We'll Always Have Murder

by Bill Crider

  “Just enough to drop by, see how he was doing.”

  “That’s right. Just enough. But no more.”

  “That’s swell,” Congreve said. “Isn’t that swell, Garton?”

  “Yeah,” Garton said. “Swell.”

  Congreve clapped me on the shoulder with one meaty hand, nearly knocking me into the wall.

  “You can go on home now, Scott,” he said. “I don’t suppose I’ll run into you again. Certainly not because of anything related to Frank here.”

  “Certainly not,” I said.

  “I’d better not,” Congreve said. “Now get out of here.”

  He didn’t have to tell me twice.

  32

  CHAPTER

  8

  The Garden of Allah wasn’t exactly the earthly paradise the name might lead you to expect. Not that the builders hadn’t tried.

  Its official address was 8152 Sunset Boulevard, but it actually covered most of a city block, bordered by Havenhurst, Crescent, and Fountain as well as Sunset. It had started out as a private estate in the ’20s, but a Russian actress named Nazimova had converted it into a hotel of about twenty-five bungalows sometime before the ’30s.

  Nazimova had also added the swimming pool that Marlene Dietrich went skinny-dipping in and Errol Flynn chased women around.

  There was a big curved wall that gave the illusion of privacy, though the bungalows were so cheap that you could supposedly hear your next-door neighbor snoring.

  The grounds were planted with tall evergreens, and bamboo grew everywhere. I guess the trees were supposed to add to the “garden”

  motif.

  The architecture was more Spanish than anything else. Maybe with a Moorish influence, which I suppose would explain the “Allah” part of the name. Not that it mattered. I didn’t think any of the residents spent much time in worship.

  I parked on the street and walked through the wrought-iron gate into the garden. There was a flagstone path that wandered among the bungalows. I was hoping to see Marlene Dietrich naked in the pool, 33

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  but she didn’t live there any longer. Neither did Errol Flynn. The place was going downhill, and I figured Bogart would move to a bigger and better place before too long.

  Part of my job is to know where all Mr. Warner’s stars live, and I located Bogart’s place with no trouble. I knocked on the door, and he let me in. He had a drink in one hand and a cigarette dangled from his lips.

  “You look as if you could use a Scotch,” he said. “Have a seat, and I’ll get you one.”

  “I don’t drink,” I reminded him, looking around the room.

  It didn’t look like a room in the home of a movie star. It was filled with battered furniture that might have been in anybody’s house anywhere, and the place was a mess. Glasses sat on the coffee table along with a couple of empty liquor bottles, the ashtrays were full, the couch was covered with newspaper, and one chair was overturned.

  The only classy thing in the room was the picture of Lauren Bacall on the mantel.

  Bogart saw where I was looking. “Beautiful, isn’t she?”

  I nodded.

  “Best thing that ever happened to me. I know people say that all the time about their wives, but most of them don’t really mean it. I do.”

  “Does she know about Frank?” I asked.

  Bogart took a drag on his cigarette and followed it with a sip of Scotch.

  “No,” he said. “She’s not here at the moment.”

  “Where is she?”

  “In New York, doing a short publicity tour and visiting her mother.

  In a few weeks, we’re going to be shooting a picture together. It’s called Dark Passage. Betty wanted to see her mother before we got started, and the studio wanted to get her picture in the New York papers. Dark Passage is going to be a good picture, and a popular one, too, if people can get over the idea that a man would actually have plastic surgery and choose to wind up looking like me.”

  “Half the guys in America would like to look like you,” I said.

  He stroked his chin. “I can’t imagine why.”

  I pointed to the picture of Bacall. “There’s one good reason.”

  He laughed. “Well, I can’t blame them then.” He looked around the 34

  WE’LL ALWAYS HAVE MURDER

  room. “I’d offer you a seat, but there doesn’t seem to be one. The maid didn’t come in today.”

  I righted the chair and sat down.

