by Bill Crider
“Just a coincidence,” I said. “Nobody has any reason to follow us.”
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Bogart shrugged. “If you say so. I think you should check that Detective’s Handbook, though.”
He looked toward the hotel entrance and tossed his cigarette to the sidewalk, then crushed it under his shoe.
“Sluggy might not be glad to see us,” he said.
“Not if she killed Burleson, she won’t,” I said. “And I wouldn’t blame her.”
“That’s not the reason. She might be a little angry with me.”
“Should I ask why?”
“She thought that with Betty out of town, we might be able to have some fun last night. I told her I was a married man. She was a little upset.”
“At least she didn’t shoot you.”
“No,” Bogart said. “She didn’t shoot me. Shall we go in?”
I could think of several reasons why we shouldn’t but I said, “We might as well.”
42
CHAPTER
10
The lobby of The Palms was no more impressive than the outside.
The ashtrays hadn’t been emptied in a week or so, and there were pieces of newspaper lying in the chairs, except for the chair the house dick was asleep in. He’d been reading the news, and the paper he’d been holding had dropped from his hand onto the floor. There was a potted palm in a dark corner. It was dying. The night desk clerk didn’t look especially healthy, either.
“Can I help you gentlemen?” he asked when we approached the desk.
He had a face like a weasel and small yellow teeth with a toothpick clamped between them. His eyes also had a yellowish cast, too, as if he might have had jaundice at some time or another. His thin black hair was slicked down close to his head. He looked closely at Bogart, and his eyes narrowed.
“Hey,” he said, “aren’t you…”
“Reilly,” Bogart said. “Doghouse Reilly.”
The clerk nodded. “Yeah. I thought I reckanized you.”
The toothpick wagged when he talked.
“And I’m Bob Steele,” I said. “We’re here to see Miss Methot.”
The toothpick wagged again. “You don’t look like Bob Steele.”
I got a dollar out of my wallet and slid it over the counter toward him. He glanced over at the house dick, who was still in dreamland.
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Knowing that nobody was going to report him, he slipped the buck from under my fingertips and made it disappear.
“Room two-sixteen, Mr. Steele,” he said.
“Thanks,” I said.
Bogart and I didn’t bother to take the elevator, which probably wasn’t working anyway. The stairway had the odor of stale smoke and dirty laundry. The rug was worn thin as a miser’s dime. Things weren’t any better in the hallway. I could hear a radio playing dance music behind one of the thin doors, but I didn’t think anyone would be dancing in there. It just wasn’t that kind of place.
Room number 216 was at the end of the hall. The door was slightly ajar. I said, “Don’t give me that line again about what happens in the movies when the door is open.”
“If something’s happened to Sluggy, there’ll be hell to pay,” Bogart said.
I tapped on the door. It swung farther open, but there was no other response. I knocked on the jamb, and the sound echoed up and down the hall. There was no sound from the room, however.
Bogart put a hand on my shoulder and moved me out of the way.
He seemed to want to take charge in these situations, and I have to admit I didn’t make it much trouble for him. He pushed the door all the way open and went into the room, with me right behind him. I was supposed to be protecting him, after all.
The place was dark, and it smelled like the den of an unhealthy animal. It also smelled like cigarette smoke and booze. Lots of booze.
“Sluggy?” Bogart said. “Are you in here, Sluggy?”
I thought she was probably around somewhere, all right, but I wasn’t at all sure about her condition, not considering the way the room smelled. I was reaching for the light switch when I heard a movement, but I couldn’t tell where it came from.
Bogart heard it, too. “Sluggy?”
I flipped the switch. The light came on, but it didn’t help much. It must have been a twenty-watt bulb. The Palms was that kind of place, but I was grateful for the dimness. The room was a mess. A slip hung over a chair back, and there was an overturned ashtray on the floor by the coffee table, which had cigarette burns on the edges. An empty Dewar’s bottle lay on the floor near the couch. There were dark stains on the couch cushions where someone had spilled something wet.
I heard another movement. This time I thought might have come 44
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from the bedroom, which was still dark except for the light that got inside though the half-open door.
“Sluggy?” Bogart said again.
“Ain’t nobody here but us chickens,” said the voice from the direction of the door.
Us sounded more like ush, and chickens came out something like shickensh.
“That’s her,” Bogart said. “I think she’s a little under the weather.”
I’d figured that part out for myself.
“I’ll see about her,” Bogart said.
He started toward the bedroom, having made the same mistake I had, though I didn’t know it was a mistake until he walked passed the couch. When he did, a wild-eyed, wild-haired woman jumped up from behind it.
It must have been Mayo, but I didn’t recognize her. Maybe that was because I wasn’t looking at her face. I was looking at the scissors in her hand. She was gripping them like a knife, and the point was heading right for Bogart’s face.
Bogart saw her out of the corner of his eye. He turned, and with his right arm he swept the scissors aside.
Mayo screamed an obscenity and kicked him in the shin. He bent over, and when he did, she swung the scissors up in order to bring them down between his shoulder blades.
