by Bill Crider
That wasn’t exactly what he’d said, but it didn’t matter. It was what he’d meant.
“You shoulda let me shoot him,” Garton told Congreve. “It woulda worked out a lot better.”
“You’ll have to pardon Officer Garton, Mr. Bogart,” Congreve said.
“He prefers the crude approach to crime solving.”
“I can see that,” Bogart said. “Would you gentlemen like to have a seat?”
Congreve looked around. The room didn’t look any better than it had the day before.
“We can stand,” he said. “This won’t take long. But we need to get rid of Scott first.”
“He stays,” Bogart said. “I like having him around.”
“I don’t,” Garton said, fingering the grips of his revolver.
Congreve looked at me and said, “You never told us why you were here in the first place.”
I hoped he wouldn’t notice the morning paper I’d tossed on the floor. It had landed with the headline face down, and there were plenty of other papers around to camouflage it.
“I might not have told you everything about me last night,” I said.
Congreve widened his eyes and said, “I’m shocked—shocked!—to discover that you might have lied to me.”
Bogart grinned at Garton, who just stared at him as if he didn’t know what was going on. He probably didn’t.
“I didn’t know you gambled in Rick’s place,” I said to Congreve.
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“There’s a lot you don’t know about me, and a lot more that I don’t know about me. You’d better tell me or I might consider other alternatives. Such as Officer Garton’s solution. And I wouldn’t want that. Neither would you.”
He was right about the last part, at least. So I told him that I worked for Warner Brothers on retainer, doing pretty much the same kind of work that Burleson had done.
“You asked me if I worked for Superior, and I told you I didn’t.
That was the truth. But since I do work for Warner’s and know Mr.
Bogart, he asked me to come over. Just in case. He’s not accustomed to dealing with the police.”
Congreve sighed and rubbed the back of his neck with one big hand. I figured he hadn’t gotten as much sleep last night as I had.
“All right, Scott. Maybe that’s the truth, and maybe it’s not.”
“I’ll bet it’s not,” Garton said.
“No matter,” Congreve said. “We’re here to ask you a few questions, Mr. Bogart. If you want Scott to hear them, that’s all right with us.”
It wasn’t all right with Garton, I thought, but Garton didn’t have much of a say.
“I’d offer you some coffee,” Bogart said, “but I didn’t have time to make any.”
“Thank you for the offer,” Congreve said. He was being polite, but I could see it was a strain for him. “Do you know a man named Frank Burleson?”
“I don’t believe so,” Bogart said.
I just stood there and kept a straight face.
“Scott does,” Congreve said. “Isn’t that right, Scott?”
I nodded. Garton glared at me. I tipped him a wink.
“He was shot to death last night,” Congreve said. “Mr. Scott could tell you about it.”
“No need for that,” I said. “They didn’t know each other.”
“We hear different,” Garton said. “We hear…”
Congreve shot him a look, and Garton shut up. His face was getting red, and I worried about his blood pressure. But not much, and not for long.
“What Officer Garton means,” Congreve said, “is that the two of you—you and Burleson, that is—were seen talking yesterday outside a restaurant. It seemed to be a somewhat acrimonious conversation.”
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Acrimonious. I liked that. I looked at Garton to see if he knew what it meant. He looked puzzled, which didn’t surprise me.
“I see a lot of people,” Bogart said, twisting his ring. “And some of them don’t like me. We have acrimonious conversations. But I don’t know any Burleson.”
“The restaurant was Romanoff’s,” Congreve said. “A number of people overheard you and Mr. Burleson.”
Bogart pretended to think about it. He did a pretty good job, but then he was practically the highest-paid actor in town. He should have done even better. But he was good enough to fool Garton, and maybe even Congreve.
“I remember a man with offensive manners,” Bogart said. “He waylaid me yesterday and made some nasty remarks about my ex-wife. I told him what I thought about him.”
“Did you say you were going to kill him?”
“I might have.”
Bogart got a pack of Chesterfields and a book of matches out of a pocket on the side of his robe. He offered the pack, but no one took him up on it. He lit a cigarette for himself and waved the match out.
“You don’t remember?” Congreve said. “It seems to me you’d remember a thing like that.”
Smoke drifted in front of Bogart’s face. He made no effort to wave it away, and when he answered, the cigarette was still in his mouth.
“I say a great many things, and I don’t remember all of them. I know that the man who confronted me yesterday was very disagree-able, and I may have said I’d so something like that. Of course I didn’t mean it. It’s just a way of talking. You know what I mean.”
Congreve nodded, as if he’d expected something like that.
“But you say you didn’t know Burleson.”
Bogart removed the cigarette from his mouth and picked a speck of tobacco from his lip. He put the cigarette back.
“You don’t suppose he introduced himself, do you? He was making remarks about my wife, not trying to get to know me.”
That was only partially true, as I well knew. He’d introduced himself, all right, but I was willing to bet there was nobody to say so. The anonymous caller probably hadn’t mentioned it, and the cops wouldn’t be able to call back to check.
