by Bill Crider
I didn’t have a glass handy, but Bogart didn’t care. He took a hefty slug straight from the bottle and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Are you sure you won’t have some?” he asked.
“I’m sure. I tried it, and it didn’t work.”
“Judging from what you said in Orsini’s office, I’d say you overdid it. The trick is to drink steadily but not heavily. That way you always have a little edge, and you stay on an even keel.”
“I appreciate the tip.” I was just being polite. I didn’t intend to drink again. Ever. “And I appreciate what you did back there.”
Bogart laughed. He wiped off the top of the bottle with his hand and took another drink. After he’d savored it for a second or two, he said, “I’ve had a lot of people offer to fight me over the years. They never seem to get tired of testing me, trying to find out if I’m as tough 112
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in real life as I am in the movies. So I’ve worked out a couple of ways to handle them.”
“Hitting them in the balls is a good one.”
When Bogart stopped laughing, he lit a cigarette. He took a few puffs and went on with what he was going to tell me.
“That’s not one of the ways. That just happened.”
“We were lucky it did.”
“I know. But of the two ways I’ve used before, one I like best is to tell whoever is challenging me that I’ll meet him outside. He always goes out, all hot under the collar, to wait for me. He can wait forever as far as I’m concerned. I never show up.”
“What happens then?” I asked.
“Oh, usually the guy cools off and realizes he’s made a fool of himself. If he comes back in or ever sees me again to ask why I didn’t show up, I just say I didn’t want to hurt him.”
“And that works?”
“Most of the time. You saw what happened to Mike. I hurt him, didn’t I?”
“You hurt him for sure.” I didn’t mention that he’d admitted it was an accident. “What if the guy won’t go outside?”
“I always get in the first punch.”
“That’s what you did with Mike.”
“Yeah, and it worked, but we were just lucky. That’s not the way I usually do it. I try not to swing until I’m close to the headwaiter or the manager of the place where we are. I try to wind up as close to one of those guys as I can after I swing. They don’t like scenes, and they’ll always step in and stop the fight before the other guy can get in a lick.”
“Charlie O. wasn’t inclined to stop anything.”
“No, but I wound up close enough to him to grab his arm before he could take another shot at you.”
“So you pretty much had it all planned out from the beginning.”
“That’s right, Junior. I never get into a fight without a solid plan of action.” He tossed his cigarette out the window and had another drink straight from the bottle. “And if you believe that, I have a nice little bridge back in Brooklyn that I’d like to sell you. I have the deed right here in my pocket.”
I told him I didn’t really need a bridge and asked him what time it 113
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was. He held his watch so that he could see the face of it in the light from the street and said, “Too late to catch anyone at the studio, probably.”
“Our meeting with Orsini took a little longer than I thought it would.
But we can run by the studio just in case they’re working late.”
“With old One-Shot Elledge on the job, I’d say we don’t have a chance.”
“We might as well try. We don’t have anything to lose.”
Bogart lit another Chesterfield and tossed the match out the window.
“Then let’s go and see if anyone’s around,” he said.
There was no one around. The guard was reading a pulp magazine with a gaudy cover, and he simply waved us through without a second glance at the pass stuck under my windshield wiper.
We drove to the sound stage where the night’s sceneshooting was to have taken place, and I could see that the red light wasn’t on.
They’d either finished shooting or there was a lull.
“We’re too late,” Bogart said. “We might as well go have dinner at Chasen’s and see if any of the cast went over there.”
“Chasen’s is a long way from here. Maybe they’re at your place, looking for a party.”
Bogart sloshed the whiskey in his bottle.
“The party’s right here.”
I parked the car and got out, telling Bogart I was going to have a look inside the soundstage and see if anyone was still there. He nodded but stayed inside the car.
The door was locked, as he must have expected it to be. I walked back to the car and was about to agree with his suggestion to have dinner when I thought I heard something, a muffled noise from the jungle set. It might even have been a gunshot.
“Did you hear that?” I asked Bogart. “There’s someone down there on the set.”
Bogart hadn’t heard the noise, and he wasn’t interested.
“Couldn’t be anyone we care about. Mr. Warner owes us a dinner after what we’ve been through. Let’s go to Chasen’s.”
Chasen’s was a classier place than the Formosa, where we’d eaten the previous evening, and I had a feeling Mr. Warner wouldn’t want 114
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to pick up the tab. He wasn’t known for his generosity any more than Thomas Wayne was.
“Let’s have a look down by the jungle anyway,” I said.
“Is this something else from the Detective’s Handbook?”
“That’s right. We professional detectives always check into everything. You never know when you might run across an important clue.”
Bogart shrugged. “It’s your car. You’re driving. If you want to go, go.”
I got in and started the old Chevy.
“I don’t see anything,” Bogart said when we started down the street.
“Maybe it was nothing. We’ll have a look, then we’ll leave.”
I drove down to the jungle and stopped the car. There was nothing moving there. No filming was going on. No one was trysting under the jungle moon.