By that time I had crossed the room. I grabbed her wrist and twisted, hard. The scissors went flying.
Mayo didn’t even seem to notice. She crossed over with her left hand, and her open palm slammed into the side of my face with the velocity of a V-2 rocket. When it connected, it popped like a pistol shot.
The blow rattled my brain. I let go of her wrist and took a step back. Mayo dropped down on all fours and scooted around the couch, quick as a large cat. Bogart made a jump for her, but he missed and landed flat, nearly hitting his head on the edge of the couch as he fell.
The right side of my face felt as if it was on fire, but I didn’t have time to worry about it. I went after Mayo.
She scuttled over to the scissors and grabbed them. I went after her and as I reached her, she sat up and whirled around, holding the scissors like a dagger again. She jabbed at my knee with them. The 45
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point ripped through the leg of my slacks and slashed a red-hot line just above my knee. I backed away.
Still brandishing the scissors, Mayo slid on the floor until her back was against the wall. She pushed herself up it and stood facing me with a feral grin that bared her teeth. She might have been a beautiful woman at one time. For that matter, maybe she still was. But not at that moment in that situation. She was wild drunk and crazy, and I didn’t have any trouble at all imagining her as the person who had killed Frank Burleson.
“I think you’d better calm down, Sluggy,” Bogart said at my back.
Mayo looked over my shoulder at him.
“Straighten up and fly right, you son of a bitch,” she said. “That’s what you mean, isn’t it?”
The words were a little slurred, but I understood them well enough.
So did Bogart.
“That’s right,” he said. “You need to straighten up and fly right.
Now giv
e me those scissors.”
She shifted the scissors to her left hand, then took hold of the point with her right. When she drew her arm back to throw them, I ducked and rushed her.
The scissors went over my shoulder, and then I had her around the waist. It was like grabbing a wildcat that was having a seizure. She jerked and twisted, kicked and spit, clawed and shouted, “Bastard, bastard, bastard.”
It sounded more like bassard, but I got the point.
I couldn’t turn around or let go to see if Bogart had gotten the other point, the one on the end of the scissors, but it turned out that he hadn’t. He walked around behind Mayo and said, “You can let her go now, Scott.”
In my position, bent over with my arms around Mayo, I could see only Bogart’s shoes and the cuffs of his pants. Mayo was still writhing like a python.
“I’m not sure I should do that,” I said.
“Go ahead. It’s me she wants, not you.”
“All right. If that’s the way you want it.”
I released Mayo and jumped back, turning aside just in time to avoid getting kicked in the family jewels. Her foot connected with my hip, and that was painful enough, considering that there was still some shrapnel in there that they hadn’t been able to dig out of me.
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I stumbled into Bogart, who grabbed me by the shoulders and moved me aside.
“That’s about enough,” he said to Mayo.
“Enough for you, maybe, you bastard. You still have a career.”
“You can have one, too.”
Mayo pushed her hair away from her face. It didn’t help her appearance any, and it didn’t say where she moved it, anyway.
“The hell you say. Some son of a bitch called me today. He said he was going to tell the papers about something if I didn’t pay him.”
“He came to me, too,” Bogart said. “I don’t pay blackmailers.”
“You don’t pay anybody if you can help it, you cheap bastard.
That’s why he called me, because you wouldn’t pay him.”
“There’s nothing he can do to hurt you.”
“You don’t know. You don’t know anything.”
“I know about the men, Sluggy,” Bogart said. “I know they didn’t mean anything to you. People don’t care about things like that.”
Mayo glared at him for a second or two and the started blubbering.
Big tears ran out of her eyes and down her cheeks. Bogart went to her and put his arms around her, much more gently than I had.
“All I wanted was to be happy,” Mayo said between sobs. “But none of those could match up to you, Bogie.”
He patted her on the back, and her tears soaked into the shoulder of his jacket. It was a very touching scene, and I might have been more affected by it if I hadn’t turned to look for the scissors and seen them sticking in the wall
Bogart took Mayo’s hands and led her to the couch. They sat side by side, and I tried not to hear too much of what they were saying to each other. I gathered that there had been a lot of men in Mayo’s life in recent weeks, and that Bogart was telling her that no one was going to find out about them because Frank Burleson was dead.
“Dead?” Mayo said. “I’m glad. It’s bad to say that, but I mean it, Bogie. He was a nasty man, and I’m glad.”
Bogart said he didn’t blame her, and I didn’t think anybody else would either. Except, of course, for the police.
I walked over to them and said, “Did you kill him?”
Mayo looked up at me. Her eyes were red, and her face was streaked.
She looked even worse than she had before.
“I wouldn’t do a thing like that,” she said.
I looked over at the scissors. Mayo and Bogart followed my gaze.
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“She didn’t mean to hurt us,” Bogart said.
“Yeah, I could tell,” I said, reaching down and sticking a couple of fingers into the tear on my pants leg. When I brought the fingers out again, they were tipped with red.
“That was an accident,” Bogart said. “Besides, she didn’t get like in just a few hours of drinking. She got drunk last night, and she’s been drunk ever since.”
