We'll Always Have Murder

by Bill Crider

  “Ah,” Orsini said. “And suppose that I’d like to sell you the car for a nominal sum. Five dollars, shall we say. What then?”

  “Nothing then. I’ll have a car to replace the one Herbie wrecked. A car for a car.”

  “Old Testament justice,” Orsini said. “It seems a fair exchange.”

  Barbara Malone had been growing increasingly agitated during this little conversation. Now she couldn’t stand to keep quiet any longer.

  “What are you talking about cars for?” she said. The way she said it twisted her mouth and turned her beauty into something repulsive.

  She was far from glamorous now. “He doesn’t need a car. You have to get rid of him.”

  “You seem to be forgetting who has the pistol,” Orsini told her.

  “Fuck the pistol. You promised you wouldn’t let people find out about me.”

  I felt almost sorry for her. She’d wanted to be a star, and now she 213

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  had almost become one. But as Orsini had pointed out to her, she didn’t understand the situation.

  “How’d you get into this mess, anyway?” I asked Orsini.

  “I was just doing a favor for a friend,” he said.

  “Thomas Wayne?”

  “That’s right. Burleson was trying to bleed him, just the way he tried with your friend Bogart here. And Miss Malone. I sent Herbie to have a little talk with him, but Miss Malone got there first. And she did a little more than talk.”

  “The son of a bitch was going to rape me. What should I have done?

  Let him?”

  “No,” I said, “and if you stick to that story and drop the vulgarity, a jury might even believe it.”

  “Fuck you, Scott. You’re just a cheap snoop.”

  I couldn’t argue with that, and I didn’t even try.

  “At any rate,” Orsini said, “Herbie thought he should do what he could to help out one of Mr. Wayne’s stars, so he took Miss Malone under his wing, so to speak, and brought her to me.”

  “I guess he saw me and Bogart at Burleson’s place,” I said.

  “Indeed. You got there almost as soon as he removed Miss Malone from the premises. And he might even have done something about you if the police hadn’t arrived when they did.”

  “So he just followed us around and kept track of us until we started getting in the way. Then he tried to kill us.”

  Orsini entwined his pudgy fingers and leaned forward to rest his hands on the desk.

  “You were a bit inconvenient, I admit,” he said. “But Herbie does have a tendency to exceed his instructions.”

  “You’re going to have to give up Herbie, too,” Bogart said.

  I was beginning to hear much better now, and I supposed he was, too.

  “And why is that?” Orsini asked. “You weren’t seriously injured in the accident, were you?”

  I would have questioned his use of the word accident, but Bogart didn’t give me a chance.

  “The accident has nothing to do with it,” he said. “Herbie killed Charlie Dawson. Charlie was a friend of mine.”

  Orsini nodded. “As I said, Herbie can be a bit of a freelancer at 214

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  times. Dawson was saying that you wanted to talk to some of the Jan of the Jungle cast about Burleson’s murder, and he happened to remember Miss Malone’s unfortunate medical experience while he was talking to Joey Gallindo. Joey is…an acquaintance, and he called me, knowing my interest in the matter. I sent Herbie to reason with Dawson, but according to Herbie, Dawson wasn’t reasonable.”

  Unfortunate medical experience was good, maybe even better than accident. I wondered why Orsini had never gone into politics. But maybe he owned a few politicians and thought that was better than having to run for election.

  “Was it Joey or Herbie who called the cops and told them it was us who killed Dawson?” I asked.

  “That was Herbie again, on his own. He really needs to learn to ask me before acting. Joey, however, is the one who called when you showed up on the set today.”

  I remembered that Joey had been outside Romanoff’s when Burleson and Bogart had their little run-in.

  “That Joey is a regular little snitch, isn’t he,” I said.

  “He has his uses. He was rather surprised to see you today.”

  “I’ll bet he was. But not as surprised as you when you got his phone call.”

  “I wasn’t surprised, Scott. I know a little about your resilience. But Herbie, well, Herbie was another story. He felt like a failure.”