  “What happened here?” I asked.

  Bogart swept newspapers off the couch and settled on it. The papers settled on the floor.

  “There was a little party last night,” Bogart said by way of explanation for the way the room looked. “Nothing formal, as you can tell. Just one of those things that happens every so often.” He stuck his cigarette into one of the ashtrays, where it was smothered in a heap of ash. “People drop by. You know how it is.”

  I didn’t know how it was. Nobody ever dropped by my place. Not even my old pal Frank Burleson. Mostly I listened to the radio if I wasn’t working. Amos and Andy, Fibber McGee and Molly, The Shadow. I knew them all, but we didn’t meet socially.

  “Did Marlene Dietrich get naked and go for a swim?” I asked.

  Bogart laughed. “She wasn’t around. Neither was Benchley.”

  I remembered the Benchley story. A while back it had gone all over Hollywood in less than a day. Someone had been pushing him in a wheelbarrow and dumped in him the Garden’s pool.

  “Get me out of this wet suit and into a dry martini,” Benchley was supposed to have said, and probably did.

  “Too bad he wasn’t here,” I said. “He sounds like a barrel of laughs.

  Did you kill Burleson?”

  Bogart lit another Chesterfield and waved smoke away from his face.

  “That was a pretty quick change of subject. Were you hoping to catch me off guard?”

  “Right out of the Detective’s Handbook,” I said. “But you’re too smart for me.”

  “I doubt it. What makes you ask that, anyway?”

  “It was your pistol lying there by Frank,” I pointed out.

  “I’ve been thinking about that.”

  “So have I. Did you kill him?”

  “No. I was hoping that you trusted me enough not to ask.”

  “I have to ask,” I told him. “It’s part of the job. In the Detective’s Handbook, too.”

  “So you asked, and I answered. Do you believe me?”

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  “Sure. Why not? I’ve heard a lot of things about you since I’ve been working for Mr. Warner, some of them not so good. You might find this hard to believe, but there are actually people in this town who think you’re a son of a bitch.”

  Bogart grinned. “And they’re absolutely correct. But I earned the right to be one. Let me tell you something, Junior. When I came to this town, I took every role they offered me and never complained.

  Even after I started to make a name for myself, I still took whatever they told me to. ‘Just give me the script,’ that was all I ever said. But it’s not that way any longer. I have a little power now, and I’m finally using it. There are some people who don’t like it. Fuck ‘em.”

  He took a deep drag on his cigarette. The coal glowed brightly.

  “If that’s true,” I said, “why did you make The Two Mrs. Carrolls?”

  “Jesus,” Bogart said, and laughed again. “Your needle is almost as sharp as mine. I made that thing two years ago for that bastard Harry Cohn, and I should have known better. Harry Cohn was reason enough to avoid it, and playing an English painter was another. Even Harry didn’t want to release it, which tells you a lot. But he finally did, the greedy son of a bitch. What else have you heard about me?”

  “Even the people who say you’re as much a son of a bitch as Harry Cohn admit that you’re a man of your word. You never lie, and you never back down. I’d like to
think they’re absolutely correct about that, too.”

  “So would I.”

  “We’ll take it as a given, then. Which means you didn’t kill Burleson. So who did?”

  Bogart got rid of his cigarette and lit another. Instead of answering my question, he said, “How did you get away from the cops?”

  “They weren’t stupid. That’s both good and bad, but at least they were smart enough to realize I hadn’t killed Frank. Maybe they’ll find out for us, though we can’t count on it. And there’s another problem.”

  “I know,” Bogart said.

  “I’m not talking about who killed Frank. I’m talking about what might have been missing from his house.”

  “I thought the room looked as if the killer might have searched it.

  Do you think he took anything?”

  “It’s possible. Frank might have been stupid enough to keep something in his house, but that’s doubtful. If it was blackmail information, 36

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  it was probably at his office, or even in a safe deposit box. If it was in either of those two places, the cops will find it. They didn’t find it at Frank’s, at least not while I was there.”