“Peter Lorre was with me,” Bogart went on, after taking a drag 53
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from his cigarette. “You could ask him. I’m sure he’ll tell you that the man didn’t introduce himself.”
I was sure, too, because Bogart would be on the phone to him as soon as Congreve got out the door.
“What about the time of death on Burleson?” I asked. “Do you have one yet?”
Congreve took a few seconds to decide if he wanted to tell me.
Finally he said, “Around 8:00 last night.”
I was glad to hear it. That meant that Bogart hadn’t killed Burleson, not that I’d ever really thought he had.
“That lets us both out,” I said. “Mr. Bogart and I were in the Formosa Club at that time. It should be easy enough for you to check that out.”
“I will,” Congreve said, but he knew he was licked.
He asked a few more meaningless questions, told me again that I’d better not get involved in his case, and then he and Garton left. Garton turned back before they went out the door and gave me another glare.
I resisted the urge to wink at him again.
Bogart closed the door and said, “Should I call Lorre?”
“It might not be a bad idea. We haven’t see the last of those two.”
“Why not? You saw that he’d given up.”
“That’s what you think. You’ve played enough tough guys to know the cops better than that.”
“Those are movie cops,” Bogart said.
“And real cops are just the same, only worse. Where do you think the writers get their ideas?”
Bogart looked around for a clean ashtray. He couldn’t find one, so he just stuck the butt into a pile of ashes in a dirty one.
“I thought they made all that up,” he said.
“You could be right. Maybe the movies don’t learn from the cops.
Maybe the cops learn from the movies
. Either way it works out the same: they don’t quit. Once they get hold of an idea, they keep after it. No matter how it looked to you just now, you’re still their number one suspect.”
I could see he didn’t think much of that idea.
“And they don’t like it that I was here,” I added. “It just makes them more suspicious.”
“Then we’d better find out who killed Burleson,” Bogart said, “before 54
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they arrest me. Getting arrested for murder would pretty much be the end of my career.”
“What do you mean we?” I asked.
“You’re going to need help. How can you turn down Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe all rolled into one?”
I looked him over as he stood there in his rumpled robe, smoking a cigarette. He wasn’t wearing his hairpiece, and he hadn’t combed the hair he had.
“You won’t like it,” I said. “The pay’s too small.”
“I’ll like it fine. And you’re going to need my help if you want to know who was at the party when Mayo showed them the pistol. Any one of them could have gone in that room and taken the pistol at some point. People were drinking. No one would have noticed.”
“Not even you?”
“Not even me. And certainly not Mayo.”
“How is Mayo today?”
“I haven’t heard from her this morning. I doubt I’ll ever hear from her again. She blames me for all her troubles, and she might even have a point.” He looked a bit sheepish. “I’m the one who ran out on her, after all.”
“You didn’t run,” I said. “At least not very fast.”
“I guess I hoped it would work out for us. But after I met Betty, there wasn’t a chance in hell that it would.”
“That wasn’t your fault, either. It just happened. Of all the movie sets in all the world, she just happened to walk onto yours.”
“Not a bad line,” Bogart said with a grin. “Sounds familiar, though.”
“Never mind that. What about Mayo?”
“She calmed down some after you left. I stayed and had a couple of drinks with her, and then she went to sleep. She didn’t kill anybody.
You know that.”
I hoped he was right.
“So how about it? Am I helping you with this or not?”
“I guess you’ll do,” I said.
55
CHAPTER
12
While Bogart was getting dressed, I gave Mr. Warner a call to tell him what had happened. He wasn’t too pleased with me.
“Bogart’s an actor,” he said, “and a pretty good one, though you don’t have to tell him I said so. At any rate, he’s not a detective. This is going to get into the papers if you’re not very careful.”
“Nobody has to know the cops have questioned him. He’s not going to tell, and neither am I.”
“You’re going gallivanting all over town with him at your heels, though. What about that getting into the papers?”
“The way I figure it,” I said, “I’ll be the one at his heels. He knows everyone involved, and he can perform the introductions. I promise that’s all he’ll do.”
“All right, but if you get him hurt, or if his name gets in the papers as a suspect, you’ll never work in this town again.”
I had a feeling it wasn’t the first time he’d said those words, and maybe he could even make them stick. I wasn’t worried about it, however.
“Nobody’s going to get hurt,” I said.
“Besides, you’re not a real detective. You’re just a guy who cleans up messes. What do you know about murder?”
“I saw The Big Sleep,” I said.
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“That won’t help you much. Nobody knows what the hell happened in that picture.”
“But everybody lived happily ever after. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”
“You’d better not make any mistakes, Scott.”
I said I wouldn’t, and he hung up. It was nice to know how much confidence he had in me.
The first place Bogart and I went was Romanoff’s. It was nearly twelve-thirty, and Bogart said he had to have breakfast before we did any detective work.