Judging by the smell of the room and of Mayo herself, I believed him.
“She couldn’t have killed Burleson, not in this condition,” Bogart said.
He was right. Oh, she might have killed Burleson if he’d come to the room. She was angry enough to do it. But she’d said he called her, not come to see her. She was too drunk to make that up.
“I tell you what, Junior,” Bogart continued, “why don’t you go on home, and I’ll stay here with Mayo for a while, until she’s feeling a little better about everything.”
I didn’t like the idea of leaving him there. I liked the brush-off even less. But there didn’t seem to be a lot I could do about it.
“We have a lot to talk about,” I said.
“I’ll talk to you tomorrow,” Bogart said. “Romanoff’s, around noon.
We can have breakfast.”
There was no use in telling him that most people had breakfast before noon. He knew that. So I just said, “I’ll be there.”
I walked over and pulled the scissors out of the wall. It wasn’t as easy as I’d thought it would be. They were stuck in there pretty well, and I had to jiggle them around a little. I slipped them into my jacket pocket.
“I’ll just take these with me,” I said. “You never know when you’ll need to make some paper dolls.”
By the time I got back to my apartment, there was nothing on the radio I wanted to listen too, but that was OK. I had plenty to worry about.
I didn’t worry about any of it until the next day, however. It had been a long day, and as soon as I undressed and put some merthiolate on the cut the scissors had made, I lay down on the bed. The merthiolate stung a little, but I hardly noticed. I was asleep before I knew it.
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CHAPTER
11
Idreamed about Rita Hayworth again, but this time the dream wasn’t pleasant at all. She was chasing me with a pair of scissors, and she was yelling something about which part of my body she was doing to cut off with them. It was one of my favorite parts, even if I didn’t get to use it often, at least not for recreational purposes.
When I woke up, the sheets were clammy with my sweat. I got up and worried for a while. Then I took a shower, and of course the phone rang before I’d finished. I managed to get to it before the caller hung up. It was Mr. Warner.
“What are you doing, Scott?” he asked.
“Taking a shower,” I said.
“You’re supposed to be protecting the studio, not wasting your time on personal hygiene. Get over to Bogart’s place now.”
“Why? What’s the matter?”
“The police are on their way already. They said they wanted to have a little talk with him. He thinks it must be about Burleson, and I think he’s right. Should I have Smithson meet you?”
Smithson was one of the best lawyers on the studio payroll. I said I was sure I could handle things and that we wouldn’t need Smithson.
“You’d better be right,” Mr. Warner told me. “Now stop wasting time and get on over there.”
I stopped wasting time and got over there.
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The cops don’t read the Detective’s Handbook, so they’d called Bogart to ask him if they could stop by. He’d said yes, of course, but he’d given them a little stall. That was fine with me, as it gave me time to get to him first, although I was only minutes ahead of Congreve and his minion, Garton. The way my luck was running, I should have known it would be them.
Before they arrived, Bogart had time to fill me in.
“They called early,” he said, flicking cigarette ashes carelessly on the rug. “It was barely nine o’clock, the uncivilized bastards.”
He w
as wearing a ratty old robe and leather slippers, and he had on his ruby ring. He hadn’t shaved, and I was sure he hadn’t eaten.
The circles under his eyes were a lot darker than they’d been the previous day.
“‘Early to bed, early to rise,’” I said.
Bogart grimaced. “Yeah. They’re both a pain in the ass. Do you know why the cops are coming here? Is it the gun?”
It could have been the pistol, but I didn’t think that was it. I thought it might be one of the other things I was worried about.
“You told Burleson you’d kill him,” I said. “Outside Romanoff’s.
Did anybody hear you?”
“I imagine so. There were several people hanging around outside the restaurant. Any of them might have heard what I said. at the time.
The one closest to me was Peter Lorre. He was with me, in fact. He heard every word.”
“Would he have told the cops?”
“No way in hell. He and I are old pals.”
“Who else was there?”
“I don’t really remember. John Wayne was there, I think. He might turn me in. We aren’t exactly pals. Joey Gallindo, maybe. Jimmy Stewart. I was too upset with Burleson to look around and make notes about the people who happened to be standing nearby.”
I’d picked up a paper on the way to his house, and I showed him the headline: HOLLYWOOD DETECTIVE FOUND DEAD.
“Somebody read that and called the cops,” Bogart said. “I don’t mind a reasonable amount of trouble, but this is beginning to look as if it’s going to be a lot of trouble.”
“I’m not sure that anybody had to read it before making that call,”
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I said. “You’re forgetting the gun. This could all be part of a frame-up.”
“The cops will tell us how they found out, won’t they?” Bogart asked.
I was still laughing about that one when the doorbell rang.
Congreve and Garton were no happier to see me than I was to see them. In fact, you might say they were downright cantankerous if your vocabulary inclined toward fancy words.
“What the hell are you doing here, Scott?” Congreve said. He looked a bit more rumpled than he had the night before. “I told you I didn’t want to see you again and that I especially didn’t want you mucking around in this Burleson business.”