  “So someone else might have.”

  “That’s right, and that brings us back to my earlier question. Who killed him?”

  “Why would I have any idea about that?”

  “We’re back to that pistol again. Your wife is out of town, so you know she didn’t do it. Who does that leave?”

  “As I said, I’ve been thinking about that.”

  “And what did you decide?”

  “It could have been anyone,” Bogart said evasively.

  He took a sip of his Scotch. It was only the second one I’d seen him take. Again I got the impression that he didn’t drink nearly as much as people said.

  “Was Mayo at that party you told me about?” I asked. If he wasn’t going to get to the point, I was.

  He nodded but didn’t look in my direction.

  “So were a lot of other people,” he said.

  “But Mayo knew where the pistol was.”

  “You’re wrong if you think Sluggy had anything to do with killing that skunk. She’s crazy, sure, but she’s not that crazy. Besides, she never picked on anyone except me.”

  We both knew that wasn’t true, and there were plenty of newspaper stories to prove it wasn’t. For example, once when Bogart had been accosted by a man who wanted to show how tough he was, it had been Mayo who decked the guy.

  Bogart noticed that I looked skeptical. “All right, she might have a violent streak, but she wouldn’t shoot a man. You can believe me.

  I know her better than anyone.”

  “But she was here last night, and she knew where the pistol was.”

  “Sure, she knew. And she was telling people about it last night.

  She was a little drunk, or maybe she was a lot drunk, and she started talking about some of the fights we used to have. People were laughing, and that encouraged her. She told them that if we’d ever really gotten angry, one of us would have shot the other, and then she showed them the pistol.”

  “She showed it to them?”

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  WE’LL ALWAYS HAVE MURDER

  “That’s what I said. She went into the bedroom and got it.”

  This was getting more complicated than I’d thought. And it was worrying me besides. Maybe I should have made Bogart stick around and have a few words with Congreve.

  “Did any of them touch it?”

  “I don’t remember. I don’t think so.”

  “Did you touch it?”

  “No. What difference does it make?”

  “Think about it,” I said. “You’ve made enough crime movies to figure it out.”

  He did, and he came to the same conclusion that I had.

  “Sluggy’s prints could be on that pistol,” he said. “Even if she didn’t do it.”

  “If the killer was careful enough,” I said.

  “That’s rough. I wouldn’t want to see Sluggy get in trouble for something she didn’t do. And she didn’t do it.”

  “We don’t know that for sure.”

  “I know it.”

  “All right. But we’re going to have to talk to her just the same.”

  “‘We’?”

  “That’s right. I think having you along will make things a lot easier for me. If she’s as feisty as I’ve heard she is.”

  “There’s no question about it. She’s as feisty as they come.”

  38

  CHAPTER

  9

  We went out to get my car and I looked over at Schwab’s drugstore across the street. I asked Bogart if Lana Turner had really been “discovered” there.

  “You know about publicity departments,” he said, lighting a Chesterfield.

  “Yeah. You and the rattlesnake farm.”

  “Don’t forget the time I put on the false beard and played the bull fiddle in an orchestra.”

  We got in the car and I asked where we were going.

  “I knew you needed me for more than an introduction,” Bogart said, and he gave me the name of the hotel where Mayo was living.

  It was on Sunset, but Sunset is a long street, and some parts of it are better than others. The hotel he named was in one of the others.

  We wound through the traffic, which is always heavy on Sunset, no matter the time of day or night. The difference is that it’s more dangerous late at night, when drivers were likely to be a little more careless than usual, having fortified themselves with a martini or three, or perhaps a few glasses of good (or not-so-good) Scotch.

  “How long have you been working for Jack Warner?” Bogart asked me.

  “A couple of years,” I said.

  “A man your age must have been in the service.”

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  “That’s right. Marines. I got out a few years ago.”

  “I notice that you have a little limp. Did you pick that up in the service?”

  “Yeah. Saipan.”

  “Purple Heart?”

  “Yeah, and a ticket home.”

  “You’re lucky you didn’t get killed,” Bogart said. “But you probably didn’t think about that. I know I never did. Hell, when you’re a kid, you don’t worry about dying, not even when it’s happening all around you. You don’t start to think about it until you get to be my age and start reading the obituaries of people whose accomplishments you read about when you were growing up, or of people your own age.

  Those are the worst.”

  He opened the ashtray and tapped his cigarette on the edge.

  “I shot a man once,” he said. “When I was in the service.”

  I’d heard the story, or thought I had. I didn’t say anything, just waited to see if he’d tell the rest of it.

  “I didn’t kill him,” Bogart went on. “I know that story is going around, and, hell, I don’t care. It’s good for my reputation. But I didn’t kill him.”

  “It’s like the rattlesnake farm all over again,” I said.

  Bogart flicked his cigarette out the car window, and it trailed a sparkling tail like a comet.

  “Yeah,” he said, “except this time it’s almost true. I was escorting a prisoner to Portsmouth, where he was going to spend the rest of his time in the brig. We went on the train. He was handcuffed, and he didn’t give any trouble. We even started talking, and he didn’t seem like such a bad sort. There were plenty of men in the brig who probably didn’t belong there, or so I thought at the time.”

  “If that’s the case, why did you shoot him?”

  “I’m coming to that. We were changing trains in South Boston, and he asked me for a cigarette. I stuck one in his mouth, and when I started to light it for him, he slugged me in the face with both hands.

  It wasn’t his hands that hit me, though. It was the handcuffs. They nearly cut my lip off. So I shot the son of a bitch.”
r />   “But you didn’t kill him.”

  “No. There was a lot of blood, but most of it was mine. You’d be surprised how much you can bleed from a cut in your lip. I just winged 40

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  the guy, and he hardly bled at all. I got him on down to Portsmouth, and a doctor sewed me up without benefit of anesthetic. Unless you count Scotch. There was some of that as I remember.”

  “I hadn’t heard that part of the story.”

  Bogart ran his index finger over his upper lip and grinned.

  “Not many people have. I guess you could say I owe that guy a lot.

  He’s the reason for this stiff upper lip, and for that little lisp I sometimes have.”

  “I thought you got the wound in the lip from shrapnel.”

  Bogart lit another Chesterfield and exhaled smoke.

  “That’s another one of those rattlesnake farm stories. Someone must have thought that getting a shrapnel wound in battle sounded more glamorous than getting hit in the face with handcuffs.”

  Shrapnel wounds weren’t glamorous at all. I could vouch for that.

  I said, “The gun you shot the man with. Is that the one you kept?”

  “Yeah. The one I brought home from the service. The same one you saw tonight.”

  “I don’t think they bothered with ballistics tests on the bullet they dug out of your prisoner.”

  “No. They didn’t bother much with him. The doc sewed me up first, in fact.” He looked out the window and gave a jerk of his head. “That’s the place where Sluggy’s staying.”

  It was called The Palms, and it wasn’t the most prepossessing place on the Sunset Strip. A couple of tall, ratty-looking palms grew out front. The canopy over the walk had a couple of fair-sized holes in it. They looked as if they’d been there a while. I pulled the Chevy to the curb and we got out.

  A black Packard Clipper drove past us. It was a pre-War model. I could tell because of the fender-shells that covered most of the back wheel-wells.

  “Do you think we were tailed?” Bogart asked.

  “Tailed?” It hadn’t entered my head. “By that car?”

  “Yeah. It’s been behind us since we left my place.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I saw it pull out behind us,” Bogart said, “and I glanced in the mirror a couple of times. I think you’re supposed to do that, according to the Detective’s Handbook.”