by Bill Crider
“Wanting doesn’t have anything to do with it,” I said.
“I see.”
He pulled the pack back and left it on the table beside the book of matches. He tugged at his earlobe with his free hand and looked me over.
“You don’t look like a detective,” he said after a moment. “You’re young, you’re bald, you’re ugly, you’re short, and you’re a little chubby.”
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“You played Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade. They’re detectives.
But at least you’re not chubby. Or young.”
Bogart laughed and took another sip of his martini.
“You don’t mind the needle,” he said. “That’s a rare quality. I usually get under people’s skins pretty quickly.”
“There’s something you didn’t notice about my skin. It’s very thick.”
“Good. So’s mine. Maybe we’ll get along.”
I leaned back in the booth and said, “I don’t get it. Why should we get along?”
“Because of what you heard in Mr. Warner’s office. Frank Burleson is trying to blackmail me, and I’m not going to pay. I’m going to tell him that. I’d like you to be there when I do.”
I usually work alone. The last thing I needed was some actor, even if it was Bogart, tagging along with me, much less trying to take over.
“Why would you want to do the telling?” I asked.
“Do you want the long version or the short one?”
“The short one will do.”
“All right, but I need another drink. The world is always supposed to be three drinks behind me, and I think it’s gaining.”
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CHAPTER
4
Bogart waved to the bartender, and with fresh martini and another cigarette in hand, he said, “I met your friend Burleson for the first time a few years ago.”
“Frank wasn’t my friend,” I said. “He was a first-class louse, and I’m surprised Wayne hired him at Superior. If he’d asked me for a recommendation, he wouldn’t have.”
“He was a louse, all right, and a snooper.” He looked at me through cigarette smoke. “No offense.”
“None taken. It’s what I do. It’s what Frank does, too.”
“I know. I just happen to think it’s a poor way to make a living.”
I shrugged. Most people I meet felt the same way.
“It’s different in the movies,” Bogart said. “Private eyes, at least the ones I play, may be a little on the shady side, but they have scruples, a code of their own.”
“Frank doesn’t,” I said. I didn’t bother to defend myself. “Or very few. Tell me about meeting him.”
“It happened when I was courting Betty. I was still married to Sluggy at the time, and she was insanely jealous. She knew as well as I did the marriage was over, and had been for some time. But she couldn’t admit it, not even to herself. So she hired a private dick to check up on me. The dick was Burleson.”
“Your wife knew about you and Miss Bacall?”
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“She didn’t know, but she suspected. Betty and I were filming To Have and Have Not. Sluggy kept calling the set after I’d left to find out where I’d gone. She was always told that I was ‘out with the cast.’
Before long, everybody was calling Betty The Cast. Naturally Sluggy was suspicious.”
“And that’s where Frank comes in.”
“That’s right. He wasn’t very good at his job, and I spotted him pretty quickly. Spade and Marlowe would have laughed at him.”
“I thought this was the short version,” I said. “All this was three or four years ago.”
“That’s not when he tried to blackmail me.”
“Ah. And when did that happen?”
“Today,” Bogart said. “At Romanoff’s, not in the restaurant itself, but just outside. When I’m not working I go there for breakfast nearly every day around noon. Everybody knows that, and that’s where Burleson met me. He said he had some ‘information’ I might be interested in. It was about Sluggy, not me, but she doesn’t have a great deal of money these days because she’s not getting any work.
Burleson couldn’t expect to get any money out of her, but he thought I’d pay to keep what he had to tell out of the papers. I told him I wasn’t paying and that I’d kill him if any hint of what he’d said ever saw print or if he ever bothered me or Sluggy again.”
That’s the kind of good-for-nothing Frank was, all right. The kind who’d try blackmailing his former clients or their husbands if he needed the money, which he often did because of another one of his lousy habits: he played the ponies. That’s fine if you win, or if you have plenty of dough, like Mr. Warner. But Frank had never been a winner, and he didn’t have any more dough than I did.
“What did he say when you threatened him?” I asked.
“He got a good laugh out of it. He said he knew I wasn’t as tough as I liked people to think and that he’d be in touch.”
“And you didn’t believe him.”
“No. I thought he was just testing me to see how I’d react. But he called, all right, later this afternoon.”
I had finished my Coke, and I rattled the ice that was left in the glass. Bogart was still working on his second martini. He didn’t seem to be drinking as much as I’d heard he did. But I’d lost count of the cigarettes.
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“What does he have on Mayo?” I asked, not quite able to call her Sluggy.
“You don’t need to know that. If Sluggy has problems, maybe she has an excuse. Let’s just say it’s the kind of thing that could hurt her, and she’s having enough trouble these days as it is.”
Hollywood gossip, of which there is never a shortage, said that Mayo had pretty much gone to hell in a handbasket after the divorce, losing her battle with the bottle as well as her looks. It made no difference whether any of that was true. What mattered was that it was being said. So it was no wonder that Mayo couldn’t get work, and a genuine scandal of any kind would most likely finish her off as far as ever making another movie was concerned.
