Black Mask (Spring 2018) , livre ebook

Black Mask: Spring 2018

Black Mask • 2018
Copyright Information

© 2018 Black Mask

BLACK MASK (Vol. 37, No. 2), Spring 2018. Published semiannually by Black Mask. © 2018 by Black Mask, all rights reserved. Black Mask is a trademark of Steeger Properties, LLC. The stories in this magazine are all fictitious, and any resemblance between the characters in them and actual persons is completely coincidental. Reproduction or use, in any manner, of editorial or pictorial content without express written permission is prohibited. Submissions must be accompanied by a self-addressed stamp envelope. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited manuscripts or artwork.

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Behind The Mask

Issue number four of the revived Black Mask is here!
This time out, we’ve included five ALL-NEW hard-boiled yarns—written by a quintet of promising new authors. Please let us know what you think of their stories: we’re planning on including new material in futures as well if the response is good.
In addition to these new yarns, we’ve included several classic pulp stories by some of the best authors of the pulp era.
Oh, and our cover is a rare treat: it’s an unpublished, vintage Black Mask cover from the 1940s! Lunnon was the primary cover illustrator for Black Mask during Fanny Ellsworth’s era. It’s suspected it was intended as the May 1940 cover, but Black Mask was sold to Popular Publications and the title underwent a drastic makeover: Lunnon’s cover illustration no longer fit the style of the magazine. We’re glad to present it here to adorn an issue of Black Mask … its original intention.
Look for another issue of Black Mask in the summer.
The Lookalike Killer
by Robb T. White