I stopped the car and looked up at the moon, which was on the wane but still hanging starkly pale in the black sky. I wondered for a second if it was real or just another effect created for the movies. I pushed in the Chevy’s clutch and moved the shift lever into reverse.
Bogart smiled as if to say he’d known there’d be no one there, but if that was what he was thinking, he didn’t say it.
I started to back up and turn around when a man lurched out of the jungle. His clothing was torn and bloody, and he put his arm in front of his face as if to blot out the car lights. Then he fell faced down in front of us. His hand scrabbled briefly in the dirt and was still.
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Iopened the door and jumped out of the car, leaving the lights on so I could see who it was. Bogart was right behind me, and as we bent over the fallen man, illuminated by my headlights, we must have looked as if we were posing for a picture by Weegee.
When I turned the man over, Bogart said, “Dawson.”
I couldn’t really recognize Dawson from what was left of his battered and bloody face, but the safari outfit, ripped and torn as it was, looked familiar.
I felt Dawson’s neck, trying to find a pulse. There wasn’t one. There was a big red stain on the front of his jacket. There was a small hole in the middle of it.
“He’s dead,” I said.
“That fight scene with Stoney must have been a lot rougher than he thought it would be,” Bogart said. “Either that or he tangled with a rhino.”
“The rhino must have been carrying a pistol,” I said, and I showed him the bullet hole.
“I guess you did hear something down here, after all,” Bogart said.
I was glad his faith in my hearing h
ad been restored, but I didn’t say so.
“I heard something, all right. I wonder who shot him.”
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Bogart didn’t have any ideas about that, but he thought it might be a good idea for us to get out of there.
“We can’t just leave him here,” I said.
“Yes, we can. There’s nothing we can do for him, and we don’t want to do anything that might disturb any clues. We probably shouldn’t even have turned him over.”
“Clues?” I said. “What clues?”
Bogart pointed down at the place where I’d seen Dawson’s hand moving.
“Oh,” I said. “I see what you mean.”
There appeared to be some letters scrawled in the dirt, as if Dawson had been trying to write something there before he died. It was hard to make out the letters in the shadowy beams of the car’s headlights.
“Can you read it?” Bogart asked.
“It looks like bob,” I said.
“Do you think Dawson was trying to tell us something before he died?”
“A dying message. Those things are admissible in court.”
Bogart’s knowledge of the law came from the movies rather than law books, and it wasn’t exactly accurate.
“Nothing that vague is admissible,” I said. “I wonder what happened to him before he was shot.”
“He looks like he might have been in a fight with an animal. Maybe one of the studio’s tame lions got out and wasn’t as tame as they thought.”
“It looks more like somebody worked him over,” I said. “With a baseball bat.”
“Mob work,” Bogart said. “Do you think it had anything to do with us?”
I thought about that. We’d arrived on the movie set with Dawson, and all the people who’d attended Bogart’s party had been there, except for Slappy Coville, and he might have heard about it from the others, all of whom had probably seen us with Dawson. Had Dawson mentioned our interest in talking to them? It seemed likely that he had. If so, had he then discovered something, or remembered something, that would have led one of them to kill him?
“It could be related to Burleson’s murder,” I said. “If Dawson 118
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recognized us in the car when we drove up, he might have been trying to let us know his killer’s name.”
“You mean that somebody named Bob killed him?”
“Maybe. But there’s nobody by that name who was at your house.”
“You’re forgetting Robert Carroll. Everyone who knows him calls him Bob. He just doesn’t use that as his professional name.”
“Dawson didn’t start the word with a capital letter. Maybe it’s not a name.”
“I thought you were a detective, not an English teacher.”
“I’m not so sure that’s an o, either,” I said, peering down at the word.
“Maybe it’s an a.” “Bab? What kind of word is bab?”
It might not have been a word, but it sounded pretty good when he said it. No wonder the Warner Brothers paid him so much money.
“It’s not a word,” I said. “Not a complete word, anyway. Dawson might not have finished writing what he wanted to say. See? The last b sort of trails off there.”
I pointed to where Dawson’s finger had made a long mark in the dirt as he tried to close the bottom of the final b.
“It was going to be Babson,” Bogart said, snapping his fingers.
“That son of a bitch. I knew it was him.”
I didn’t remind him that only a few hours earlier he’d been sure it was Orsini. We’d gotten into plenty of trouble over that particular hunch. The Detective’s Handbook says hunches are sometimes all right, but it’s best never to trust them too much.
“Maybe it’s Babson,” I said, “or maybe it’s Carroll. We can’t be sure.
We’ll think about it some more after we find a telephone and call Congreve.”
“He’s not going to be happy when he finds us here,” Bogart said.
“Especially you. I don’t think he likes you very much.”
I knew Congreve didn’t like me, and Garton liked me even less, if that was possible. Still, we had to make the call.
“We could always do it anonymously,” Bogart said. “Put a handkerchief over the phone or something like that. That’s what we do in the movies.”