  I glanced at Herbie, who was glowering at the floor. He didn’t like the way things were going.

  Neither did Malone, whose face was contorted with anger and fear.

  Bogart wasn’t angry, but his face was tense with anticipation. So was mine, for that matter.

  In fact, the only one in the room who appeared to be relaxed and comfortable was Orsini.

  Which meant that he knew something the rest of us didn’t know.

  I couldn’t figure out what it was until I heard the door open behind me.

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  35

  Hello, Tank,” Orsini said, looking past me. “I’m glad you could drop by.”

  Tank didn’t say anything, but I knew he’d be the one who’d opened the door. I looked around and saw that he was standing there taking up most of the doorway. He had a pistol in his right hand. He leaned against the doorframe as if he might be a little uncomfortable, but other than that there was no sign that he’d recently been shot. I thought it was too bad that his wound hadn’t been more serious.

  “How’re you doing, Tank?” I said. “You’d better watch out, or Charlie O. will shoot you again.”

  “That’s not funny, Scott,” Tank said. “Why don’t you and Mr.

  Bogart put your guns on the desk, and then we’ll sort things out.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “Bogart?”

  He shook his head and moved a little to his left to spread the room out and make it more difficult for Tank to get a shot at both of us. I didn’t know if he made the move instinctively or whether it was something he’d learned from making a movie, but in any case I approved.

  “You see, Tank,” I said, “there’s one problem that you haven’t thought about.”

  “Yeah?”

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  “Yeah. If you shoot either me or Bogart, the other one of us is going to get Orsini.”

  Thinking about that taxed Tank’s abilities to the extreme. He looked at Orsini as if expecting help. Orsini raised his shoulders about a quarter of an inch. Not much of a shrug, but it was all the help Tank was going to get from him.

  Barbara Malone jumped out of her chair and said, “Give me the fucking pistol. I’ll kill the bastards.”

  I wondered how I could ever have thought she was beautiful, and the thought distracted me for just a second. It was a second too long.

  I should have just shot her as soon as she stood because I didn’t see Mike when he grabbed at Bogart’s arm.

  I heard the shot, however, when Bogart pulled the trigger, and as Mike was falling I dropped to the floor and fired at Tank. Part of his face flew off in a haze of blood.

  I heard shots from behind me as well, and I knew that Orsini hadn’t wasted any time in replacing the pistol I’d taken from him. Lead passed through the empty air where I’d been standing and smacked into the wall near the doorway.

  I rolled over and Herbie fired a shot that splintered the floor beside me. I hadn’t been the only one with a concealed pistol on his person somewhere. I should have known Herbie would be armed. He just hadn’t had a chance to get to his gun yet. I shot him twice in the chest and he went down.

  The room was full of powder smoke and the sharp smell of it. My eardrums were never going to be the same.

  Tank, Mike, and Herbie lay on the floor. Bogart was backed against the wall with
his pistol held straight out in front of him, pointing at Orsini, who had laid his own weapon on his desk in front of him. It seemed to be a habit of his. Barbara Malone was back in her chair with a blank stare on her face as she looked out over the room. Her stomach was more delicate than I’d thought.

  Mike wasn’t hurt badly and tried to stand up, but he couldn’t manage it. Bogart had shot him in the calf. So Mike sat back down on the floor and started ripping his pants leg to make a tourniquet.

  Tank squirmed around like a crippled spider. He made unintelligible gobbling sounds with what remained of his mouth, which was more 218

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  a red, gaping hole than a mouth now. I couldn’t really tell, but I thought I’d shot off most of the left side of his jaw.

  Orsini was looking at Herbie, who wasn’t moving at all. There was a small pool of blood beside him, but not really very much at all.

  “We seem to have a difficult situation here,” Orsini said.

  “Difficult, maybe, but not impossible,” Bogart said.

  I think he said it. My hearing was messed up again. I stood up, hoping my knees would hold me. They were nowhere near as steady as Bogart’s voice.