“All right, let’s say I don’t need to know about the blackmail except for the threat itself. We still haven’t gotten to why you want to be the one who does the talking.”
“Because I’m Bogart. Nobody does my talking for me. But I wouldn’t mind if you just stood there and looked menacing.”
“Like Bob Steele,” I said. “Eddie Mars’s best boy.”
“That sounds right. I’ll be Bogart, you’ll be Bob Steele.”
“And you think we can convince Frank not to do anything with his information?”
Bogart looked at me the way he’d looked countless times at Jimmy Cagney and Edward G. Robinson.
“Two tough guys like us?” he said. “Why not?”
“Frank knows me. He knows whether I’m really tough or not.”
“How tough are you?”
“Tough enough for me to worry Frank,” I said. “All right, I’ll be your right-hand man.”
I didn’t like it, but Mr. Warner liked to humor his stars when he could, especially one as big as Bogart. If Bogart wanted to be Bogart for one night, I supposed that was OK.
“The way I see it,” Bogart said, “is that your pal has to be stopped now. He might get the idea that he can run his con on other people if I let him get away with it.”
Frank still wasn’t my pal, but Bogart had a point. Frank was in a position to hurt a lot of people, or to make a lot of money from them.
He knew plenty of secrets, if his job was anything like mine. And it was.
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“All right,” I said. “We’ll pay Frank a little visit.”
“‘Pay him a little visit,’ huh?” Bogart said, running the backs of his fingers down his jawline, letting the tip of his thumb trail along.
“I like the
sound of that. Maybe I’ll use it in a movie.”
I didn’t even feel the needle. I said, “Feel free. But before we go, there’s one other thing I want to ask you.”
“What about?”
“It’s a question about a movie.”
“Forget it. I don’t know who killed Sternwood’s chauffeur, and neither did Raymond Chandler when we asked him about it. William Faulkner was on the set, and he’s the one who was stumped in the first place. If he and Chandler couldn’t figure it out, nobody could.”
“I guess it doesn’t matter in the long run, then.”
“Not when you’re sleeping the Big Sleep, Junior. Now are we going to make that visit or not?”
I wondered how long it had been since anybody had called me junior. A lot of years.
“Let’s go,” I said, sliding toward the edge of the booth.
“Hold on just a second,” Bogart said. “When you’re working for the studio, you’re on an expense account. Isn’t that right?”
I told him that was right.
“I thought so. You can get the check.”
16
CHAPTER
5
There was a pay phone in the Formosa, so I looked up Burleson’s address before we left. I expected his place to be some fleabag apartment, but it wasn’t that at all. It was a little bungalow on North Harper, one of several in a unit just off Santa Monica, and it was practically new. There was even an open court with a swimming pool and palm trees.
“Not bad,” Bogart said when I pulled up. “You have a place like this?”
“No,” I said. “I couldn’t afford it. Your pal Frank might already have talked to some other people. And they might have paid off.”
“He’s not my pal,” Bogart said.
“He’s not mine, either,” I told him.
I stopped the car and we got out in front of Burleson’s place. The slamming doors seemed to echo in the still air. The day had been warm, but an evening chill had started moving in from the west just as night had moved over the mountains from the east. If you looked toward L.A., you could see the miles of neon that lit up the night.
A dog barked somewhere down the street, and another dog, farther away, answered. They sounded lonely.
“Maybe you should have used that pay phone to call ahead,” Bogart said.
“Lesson Number One in the Detective’s Handbook,” I said. “Never 17
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let them know you’re coming. You want to catch them off-guard.
Sam Spade would have known that.”
“But if Burleson’s not home, we’ve wasted our time driving out here.”
“True, but Lesson Number Two says that we’re paid by the hour, so we don’t mind if we have to come back. Anyway, he’s home. The light’s on.”
A window that I assumed opened into the living room glowed in the night, and a faint yellow light shone through the thin curtains and onto the grass in the tiny yard.
“Come on,” I said.
I walked to the door and thumbed the bell-button. A muted chime sounded somewhere inside.
I waited for Burleson to respond. Bogart stood behind me, smoking a cigarette. We stood like that for fifteen or twenty seconds. No one came to the door. I rang the bell again, leaning on it a bit longer than necessary. It didn’t make any difference. Nobody came that time, either.
Bogart coughed and said, “I don’t like this, Junior. In the movies, we’d go in and find a body on the floor.”
“This isn’t a movie, and we’re not going in. I don’t do breaking and entering.”
That wasn’t strictly true. I’d done it a time or two, but not when there was a witness around.
“In the movies the door’s always unlocked,” Bogart said. “Give it a try.”
I’d tried doors before, and they’d never been unlocked. Hardly anyone in California trusted his neighbors, and with good reason.
“I’m sure it’s locked,” I said. “He’s probably in there, waiting us out. He must have seen you get out of the car.”
Bogart edged past me and put his hand on the doorknob. It must have turned easily because the door swung open.