I’d seen that bit many times, the close-up of the man’s mouth close to the hanky-covered telephone receiver. For all I knew, it might even 119
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work, but I wasn’t going to try it. I was about to tell Bogart that, but I didn’t get a chance.
Off to our left, a hundred yards or so away, car lights came on. I hadn’t looked down that way, and I wondered how long the driver had been sitting there, waiting for us to leave. He must have given up and decided that we were going to stay there all night talking over Dawson’s dead body.
“Now who could that be?” Bogart said.
I didn’t have an answer for him, but I thought that whoever it was had better have a good excuse for being there, considering what had happened to Dawson.
“Let’s find out,” I said, and started walking toward the car.
That was a mistake. Or maybe not. Maybe the driver would have done what he did even if I’d stayed right where I was. What he did was gun the engine and aim the car right at me.
For just a second I was frozen in the headlights as the car barreled toward me. Then I managed to scream, “Look out!” just before I threw myself out of its path.
I rolled over a couple of times, but I wasn’t too busy to hear a gunshot. Something buzzed by my head and hit the ground beside me, kicking up the dirt.
I scrambled to my feet in time to see Bogart lying at the edge of the jungle. He sat up just as the car’s right front tire hit Dawson. The car bounced but didn’t slow down. It didn’t slow down when the rear tire hit him, either.
Feeling like a stuntman in a Republic serial, I dusted my clothes off and watched the car’s small red tail lights fade into the darkness.
Bogart was already running toward the car.
“What are you waiting for?” he yelled. “We have to catch that bastard.”
I wasn’t sure we had to, but it seemed like a good idea to find out who was trying to kill us. And who had probably already killed Dawson. I had a feeling that whoever had tried to run us down had already done the job on him.
I jumped into the Chevy, slammed the door, and started the engine.
The tires spun, then gripped, and we were off.
There was only one problem. I wasn’t sure exactly where we were going.
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“Follow that car!” Bogart said.
He said it with a straight face, maybe because with Dawson lying dead there wasn’t much cause for smiling.
I told him I didn’t know where the car had gone.
He pointed through the windshield and said, “It went thataway.”
I went thataway, too.
In trying to run over us, the driver had been unable to turn left on the street leading out of the studio, so it had simply gone straight ahead, running along parallel with the back-lot jungle. We passed the jungle quickly and found ourselves in a western town, with false-front stores and a wagon-rutted street. It looked like every other town in western movies, with a mercantile store where the cowardly shop-keeper worked, a saloon where the dancing girls and villains hung out, a watering trough for the hero to duck behind when the bad guys shot at him, a little jail where the lynch mob could gather.
The Chevy bounced in the wagon ruts and tossed Bogart around in the seat beside me. I clung to the wheel and looked for taillights, but I didn’t see any.
“Keep going,” Bogart said, reaching under the seat and trying to grab the whiskey bottle, which wasn’t easy in the pitching Chevy. He finally grabbed it by the neck and put it in the seat beside him.
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“I wouldn’t want it to get lost,” he said.
By that time we were in a small town that Andy Hardy would have been proud to call home, except that Andy Hardy didn’t work for Superior Studios. We passed a malt shop, a high school, and houses with picket fences.
And we were running out of road.
“Turn left,” Bogart said, which I did since it was about the only option I had.
I turned and then turned left again almost immediately. We found ourselves riding along behind the sets, which were unfinished and skimpy from the rear, nothing like the fronts they showed in the movies. I saw taillights ahead.
“There he is,” Bogart said. “You’re gaining on him.”
I knew that wasn’t true. I hadn’t been observant enough to notice what kind of car we were chasing, but I knew it was both bigger and more powerful than my Chevy.
I thought it would turn back toward the entrance, which it did, but 121
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it turned before we came to the main street. I turned as soon as I got to the corner, and we found ourselves driving past a haunted house that was beside a graveyard. I knew that Slappy Coville had starred in a couple of supposedly humorous horror flicks for Superior. They had involved monsters a lot like the ones that Universal had made so popular. But not so much like them that Universal could sue.
I was actually gaining on the car in front of us now, thanks to the turns, which slowed it down, and now it made another turn. We came to the main street, and it turned once again, this time heading for the entrance.
“It’s getting away,” Bogart said. “Shoot out the tires.”
I’d forgotten all about the pistol that was dragging down the right side of my jacket. I might have been able to claw it out and use it, but I didn’t intend to try. I was sure I couldn’t hit the tires of the car in front even if it had been standing still. I was more likely to shoot someone by accident, and I didn’t want that to happen. I was sure Bogart didn’t either, since he was the one I’d be most likely to shoot.
It was too late to do anything, anyway. The car shot past the gatehouse and out into the traffic. We could never overtake it now.
Even if we went after it, we could never be sure which car it was unless Bogart had gotten a better look at it than I had.
He hadn’t. He suggested that we ask the guard, who was still reading his pulp magazine. The Shadow. At least he had pretty good taste.