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.
Spade slowly replaced receiver on prong, telephone on shelf. He licked his lips and looked down at his hands. Their palms were wet. He filled his deep chest with air. His eyes began to glitter between straightened lids. He turned and took three long, swift steps into the living-room.
Brigid O’Shaughnessy, startled by the suddenness of his approach, let her breath out in a little laughing gasp.
Spade, face to face with her, very close to her, tall, big-boned and thick-muscled, coldly smiling, hard of jaw and eye, said:
“They’ll talk when they’re pinched — about us. We’re sitting on dynamite, and we’ve got only minutes to get set for the police. I can swing it if I’m sure I know what’s what. Give me all of it — fast. Gutman sent you and Cairo to Constantinople?”
She started to speak, hesitated, and bit her lip.
He put a hand on her shoulder.
“—damn you, talk!” he said. “I’m in this with you, and you’re not going to gum it. Talk. He sent you to Constantinople?”
“Y-yes. He sent me. I met Joe there, and — and asked him to help me. Then we—”
“Wait. You asked Cairo to help you get it from Kemidov?”
“Yes.”
“For Gutman?”
She hesitated again, squirmed under the hard, angry glare of his eyes, swallowed, and said:
“No, not then. We thought we would get it for ourselves.”
“All right. Then?”
“Oh, then I began to be afraid that Joe wouldn’t play fair with me, so... so I asked Floyd Thursby to help me.”
“And he did. Well?”
“Well, we got it and went to Hongkong.”
“With Cairo, or had he been ditched before that?”
“Yes. We left him in Constantinople, in jail — something about a check.”
“Something you fixed up to hold him there?”
She looked shamefacedly at Spade and whispered: “Yes.”
“Right. Now you and Thursby are in Hongkong with the bird.”
“Yes, and then — I didn’t know him very well — I didn’t know whether I could trust him. I thought it would be safest — anyway, I met Captain Jacobi and I knew his boat was coming here, so I asked him to bring a package for me — and that was the falcon. I wasn’t sure I could trust Floyd, and that was safer than running the risk of having it where he could get it.”
“All right. Then you and Thursby caught one of the fast boats over. Then what?”
“Then — then I was afraid of Gutman. I knew he had people — connections — everywhere, and he’d soon know what we had done; and I was afraid he’d have learned that we had left Hongkong for San Francisco. He was in New York, and I knew if he heard that by cable, even some time after we’d left, he could get here by the time we did. And he did. I didn’t know that then, but I was afraid of it, and I had to wait here until Captain Jacobi arrived. And I was afraid Gutman would find me, or find Floyd, and buy him over. That’s why I came to you and Mr. Archer and asked you to watch him for—”
“That’s a lie,” Spade said. “You had Thursby hooked, and you knew it. He was a sucker for women. His record shows that: the only falls he ever took were over women. And, once a chump, always a chump. Maybe you didn’t know his record, but you’d know you had him safe.”
She blushed and looked timidly at him.
He said: “You wanted to get him out of the way before Jacobi arrived with the loot. What was your scheme?”
“I... I knew he’d left the States with a gambler, after some trouble. I didn’t know what it was, but I thought that if it was anything serious and he saw a detective watching him, he’d think it was on account of the old trouble, and would be frightened into going away. I didn’t think—”
“You told him he was being shadowed,” Spade said confidently. “Miles hadn’t many brains, but he wasn’t clumsy enough to be spotted the first night.”
“I told him, yes. When we went for a walk that night I pretended to discover Mr. Archer following us, and pointed him out to Floyd.” She sobbed.
“But please believe, Sam, that I wouldn’t have done it if I’d thought Floyd would kill him. I thought he’d be frightened into leaving the city. I didn’t for a minute think he’d shoot him like that.”
Spade smiled wolfishly with his lips, but not at all with his eyes. He said:
“If you thought he wouldn’t you were right.”
The girl’s upraised face held utter astonishment.
Spade said: “Thursby didn’t shoot him.”
Incredulity joined the astonishment in the girl’s face.
Spade said: “Miles hadn’t many brains, but—! He had had too many years’ experience as a detective to be caught like that by a man he was shadowing. Up a blind alley, with his gun tucked away on his hip? Not a chance. He was as dumb as any man ought to be, but he wasn’t that dumb. The only two ways out of the alley could have been watched from the edge of Bush Street over the tunnel. You’d told us Thursby was a bad actor. He couldn’t have tricked Miles into the alley like that, and he couldn’t have driven him in. He was dumb, but not dumb enough for that.”
He ran his tongue across the inside of his lips and smiled affectionately at the girl. He said:
“But he’d have gone up there with you, angel, if he was sure nobody else was up there. You were his client, so he would have had no reason for not dropping the shadow on your say-so, and if you had caught up with him and asked him to go up there, he’d’ve gone. He was just dumb enough for that. He’d’ve licked his lips and looked you up and down and gone — and then you could have stood as close to him as you liked in the dark and put a hole through him with the gun you had got from Thursby that evening.”
Brigid O’Shaughnessy shrank back from him until the edge of the table stopped her. She looked at him with horrified wide eyes and cried:
“Don’t... don’t talk to me like that, Sam! You know I didn’t! You know—”
“Stop it.” He looked at the watch on his wrist. “The police will be blowing in any minute now, and we’re sitting on dynamite. Talk.”
She put the back of a hand to her forehead. “Oh, why do you accuse me of such a terrible—?”
“Will you stop it?” he demanded in a low, impatient voice. “This isn’t the spot for the schoolgirl manners. Listen to me. The pair of us are sitting under the gallows.” He took hold of her wrists and made her stand up straight in front of him. “Talk!”
“I... I... How did you know he... he licked his lips and looked—?”
Spade laughed harshly.
“I knew Miles, but never mind that. Why did you shoot him?”
She twisted her wrists out of Spade’s fingers and put her hands up around the back of his neck, pulling his head down until his mouth all but touched hers. Her body was flat against his from knees to chest. He put his arms around her, holding her tight to him. Her dark-lashed lids were half down over velvety blue eyes. Her voice was hushed, throaty: