We'll Always Have Murder

by Bill Crider

  If I’d been as heroic as I sometimes liked to think I was, I’d have rushed over and knocked the spiders off the screaming woman. She stood there, rigid as a lamppost, as if she were waiting for someone to do just that, and kept up the yelling. I hoped someone would do something, because I knew it wasn’t going to be me. If it had been anything else crawling on her, snakes, for example, I’d have been right on the case. Snakes don’t bother me. Spiders do.

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  Anyway, I thought it was Robert Carroll’s job to take care of them.

  He was the hero of the picture. Let him handle it.

  He didn’t want to handle it. He was huddled behind Harvey Elledge, and he was screaming, too.

  No surprise there. Nearly everyone was screaming or yelling by now. I couldn’t make out any words, but that wasn’t my fault.

  Everyone was pretty much incoherent. Even the chimp, which had fled up a tree, was chattering.

  I looked around for Dawson, but he wasn’t anywhere that I could see. He’d run away, I supposed, which is exactly what I would have done if only my knees had worked.

  Meanwhile the woman stood there her arms held out slightly from her sides, her legs a bit spread, as the spiders crawled over her and even into her long black hair.

  Just about the time I decided that no one was going to make a move, Bogart walked over to the screaming woman. He was as calm as he’d been when we were walking into Romanoff’s for some eggs and bacon. He said something to the woman, and then he started brushing the spiders off her and onto the ground. He was so casual about it that you might think he dealt with vicious flesh-eating spiders every day.

  It didn’t take him but a couple of seconds to get all the spiders off the woman. The trouble with that was that the spiders were running in all directions, and people were scattering like scared rabbits. I didn’t go anywhere. It wasn’t because I was too afraid to move. At least I told myself that.

  Stella Gordon didn’t go anywhere, either. She went over to the woman, who was sobbing now, and put her arms around her to comfort her. The woman’s shoulders shook, and Stella held her gently.

  People started drifting back, and Stella led the woman into the trees so she could cry in private.

  I forced my locked knees to flex again and walked to where Bogart stood. I said, “You saved her life.”

  “Saved her life, my ass. Those spiders wouldn’t hurt anybody.”

  “Don’t tell me,” I said. “Let me guess. You’re going to say that they’re as afraid of us as we are of them. You’d be wrong, though, at least in my case.”

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  “I wasn’t going to tell you that,” Bogart said, pointing. “Look at them.”

  I looked around. Most of the spiders were gone, and a rotund little man was scampering around trying to gather up the ones he could find. Each time he caught one, he picked it up as if it were no more dangerous than a doughnut and put it back in the cage before going to look for another.

  “I don’t see anything special about them,” I said. “They’re tarantulas.”

  “Yeah, the kind you could find in the desert, not in the jungle, not that anybody who sees this crummy picture will know that.”

  “I don’t care where they’re from. I don’t like them.”

  “You have a phobia?”

  “Maybe. I know I don’t like spiders.”

  “They won’t hurt you much. If they did bite you, which isn’t likely, it wouldn’t be any worse than a little wasp sting.”

  “I’m not all that fond of wasp stings if you want to know the truth about it.”

  “What kind of shamus are you, Scott? You’re supposed to be a tough guy. Tough guys aren’t afraid of spiders.”

  “I never said I was a tough guy.”

  “You’re a detective, though. I do have that part right, don’t I?”

  “I’d like to think so.”

  “Good. Why don’t you start detecting and find out who dumped those spiders on Wendy.”

  “Wendy?” I said.

  “Wendy Felsen. She’s been around my place a few times with Robert and Stella. She looks pretty good in that jungle suit, doesn’t she?”

  I admitted that she did, but I didn’t see what the spider episode had to do with anything we were interested in.

  “Maybe nothing,” Bogart said. “But you never can tell. It’s the little things you have to watch for. They’re always what trips up the crooks.

  That’s in all the movies. Did they leave it out of the Detective’s Handbook.”

  “I probably skipped over that part.”

  “You shouldn’t do that.” He ran the ball of his thumb along his jawline.

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  “Let’s ask the little guy who’s catching the spiders if he noticed anything.”

  I didn’t see anything wrong with that as long as I didn’t have to deal with spiders. As we walked in his direction another man appeared on the scene and started yelling about how it was costing him five thousand dollars an hour to film the movie and what the hell was going on around there anyway?

  “Producer,” Bogart said out of the side of his mouth in the same tone he might have used to discuss dog droppings on his rug. “Just ignore him.”

  I did. Elledge was the one who went to him and started speaking to him in soft tones so that I couldn’t overhear. Carroll trailed along behind Elledge, standing so close to him that they might almost have been Siamese twins. I guess Carroll liked spiders even less than I did, if that was possible.

  But the spiders were pretty much taken care of now. The man who had been gathering them up had closed the cage and seemed to be satisfied that either he had all of them or that the ones he didn’t have weren’t ever going to be found. The skin on my arms prickled at the thought of any of them running around loose. It was funny in a way because I’d withstood enemy fire on Saipan without turning a hair, and I had the scars to prove it.

  The man looked up when he saw us coming and said, “Oh, my. Can it be Humphrey Bogart in person? I loved your work in High Sierra.”

  “I was pretty fond of that, myself,” Bogart said. “Especially since I almost didn’t get the part.”

  “It would have been unthinkable to use anyone else. No one would have been right for it.”

  “Leslie Howard was the only one who thought so at the time. Are those your spiders?”

  The man looked at the cage. “Oh, yes. Yes, indeed. Do you like spiders?”

  “I don’t,” I said. “My name’s Terry Scott, by the way.”

  “Oh, I didn’t introduce myself, did I? I’m Lane. Lane Trueblood.”

  He extended a soft, limp, and slightly damp hand. “I do a lot of work with animals for the studio.”

  “You have to be careful with animals,” Bogart said with a glance at the spider cage. “They might get loose.”

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  “Oh, the spiders didn’t get loose. And they’re not animals. They’re arachnids.”

  I wasn’t interested in a biology lesson, but one thing he said did get my attention.

  “If they didn’t get loose,” I said, “how did they get all over Miss Felsen?”

  Trueblood clasped his pudgy little hands together and looked around.

  “It could be construed that it was my fault,” he said.

  “We wouldn’t construe that,” Bogart assured him, but Trueblood didn’t seem to care. He wasn’t worried about us. He was thinking about the producer.

  “You see,” he said, “I’m supposed to be with the spiders at all times, for safety’s sake, but I had to go…relieve myself. There are times when it’s absolutely necessary, and the spiders were secure, or so I thought.”

  “They didn’t open that cage by themselves,” Bogart said.

  “No. Indeed they didn’t. Let me show you.”

  He walked over to t
he cage, picked it up, and brought it back to where we were standing.

  When he got close, I moved away. I knew the spiders couldn’t get out, or part of me knew it. The other part of me wasn’t so sure.

  “Look,” Trueblood said, and he pointed out the latch on the cage.

  There was a hasp that slipped over a U-bolt, and a piece of metal was run through the bolt to hold the hasp in place. “I know it was secure before I left. I checked.”

  “So somebody let the spiders out,” Bogart said. He looked at me.

  “Now all you have to do is find out who it was.”

  “Oh, I know who it was,” Trueblood said. “I saw it happen.”

  We waited for him to tell us the name of the guilty party, but he didn’t. He returned the cage to its place and then came back over to where we stood.

  “Well,” I said, “are you going to tell us who it was or are you planning to make us give you the third degree?”

  “That sounds rather exciting,” Trueblood said. “Would you both be involved?”

  “Look, cutie,” Bogart said. “We like you, but you’re not really our type. Just tell us who let the spiders out.”

  “Oh, all right, if that’s the way you want it.”

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  “That’s the way we want it,” I said. “Tell us who it was.”

  “It was Wendy,” he said. “Miss Felsen, I mean. She let them out herself.”

  I must have looked surprised because Trueblood said, “I did see her.

  I don’t make up stories just to get attention.”

  “He doesn’t like spiders,” Bogart said. “Naturally he was a bit shocked.”

  Trueblood was disappointed in me. The corners of his soft mouth turned down.

  “You don’t like spiders? But they won’t hurt you. They’re far kinder than most human beings I know.”

  I didn’t want to get into a philosophical discussion. I said, “Why would someone do a thing like that?”

  “Just for fun?” Bogart said, but I knew he was only needling me.

  Trueblood, however took him seriously. He got a sly look in his eyes.

  “It just depends on what you mean by fun.”

  I didn’t know what he meant, but Bogart seemed to. He gave a wry grin and said, “So that’s it.”

  I was going to ask him to explain it to me, but before I could say anything someone yelled out, “What’s that son of a bitch doing on this set? I want him out of here right now!”

  We turned around to see who was causing the commotion. A man in a light-colored suit and hat was staring in our direction and pointing a skinny finger.

  “I don’t think he likes you much,” Trueblood said.

  “You’re right,” Bogart said. “Is he the writer on this picture?”

  “Yes, indeed. I’m surprised he’s here, though. He’s always complaining about the way the actors play the scenes. Mr. Elledge has had him removed from the set several times already.”

  “It figures,” Bogart said. “I knew he’d sold a script. I didn’t know it was this cheap jungle epic. That figures, too.”

  It was beginning to look as if nearly everyone who’d been at Bogart’s place for the party was working on Jan of the Jungle.

  “I mean it,” Babson said. “I want him off this set. He has no business here. He’s trying to steal our ideas for some Goddamned Warner Brothers picture.”

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  Trueblood giggled. “As if Warner Brothers needed to steal from Superior.”

  A man wearing a white hunter’s outfit walked over and took Babson’s arm. I’d seen enough jungle movies to know that the white hunter was invariably the villain. And I happened to recognize this one.

  “Joey Gallindo,” I said. “Let me guess who’s playing the comic relief.”

  “The chimp,” Bogart said. “It’s always the chimp.”

  “Not this time,” Trueblood said. “Where is Timbo, I wonder.”

  Timbo had to be the chimp.

  “He’s up a tree,” I said. “You could probably get him down if you offered him a cigarette.”

  “Oh, I’d never do that. Smoking isn’t good for him.” He looked disapprovingly at Bogart, who’d lit up a Chesterfield. “It’s not good for you, either.”

  Bogart grinned at him and then blew out a plume of smoke, which Trueblood waved away with fluttering hands.

  “If Timbo’s not the comic relief,” I said, “who is?”

  “Timbo’s a serious actor,” Trueblood said. “He wouldn’t stoop to the cheap humor in this picture. So they had to hire someone who would.”

  “Slappy Coville,” I said.

  “How did you ever guess?”

  “It was easy,” I said.

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  CHAPTER

  16

  What wasn’t easy was figuring out where to start. Everyone from the party was working on the same Superior picture, which meant that Burleson could have had something on all of them. And maybe that each of them knew about the others. It was getting complicated, and I didn’t like complications. I preferred cowboys who fell in love with their horses. Odd, maybe. Even perverse.

  But not complicated.

  Joey Gallindo had pulled Babson off to the side and was talking earnestly to him. It didn’t really matter. No one had paid Babson any attention in the first place, so Babson was calming down. He didn’t want us to notice how little influence he had.

  “I must coax Timbo down from that tree,” Trueblood said. “He’s supposed to be in the next scene. It’s been a pleasure to meet you.”

  He meant Bogart, but I said, “It’s been a pleasure to meet you, too”

  before the walked off to see about his chimp.

  When he was gone, I said to Bogart, “You neglected to mention that everyone who came to your party was in the same picture.”

  “I told you I didn’t invite them. They just showed up. If I’d invited them, Babson wouldn’t have been there.”

  “Let me see if I have this right. He’ll drink your whiskey, but he doesn’t want you on his set.”

  “His set. I like that. You’re always good for a laugh, Junior.”

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  “You know what I mean.”

  “Yeah. I do. So let me tell you the way it was. He showed up at my house with a bunch of other people. They’d all had a drink or two by the time they got there. I don’t know why they came, but they did, and I wasn’t going to turn them away. I like most of them, except for Babson.”

  “One of them probably framed you for murder.”

  “And I know which one would be the most likely suspect. Babson.

  Too bad there’s a problem with that.”

  I didn’t see the problem, and I said so.

  “You need to go to more movies, Junior. The most likely suspect is never the guilty party.”

  “It’s not that way in real life,” I said. “Usually the most likely suspect is the one who did it. That’s why he’s the likely suspect.”

  “Good. Let’s call your friend Congreve and have Babson hauled off to the pokey.”

  It wasn’t that easy, and Bogart knew it. He was giving me the needle again. I would have called him on it, but just then Dawson came sauntering up as if he’d just stepped away for a refreshing drink or maybe to have a smoke with the chimp. But I suspected that he’d been hiding behind a tree somewhere.

  “Never a dull moment,” Dawson said.

  He took off his pith helmet and wiped the leather sweatband with a handkerchief that he produced from one of the many pockets of his jacket. The outfit was similar to the one being worn by Joey Gallindo.

  “Are you doubling for Gallindo?” I asked.

  He returned the handkerchief to his pocket and put the helmet back on his head.

  “How did you guess?” he asked.

  “He’s a professional detective,” Bogart said. “He sees thi
ngs other men don’t notice.”

  The needle again, but I ignored it. I said, “Why weren’t you at the party last night?”

  “Did I miss a party? How unlike me.”

  “At Bogie’s house,” I said. “Half the cast was there.”

  “I didn’t know about it. But then I’m not so friendly with most of these people.” He looked over to where Babson and Gallindo were still deep in conversation. “Frankly, they make my skin crawl.”

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  “I’m not all that fond of them myself,” Bogart said. “So why did they end up at my place?”

  That’s what I was wondering. Whose idea had it been to go to Bogart’s place? Was there someone in the group who had known about the pistol even before Mayo had brought it out? And if so, which one of the partygoers had it been?

  Dawson told us that he had no idea how the group had gotten to Bogart’s house. He said that several of them got together every evening after filming and went somewhere. It didn’t seem to matter where.

  “Maybe they all talked about Burleson,” Bogart said.

  I didn’t think that was the case. If they had secrets they wanted to keep hidden, they wouldn’t have discussed them openly. On the other hand, I knew that on a set there were sometimes very few secrets.

  Things had a way of coming out whether they were discussed openly or not. Whatever Burleson had known might have been known to others as well.

  “We’d like to talk to Stella Gordon,” Bogart said. “But she seems to have disappeared.”

  “It happens now and again,” Dawson said. “You know what stars are like.”

  “Present company excepted,” Bogart said.

  Dawson nodded. “Goes without saying.”

  “Thanks.”

  “At any rate, there won’t be any talking here for a while,” Dawson said. “Everyone’s leaving for a break because they’re upset about the spiders. So we’ll be setting up for the another scene, and it won’t be filmed until after dark.”

  “It’s a night scene, huh?” I said.

  Dawson and Bogart just looked at me. I suppose it wasn’t the brightest thing I’d ever said, but I tried to defend myself.

  “Sometimes they do night scenes during the day,” I said.

  “They always look shoddy and faked,” Dawson said, “and they never, so far as I know, do the reverse.”