  “How do you see it?” Orsini asked Bogart.

  “Like this. Malone killed Burleson. She and Randall have to take the fall for that. Your men, without your knowledge, were protecting her for Wayne, and one of them, Herbie there, was a little over-zealous. He killed Dawson. So far it’s all true, except the part about you.”

  “That’s true, too, in a way.”

  “Yeah. True enough to keep you out of jail, maybe. Malone can use her self-defense story and see how far it gets her. She’s a pretty good actress. Maybe she gets off with a slap on the wrist.”

  “It’s possible,” Orsini said, glancing at Barbara, who was still staring with horrified fascination at Tank, who continued to make those noises. They were beginning to bother me a little, too, to tell the truth.

  But Bogart and Orsini ignored him.

  “Wayne might be a problem,” Bogart said. “It will look as if he was covering up a murder.”

  I didn’t see a problem with that. I was sure Wayne, through Orsini, knew everything that had happened. He’d have to admit it, but he had enough clout to survive. He had access to the best lawyers in town, too. When it was all over, he might even become more accept-able because of his notoriety. Hollywood is a funny town. Some things, like the fact that Stella Gordon liked women, had to be kept hidden, but everybody in Hollywood loves a gangster. A successful one, that is, with a patina, no matter how thin, of respectability.

  “I can handle Wayne,” Orsini said. I’ll just bet he could. “But what about Herbie?”

  Bogart switched his pistol to his left hand and ran the ball of his right thumb down his jawline.

  “Like this: your other two goons decided they didn’t like being part 219

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  of a murder cover-up,” he said. “They turned on Herbie, and there was a little shooting.”

  A little? That was as good as Orsini’s calling the abortion an

  “unfortunate medical experience.” Bogart was good at this sort of thing.

  Orsini must have thought so, too. The corners of his mouth twitched in what might have been a smile.

  “I think we can make that work,” he said. “Tank and Mike will say what I tell them to say. Tank might not be able to say much for quite a while anyway. What about you and Scott?”

  “We don’t know a thing. We were never here, and this never happened. Not the way it really did.”

  “Do you think we can trust Miss Malone to go along with that?”

  “Maybe not. But who’s going to believe her if she starts telling people that Humphrey Bogart was involved in a wild gun battle in your office?”

  “No one,” Orsini said. “Though it would make a good story for the papers.”

  “Let them print it. I’ll deny it and threaten to sue. You’ll back me up.”

  “I will, indeed. And you’re going to trust me to take care of all this?”

  “I don’t see why not. You’re in it up to your neck, but this way you’ll come out all right. Call a cop named Congreve. He’s your kind of guy.”

  “I like the way you think,” Orsini said. “If you ever decide to retire from making movies, you might consider coming to work for me.”

  “No thanks,” Bogart said. “I couldn’t stand the excitement.”

  After that it was just a matter of working out the details, one of which was the transfer of the Packard to my name. Orsini said there wouldn’t be any trouble about it and that he could take care of all the paperwork without even my signature. I believed him.

  Barbara Malone was coming out of her trance when we left, and Orsini was going to have his hands full with her, but I thought he’d manage.

  I suppose I should have felt bad about Tank. He was going to be messed up even after he got treatment. He’d have trouble eating and 220

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  talking for the rest of his life. He wasn’t going to be very pretty, but then he hadn’t been pretty in the first place.

  As for Herbie, well, I did feel bad about that. There was a hollow place in the pit of my stomach, and as much as I tried to tell myself that I’d shot him in the same way I’d shot men in the war, I couldn’t quite convince myself. But I’d get over it. He’d tried to kill me and Bogart, after all.

  “You know what I don’t like about this car?” Bogart said as we drove through the streets back toward the Garden of Allah.

  “The hole in the roof?” I said.

  I didn’t like the hole, either. I thought that it would be a problem for someone with normal hearing because the wind might whistle in it when the car was moving, but I could get it fixed. I wasn’t worried about rain because it never rains in Los Angeles, or so the Chamber of Commerce would have you believe.