“You awake?”
“What time is it?”
“Time to get your lazy ass out of bed and start making me some money!”
When Ron DeVine called me for a job, it was like that. Never “Good morning, Mister Jarvi. Would you be available for some work today?”
DeVine was the founder of his law firm, DeVine, Sufritta, and Nelson, which comprised as slick a trio of lawyers as you’ll find this side of the Mississippi, at least in our humble bedroom suburb of Cleveland. Th biggest law firm in Northtown, DeVine’s advertised on Cleveland stations featuring a perky dyed blonde in a sparkly angel costume; their catchphrase played off Ron’s surname: In need of divine intervention? Call us! We’re the DeVine Law Firm at your service!— sung by a barbershop quartet, in white gowns with those tinfoil halos. It came on so often it burrowed into your neocortex. People in town hummed the cornpone lyrics.
The barbershop quartet was Mark Sufritta’s brainchild. “Sorefeet” was the trio’s ace trial lawyer with a luxuriant helmet of gray, coiffed hair; he connected me with Ron. I’ve known him since high school. He’s a demon for attaching himself like a cockleburr to the prosecution’s weakest point, and it’s amazing how often it works with that one knuckleheaded juror who thinks holding out against a conviction despite a mountain of evidence meticulously accumulated against Sorefeet’s client is a mandate from on high—Mark’s syrupy closing statements practically promise the hold-out a guaranteed place in heaven. Jake Nelson, an ex-jock with a busted nose, handles tort cases and does any small-potatoes estate work. But every big-money case falls into the lap of Ron “Nino” DeVine, Esquire.
Much as I hate that gravely-voiced call, I wasn’t doing so much business from my Northtown office in the harbor I could afford to be choosy. Being a one-man operation, it behooves me to roll out of bed, hit the shower, slam my system with two cups of black coffee and hie me to yon faux-Tudor office on Lake Avenue to do the master’s bidding. DeVine’s was a few notches above the ambulance-chasing firm it had started out as, and they paid well. Moreover, a word in the right ears from DeVine to his Cleveland connections could jolt my own business out of the doldrums. As if I needed another reason, I was getting weary of following errant spouses from one freeway motel rendezvous to the other.
Some work I did for DeVine’s was downright sleazy, some could be described as dangerous. None of it left goodwill in my wake when I turned in the reports. Some ex-wives in town despise me on sight after I’d assisted their husbands. The fact I worked as hard gathering evidence for wives to leave their husbands shorn of a sizeable portion of their earthly goods made little difference. My plate glass window has been shot out twice, my car vandalized, and one client’s ex took special umbrage at my zeal in her behalf and is currently doing three-to-five in the Lake Erie Correctional for attempting to hire a hit man to arrange my premature death in as gruesome a manner as said hitman could accomplish. Fortunately, that hit man was an undercover sheriff’s deputy.
Rich people are smart but not always in the ways of crime. However, you’d think by now everybody had the same memo that jails everywhere tape all calls in and out. The defendant’s resorting to pig-Latin from the county hoosegow didn’t fool anybody. During voire dire when “uck-fay that umbag-scay up” was translated for the jury, some laughed aloud. Sufritta told me when he and the prosecutor were in Judge Mangold’s chambers before trial started, the judge gave out a yip or a bark of laughter at the pig Latin ruse. Northtown’s “Hanging Judge of the Criminal Courts” isn’t known for humor. “You see I’m not laughing, Mark,” I told him outside the trial room.
Thirty minutes later, I was sitting across Ron’s gleaming desk watching him give me that lawyer’s appraisal, a stare to remind me I served at his pleasure. I gazed over his desk, big enough that a sequoia must have been sacrificed for it; it was cluttered with Newton’s cradles and pendulum balls, those executive toys people display. In Ron’s case, his stacks of briefs and client files obscured much of the space.
I’d asked him why he didn’t want the name of his lawyer-client on my report.
“Because we’re a brotherhood, shamus. You guys, sheesh , you private eyes would knock your mother over if she happened to be standing on a dime.”
I said, “I can’t be very effective if I’m working in the dark.”
“Don’t be dumb, Ray. No all-night surveillance dressed like a wino in an alley or crawling through hedges to peek into people’s bedroom windows. This is easy-peasey.”
I found it ironic that all the window-peeping, filthy-alley-lurking, and belly-crawling I’d done had been at his behest for his clients. If you’ve ever seen the derelict buildings and crime-ridden streets of East Cleveland, you’d appreciate that.
“It doesn’t sound easy to me,” I argued.
“Trust me, it is.”
When a lawyer says to you, “Trust me,” watch out.
“I don’t know—”
“Ray, let me spell it out for you. The client’s reputation is what matters here. You know what that means, right? You’re in business. Word gets out some schmucko is embezzling funds, they’re done around here.”
I hardly thought Northtown qualified as the legal mecca of Northeastern Ohio. He saw the skeptical look on my face.
“I’m talking about Cleveland, Jarvi, where the action is.”
Action means only one thing in Nino’s lexicon. Justice? Truth? Those are quibbles for dullard law-school professors to wrangle over like some theologian in the Middle Ages arguing about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. DeVine once told me Share and share alike was the absolute worst expression to come out of Blackstone’s Law Commentaries since the Magna Carta. If a lawyer carried that silly notion on his pennant into trial combat, Ron said, he or she deserved the annihilation sure to follow. If it didn’t involve spreadsheets with billable hours, it didn’t exist. Next to Make me some money , Get me some of that green was his favorite saying.
Still, I had my doubts about the easy part. DeVine was a go-between for an in-house private investigation into a big Cleveland firm’s finances. Using a Northtown law firm was a way to keep a lid on potential gossip from being leaked. If someone over there in the KeyBank building off the Memorial Shoreway was running a scam on Boone & Fuqua, it could ruin its glossy, white-shoe reputation.
Both Lisa Boone and Thomas Fuqua were among Cleveland’s elite in law and social circles both. Lisa Boone was especially well connected to city politics and the upper levels of its social strata. I liked Tom. I’d met him on occasion and seen him on the news involving cases that weren’t high profile. He was the firm’s workhorse and biggest moneymaker. I liked him because he did pro bono work that helped defendants that needed a break to keep the law’s machinery from crushing them. DeVine, on the other hand, was an ex-seminarian who had gone over to the dark side; he enjoyed pointing out misericordia was medieval Latin for “merciful” but misericorde meant a sharp-pointed dagger used for delivering the death stroke.
“I need mor