If Mayo’s hotel had catered to the low-income crowd, Romanoff’s was at the opposite end of the scale. It was on North Rodeo Drive, surrounded by stores that sold jewelry fit for royalty, including movie-star royalty, of course, and clothes that were so expensive I couldn’t even afford to window shop there. Which is why I insisted that we go in Bogart’s car, a spiffy blue Cadillac convertible. It would fit into the neighborhood, whereas my Chevy might have been hauled off by the junk man.
We drove with the top down, and it was one of those California days that made the tourists want to stay right there and never go back to Texas or New York or Iowa or wherever it was that they’d come from. The sky was a brilliant blue, the haze was gone, and the air was actually fresh. It was almost enough to make me want a convertible myself.
The streets of Los Angeles were filled with the usual assortment of people, the hustlers and the hopeful, the tourists and the touts, the dynamic and the down-and-out, the dazzling and the damned. I promised myself, as I often did, that someday I’d actually walk somewhere just to have a closer look at all of them, but I knew I was lying.
We got to Rodeo Drive without incident. If the shops there sold things fit for royalty, then Romanoff’s fit right in. It was Michael Romanoff’s conceit that he was descended from nobility and that he was, in fact, a prince. In between two big pillars was the big door that opened into his restaurant, and the middle of the door was the Romanoff coat of arms. It was a pair of golden Rs on a shield. For all I knew it might even have been authentic. But I didn’t think so, any more than I thought Romanoff was a real prince.
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We went inside and walked through the waiting room. When we got into the restaurant proper, Bogart was immediately greeted by the maitre d’, who looked at me with something between distaste and suspicion.
“Your usual table?” he asked Bogart.
“That’s correct, Reinhardt,” Bogart said, and we were ushered to the second booth from the entrance.
When we were seated, I looked the place over. The wallpaper was bright enough to keep a dead man awake. It looked as if someone had stirred three or four cans of bright green, yellow, and orange paint together and spilled the result on it. Or that some parrots had exploded in the room.
Over to one side was the bar, and there were already a couple of drinkers there, though it was only barely after noon. There were some caricatures over the bar, but I didn’t recognize any of them. On the wall was a large portrait, clearly the prince himself in a tux and top hat, smoking a pipe, carrying a cane, and wearing a monocle.
“How do you like the picture?” Bogart asked.
“The monocle is a nice touch,” I said.
“Right. His real name’s Harry Gerguson. He started this place with dough he borrowed from Cary Grant and Benchley, among others, but don’t let him know I told you that.”
“There’s not much chance of that. We don’t move in the same circles.”
“You do now. Here he comes.”
I looked toward the bar and saw a man heading in the direction of the table. He was shorter than I was, but he was dressed much better, in a dark blue suit that might have come from one of the nearby shops. His tie had a knot in it as big as an egg from a healthy hen.
He had a thin moustache and a big nose. And, so help me, he was wearing spats. At his heels were two bulldogs.
“Good morning,” Romanoff said when he reached the table.
He looked at me the same way the headwaiter had, except with more distaste and less suspicion.
“Hey, your Royal Fraudulence,” Bogart said. “How are the dogs?”
“Confucius and Socrates are fine,” Romanoff said, looking down at the animals. “They’ll be dining with me
shortly.” He looked back up and turned his eyes on me again. “Who is your friend?”
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“This is Mr. Terry Scott. Scott, meet Prince Michael Alexandrovich Dimitri Obolensky Romanoff, educated at Harvard and descended from Rasputin.”
“From the man who killed Rasputin, my dear Bogie,” Romanoff said, drawing himself up a little straighter. “Not from Rasputin himself, thank God.”
He sounded more British than Russian, but then I suppose he knew that.
“I keep forgetting just who it is you’re descended from,” Bogart said, “because it keeps changing. Didn’t you once tell me you were the morganatic son of the Czar?”
Romanoff allowed himself a small smile. “I may have. I don’t remember. One tells so many stories.”
“I suppose it depends on who one is,” Bogart said. “But who cares?
It was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead. Would you be interested in a little game today?”
Romanoff looked at me. “I don’t know how long you’ve known dear Bogie, but he fancies himself a chess player. Notice that I say fancies. He has lost vast sums of money to me by betting on games.
He never beats me.”
“You know better than that, your Phoniness,” Bogart said. “I don’t do too badly for a guy who doesn’t have the benefit of a Harvard education like you do.”
I knew about Bogart’s chess playing. The story was that he’d once picked up money by taking on all comers for twenty-five cents a game. Some of the stories said it was fifty cents, but the point was that he was supposed to be pretty good.
“Your playing got you in trouble during the war, my dear Bogie,”
Romanoff said. He looked at me. “Secret codes and all that, you know.”
I said I didn’t know, and Bogart explained that he liked to play chess any way he could.
“Sometimes I even played by mail. Somebody got hold of the letters and thought I was a spy.”
During this conversation, a waiter had been hovering nearby. Like the dogs, he was too well-trained to interrupt. Bogart noticed him and said, “Bring me the usual, and the same for my friend.”
The waiter nodded and turned to go. I had no idea what I’d be getting, but I had a feeling I knew who’d be paying for it.