slabbe asked Nola.
Some of the tension went out of Nola’s arms. “Let me drink,” he said. Slabbe let him, waiting, then moved back alongside him on the left. The purple mouse on Ruby’s left eye was several days old but still something to behold.
Nola said: “Spit it out. I’m still in that mood.”
Slabbe nodded. “Your father hired a detective named Jake George. Maybe you know why.”
“I don’t.”
“Ever hear of Max Lorenz?”
“No.”
“OK. I’ll be seeing you.”
Nola’s hand was the clamp this time, on Slabbe’s right wrist, “No, you don’t, big boy.”
Slabbe started to use the necessary twist and foot-pounds to release his wrist without quite fracturing Nola’s thumb, then stopped. The reason he stopped had nothing to do with the ex-pilot, it had to do with Ruby Reed. Her perfectly madeup face, stark white against the contrast of her upswept ebony hair, was showing no expression whatever – which was, of course, the giveaway.
Nola was saying: “I didn’t pull my weight while the old man was alive, but maybe this did something to me. Maybe I’m interested in something – for the first time since they invalided me out.”
Slabbe mumbled something, stared into the bar mirror. Ruby’s green eyes were on him. Her lips moved, formed the words, “See me later.” Slabbe winked into the mirror.
Prentice Nola snapped: “Why would my father have employed a detective?”
“That’s what I asked you,” Slabbe said. “Would I ask what I know?”
Nola’s blue eyes burned at him. Softly, he said: “Men ask what they know to find out if anybody else knows. Especially dicks, big boy.”
“Not this trip, junior,” Slabbe said easily. “How close were you to your father?”
“None of your damn business, big boy.”
“I can find out somewhere else.”
“I’m scared.”
Slabbe grimaced. “We should have a camera and sound truck. About here the director would say, ‘Cut.’ Let go of my wrist and get back on your bottle. Put milk in it. That’s for babies.”
Nola began to breathe the least bit deeper. The pupils of his eyes got small. Almost delicately, he released Slabbe’s wrist, slid off the barstool.
Slabbe warned: “Five bouncers will be on top of us.”
Ruby said huskily: “Prentice, stop!”
The words were repeated, and in a female voice, but not Ruby’s. In a tinkling voice, a voice clear as tiny bells in a fine Swiss watch. “Prentice, stop that!” it said.
Prentice winced, looked over his shoulder as if there might be a chance he was hearing things, saw that he wasn’t and moaned softly: “Good Lord, Aunt Serena, why didn’t you bring the servants too?”
“Don’t be rude, Prentice.” The tinkling voice had the clarity of ice, now. “I’m sure this is a charming place to mourn your father, but you’re coming home.”
Slabbe looked at her. Her ancient, rustling black taffeta with lace at the throat suggested another century. Her white hair under its black bonnet might have been a powdered wig. Her companions might have been a retinue of lady-in-waiting and footmen. They were instead a little-girl-sized ash-blonde, a slender, tired-faced young man and a brute in chauffeur’s livery.
The latter just stood there, yellow-flecked hazel eyes alert. The tired-faced young man put a hand on Prentice Nola’s shoulder, said, “Come on, chum,” and then saw Ruby Reed’s green eyes gleaming on him and was done for – literally. His thin, high-cheekboned face was no longer merely tired – it was dead.