“If he’s hiding in there,” Bogart said, “we’ll find him.” He held the door open and turned sideways. “After you, Alphonse.”
“Non, non. After you, Gaston.”
“No, no. I insist,” Bogart said, waving me in with his hand.
I went past him into the living room. It was decorated about the way you’d expect, which is to say it wasn’t decorated at all. The walls 18
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were bare of pictures and bookshelves. There was a couch with a sprung cushion, an overstuffed chair that looked almost new, and a big cabinet radio. There was a coffee table in front of the couch, and the ashtray was full of butts. But there was no sign of Burleson.
Bogart came into the room and went over to the coffee table to put his own cigarette butt in the ashtray. When he did, he said, “There’s a spark in here. Burleson hasn’t been gone long. Maybe he’s hiding in the bedroom.”
There were only two other rooms in the small bungalow, a kitchen and a bedroom. I looked into the kitchen, flipping the light switch by the door. There were dirty dishes in the sink and even on the table.
They had once been white, but now they had food residue crusted on them in various colors: brown, yellow, green. Frank wasn’t just a louse. He was a slob, too.
“Is he having a sandwich in there?” Bogart asked.
“No, but I wish I was. Having a sandwich, I mean, but not in there.
It’s Ptomaine Tavern. We should have eaten at the Formosa.”
“I wasn’t hungry, but I could have stood a bite. Why didn’t you say something? We could have had a meal on Mr. Warner.”
“I can eat later,” I said, moving to the bedroom.
I flipped the light switch and looked in. I wished I hadn’t because what I saw ruined my appetite. It was just like one of those movies Bogart had mentioned. Frank Burleson lay on the floor at the foot of the bed. He was wearing brown slacks, brown shoes, and a white shirt.
Frank looked a little surprised, as if he couldn’t believe what had happened to him. The front of he shirt was stained a dark, wet red by the blood that had leaked out of him. There wasn’t a lot of it because whoever had shot him knew pretty well where the heart was, or had gotten lucky. And after the heart had stopped, so had the blood. There was a .45 automatic lying not far from the body.
I must have said something, or made some sound, because Bogart came over to stand behind me.
“What is it?” he said.
“You don’t want to see it,” I told him.
“Why not?”
“Because it’s Frank Burleson, and he’s dead. Really dead. It might look like some movie set, but it’s not. Frank’s not some movie corpse that’s got chocolate sauce poured on it to look like blood. The direct-19
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or’s not going to say cut and have everybody get ready for the next scene. Frank’s not going to get up and read a book or start a chess game with his stand-in.”
Bogart looked past my shoulder into the room.
“Christ,” he said, which I thought was a lot better than “I told you so.”
“If you’re going to be sick,” I said, “do it outside. We don’t want the cops to find any sign of us.”
Bogart pulled out his display hanky and wiped his face.
“There might be one already,” he said, putting the handkerchief back in its place.
“Don’t worry. I’ll wipe down the light switches and the doorknob.
Don’t touch anything else.”
“It may be too late for that,” Bogart said.
He turned away and walked back into the living room. I went with him.
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“Did you see that .45?”
“I saw it, all right. Why?”
Bogart’s face was as gray as an unwashed ghost, and I thought for sure it was the sight of Frank’s body that had sickened him. But after what he said next, I wasn’t so sure.
“Why?” he said. “Because I think that’s my pistol, that’s why.”
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6
Alot of things went through my mind right at that moment, none of them good. I said, “There are a million of those things around. Why do you think it’s yours?”
“Maybe it’s not,” Bogart said. “Let’s have a look.”
It had been only a couple of seconds since he’d moved out of sight of the body, but he was already recovering. He was a lot better at being Bogart than I was at being Bob Steele. My stomach was still twitching a little.
We went back to the bedroom. Frank was still lying there on his back, staring up at nothing in particular. The room was more or less a mess, which might have been because Frank was a slob or because someone had searched it.
The pistol was still lying right where it had been. Bogart walked into the room and looked down at it.
“It’s mine, all right,” he said. He knelt down and pointed to the grips. “See that big scratch right there? That happened one night when Sluggy threw the pistol at me.”
“You should have taught her a little about firearms safety.”
Bogart stood up. “She didn’t care about safety or anything else when she was mad. She just threw whatever came to hand. I’m damned lucky she didn’t shoot me with it instead.”
I was curious, so I said, “Why didn’t she?”
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“The safety was on. She didn’t know how to take it off. I never showed her.”
A wise move, I thought. I said, “Where was the pistol? Not out in plain sight, surely.”
“It was in the drawer of a bedside table. She’d already thrown the table lamp at me, and she pulled the drawer to throw it next. But the pistol was in there, so she grabbed it.”
He said it in a flat, unemotional voice, as if it were just one more unremarkable incident in the life of the Battling Bogarts. Which it probably was.
“There are a couple of possibilities here,” I said, “but we really don’t have time to talk them over.”
