The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories (Vintage CrimeBlack Lizard Original) by The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories (epub)

Author:The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories (epub)
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307808257
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-05-09T00:00:00+00:00

hen Jerry awoke the sun was shining. He picked up his fresh copy of the Daily Planet and saw the expected headline on the front page. There was a photograph of the body, with a squat white arrow above it to help dumb tabloid readers pick it out from the tin cans and debris. No identification yet. Jerry, having carefully cut out all the labels from Clement’s clothing, wasn’t surprised. Twenty-four hours, he thought grimly. After that—Inspector Fitzgerald and the cops.

Butch was behind the wheel of the Lincoln when Jerry appeared on the sidewalk. Off like oiled lightning, down to Times Square.

Butch tossed his plaid cap at a peg and squatted in the outer office with a copy of Variety and the Daily Planet funnies. Jerry sat down at his desk and hooked the dictating machine closer with a tug of his patent-leather toe.

But before he dived into the column he reached for the phone and called Garbo, the very snooty chief operator on the Daily Planet switchboard. He gave her Sweetie Malloy’s suburban number.

“When you get it, say anything you like. I want to know how the woman sounds when she answers. Keep my line in. Verstehen Sie?”

“If you mean do I understand,” Garbo said icily, “the answer is yes, Mr. Tracy, I do.”

He hung on and listened with narrowed eyes to the brief two-way misunderstanding between Garbo and Sweetie Malloy. Garbo lingered a second after she broke the connection. “Satisfactory, Mr. Tracy?”

“Quite.” He grinned. “Hey, Garbo—listen. Why don’tcha like me, keed? You mad because I call you Garbo?”

She sniffed audibly and clicked off. But Tracy was satisfied. The sleeping draught he had slipped Sweetie hadn’t done her any harm. She sounded tired and listless—but she was out of the shadow of the electric chair, and there wasn’t a way she could frame herself again. Call in the cops now, and they’d laugh at her!

He tackled the column with vim. At noon Butch appeared with a mound of Swiss cheese on rye and a pitcher of draught ale. Tracy took the stuff in his stride. When he got busy on an overdue column he was like the Twentieth Century singing along steel rails. At four-thirty a messenger arrived and took the cylinders away. Tracy stretched gratefully. He was done. McCurdy always edited the stuff and trimmed the edges. Nice guy, McCurdy. His youngest brat was named Jerry. On purpose.

Tracy went down to the sidewalk and thought things over, while a steady stream of pedestrians buzzed and bumped past him. Sam, his favorite hackman, was parked at the curb. He gave the Daily Planet’s columnist a wrinkled grin and gestured briefly towards his tin flag; but Jerry shook his head. The subway seemed a better bet for a well-known little guy on an anonymous mission. The small-calibered gun that he had picked up from the bedroom floor in Sweetie Malloy’s suburban cottage was a sagging weight in his pocket.

The dump Jerry was hunting was west, between the gaunt Ninth Avenue El and the river.

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