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.
The man straightened, turned around. He was short, dumpy. He was wearing golf knickers and a checked sweater and checked golf hose and a checked cap. He had a round, reddish face sprinkled with brown spots. He was chewing on the stub of a cigar, and tobacco juice had left a brown trail from the corner of his mouth down his chin. He stared at Shaley without any sign of recognition.
“Let me in, Mandy,” Shaley requested.
Mandy strolled up to the gate, looked at Shaley through it.
“I don’t suppose you’d have a pass, would you?”
Shaley said: “Come on, Mandy. Let me in. I want to talk to you.”
“Huh!” said Mandy. He opened the gate grudgingly.
Shaley slipped inside, and Mandy slammed the gate with a clang.
“Go ahead and talk,” he invited. “It won’t do you any good. I won’t buy anything.”
Shaley looked at the other man meaningly. This one wore a plum-colored military uniform with silver trimmings. He looked as a motion picture director’s chauffeur should look. He was thin and tall with a swarthily dark face and a small black mustache. He had his military cap tipped at a jaunty angle.
He stared from Mandy to Shaley, then shrugged his thin shoulders.
“Excuse me,” he said. He slammed the hood down and got into the front seat of the Rolls and backed it up the road.
“Pretty fancy,” Shaley said, jerking his head to indicate the chauffeur and the car.
“He gripes me,” Mandy said sourly. “I liked old Munn better.”
“Why all the war-whoops outside?” Shaley asked.
“Extras. Waitin’ to be put on. We ain’t gonna shoot any exteriors today. We’re shootin’ a saloon scene. I told ’em that six times, but you can’t argue with them guys. They just grunt at you.”
“How’s Van Bilbo coming since he’s been producing independent?”
Mandy shrugged. “Just fair, I think we got a good one this time — forty-niner stuff.”
They were silent, watching each other warily.
Shaley said suddenly: “Who was Big Cee, Mandy?”
“Huh?” Mandy said vacantly.
Shaley didn’t say anything. He squatted down on his heels and began to draw patterns in the dust with his forefinger.
After a while, Mandy said bitterly: “I mighta known you’d get on to that. You find out everything, damn you.”
There was another silence. Shaley kept on drawing his patterns in the dust.
“Her name was Rosa Lee once,” Mandy said sullenly. “She worked with the old man on some serials way back in ’09 or ’10.”
Shaley drew in a long breath. “So,” he said quietly. He stood up. “Thanks, Mandy.”
“Don’t you try any of your sharp-shooting on the old man!” Mandy warned ferociously. “Damn you, Shaley, I’ll kill you if you do!”
Shaley grinned. “So long, Mandy.” He opened the gate and slipped outside.
Mandy put his head through the bars. “I mean it now, Shaley. You try anything funny on Van Bilbo, and I’ll kill you deader than hell!”
Shaley went into a drug-store on Sunset and called his office.
“Anybody call me?” he asked, when Sadie answered the telephone.
She said: “Yes, Mr. Shaley. That man McFane called three times. He seems to be mad at you. He swore something terrible when I told him you’d gone to Europe. And that woman called — that woman that was here this morning and didn’t pay you any money.”
“What’d she want?”
“She wanted to thank you for getting Bennie that job in Phoenix.”
“For what?” Shaley barked.
“For getting Bennie that job in Phoenix.”
“Tell me just what she said,” Shaley ordered tensely.
“She called just a little while ago. She said she wanted to thank you. She said the man you had talked to had called her up and told her that he would give Bennie a job in a hotel in Phoenix, and that she had told the man where Bennie was so the man could go and see him about the job.”
Shaley stood there stiffly, staring at the telephone box.
“Hello?” said Sadie inquiringly.
Shaley slowly hung up the receiver, scowling in a puzzled way.
“Good gawd!” he said to himself suddenly in a tight whisper.
He banged open the door of the telephone booth and ran headlong out of the drug-store.
Shaley parked the Chrysler with a screech of rubber on cement. He got out and walked hurriedly along the sidewalk, along a high green hedge, to a sagging gate. He strode up an uneven brick wall, up steps into a high, old-fashioned porch.
A fat man in a pink shirt was sitting in an old rocker on the porch with his feet up on the railing.
“Where’s Bennie Smith’s room?” Shaley asked him abruptly.
“Who?”
“Bennie Smith?”
“What’s his name?” the fat man inquired innocently.
Shaley hooked the toe of his right foot under the fat man’s legs and heaved up. The fat man gave a frightened squawk and went over backwards, chair and all. He rolled over and got up on his hands and knees, gaping blankly at Shaley.
Shaley leaned over him. “Where’s Bennie Smith’s room?”
“Upstairs,” the fat man blurted quickly. “Clear back. Last door on the left.” He wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “Gee, guy, no need to get so hard about it. I’d ‘a’ told you. I was only fooling. No need to get so rough with a fellow.”
Shaley was running across the porch. He went in the front door into a dim, moist-smelling hall with a worn green rug on the floor. He went up a flight of dark, carpeted stairs, along a hall.
The last few steps he ran on his toes, silently. He had his hand inside his coat on the butt of the big .45 automatic in his shoulder-holster.
He stopped in front of the last door on the left, listening. He pulled out the automatic and held it in his hand. He knocked softly on the door with his other hand.
There was no answer.
Shaley said: “Bennie,” and knocked on the door again.
He turned the knob. The door was locked.
Working silently, Shaley took a ring of skeleton keys out of his left-hand coat pocket. The lock was old and loose. The first key turned it.
Shaley pushed the door open cautiously, standing to one side.
He drew in his breath with a hissing sound.
Bennie was lying on the bed. He looked very small and thin and young. In death his face had lost some of its sharpness, its wise-guy cynicism.
He had been stabbed several times in his thin chest. The bed was messy.
Shaley shut the door very quietly.
Shaley turned off of Sunset and drove up Cahuenga. He parked the Chrysler and walked slowly across a vacant lot towards a long, shacklike building that had a big red Neon sign on top of it that said: Zeke’s.
Shaley walked around to the back and knocked on the door.
An angry voice from inside said: “How many times must I tell you bums that I can’t give you no hand-outs until after the rush—” The man opened the door and saw Shaley. He said: “Oh! Hello, Mr. Shaley.” He was a short, fat man with a round face that was shiny with perspiration. He wore a white chef’s cap.
Shaley craned his neck, peering in the door. He could see into the interior of the dining-car. Bennie’s sister was standing at the cash register, joking with a policeman and a man in a bus driver’s uniform.
“What’s the matter, Mr. Shaley?” the short man asked.
Shaley nodded his head to indicate the blonde woman. “Her brother has just been murdered.”
The short man said: “Bennie?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, — !” said the short man. “And she thought he was the grandest thing that ever lived.”