  “The hole doesn’t bother me,” Bogart said. “The trouble is that this car isn’t fully equipped, even if it is a Packard.”

  I couldn’t think of a thing that was missing. There was a radio and even a heater. Cruising the streets in a car like that was pure luxury, even with the hole in the roof and the dented bumper. I planned to get the bumper fixed, too, as soon as I could afford it.

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “What’s missing?”

  “A bottle. Even your old heap had a bottle.”

  “We can fix that,” I said, and we did.

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  There was still something bothering me when I pulled up at the Garden of Allah. When I told Bogart about my vague misgiv-ings, he held up the Scotch bottle and said, “Have a drink of this, and you won’t be so bothered.”

  It was getting dark, and the fog had rolled in from the Pacific.

  Maybe it had come all the way from China. It put a chill in the evening air.

  “I’m not looking to forget anything,” I said. “I’ll have some bad dreams about Tank and Herbie, but they won’t last forever. They’re not what’s bothering me.”

  Bogart had a swallow of Scotch and lit a Chesterfield.

  “Then what is bothering you?” he asked, blowing out a stream of smoke as gray as the fog.

  “If I knew, it might not be bothering me. Something just wasn’t right about the way things played out back there in Charlie O.’s place.

  I don’t know exactly what was wrong, but something was.”

  “You were good in there, kid. You don’t have to worry about that.”

  “You were no slouch, yourself. And that’s not what’s worrying me.”

  “You have a new car, you have the cops off your back, and Mr.

  Warner is going to be very grateful. The cops will be off my back, too, so I’m also very grateful. What could be wrong?”

  “Something,” I said.

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&n
bsp; But for the life of me I couldn’t figure out what it was.

  I left Bogart and went back to my apartment, which seemed shabbier than ever now that there was a new Packard parked out in front. But I could get used to that.

  After I took a shower, I lay down and tried to sleep. For a while I just stared at the brownish water stain on the paper of the ceiling.

  The stain was shaped vaguely like a longer, thinner version of the state of Texas. I don’t know how long I looked at it. It seemed like a long time. And then I finally went to sleep.

  Rita Hayworth was dressed in one of her costumes from Blood and Sand. She was talking to Tyrone Power, who was mournful because Rita had decided she didn’t really care about him any more. As far as Rita was concerned, Linda Darnell could have Tyrone, and she wished them all the best. Rita explained to the forlorn Tyrone that she had found someone better, someone more handsome, more courageous, more manly. She beckoned for me, and I walked to her side.

  Tyrone looked at me with considerable skepticism, but Rita didn’t care. She put her arms around me and smiled, and I drew her me to me for a kiss.

  I woke up before the kiss happened, of course. I never got as far with Rita as I would have liked to. You’d think that I could do better than that, at least in my dreams, but I always woke up too soon.

  The difference this time was that I didn’t mind waking up. While I was asleep and dreaming, I’d somehow figured out what had been bothering me about the deal with Charlie O.

  It had all been too easy, that’s what. Charlie O. hadn’t even bothered to insult me or to tell me never to darken his door again. He’d gone along with everything Bogart had said without making a peep of protest.

  Granted, Bogart was smooth. Granted, everything he’d said made sense.

  But it wasn’t in Orsini’s nature to go along so calmly with a plan that wasn’t entirely to his advantage. And in fact, several things about the plan were distinctly unfavorable to him. It was his men who’d done the murder, and even if they’d been “over-zealous” as Bogart put it, Orsini was still their boss. He could probably handle Congreve, but it would take some doing, as would handling Barbara Malone.

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  And then there was the little matter of the car. To say that Orsini didn’t like me was to say that most citizens of the United States didn’t like Tojo and Hitler during the late war. Why would Orsini give up a new Packard so easily? OK, so it had a hole in the roof, and the bumper wasn’t in pristine condition. He still shouldn’t let go of it so ungrudgingly.