by Bill Crider
He could always double-cross me, give the cops a call and tell them I’d stolen it, but I didn’t think he’d try that, not with Bogart as my witness that the car had been given to me fair and square.
So there had to be something else going on, and I thought I now knew what it was.
I got out of bed and turned on the light to check the time. It was a couple of minutes after three o’clock. I wondered if Bogart was up.
I had his number, so I gave him a call. He answered on the second ring.
“What the hell do you want, Junior?” he asked when I identified myself.
“I was wondering if you were awake.”
“The telephone took care of that. What makes you suddenly so concerned about my slumbers?” I told him.
“Christ, kid, are you sure?”
I wasn’t sure, and I told him so.
“But it makes sense,” I said, and I explained why.
“Let’s say you’re right about it. What are you going to do?”
I told him that, too.
“And you called because you thought I might like to go along for the ride? Or just for the fun of it?”
“That, and I thought you might enjoy the chance to use your new pistol again.”
Bogart had kept Mike’s gun, just as I’d kept Orsini’s. We’d also collected Tank’s pistol, Herbie’s, and Orsini’s new one before we left.
We were nearly as well armed as The Big Red One.
“You don’t think there’s a chance of that, do you?” Bogart said.
“Not really. If everything goes all right, we’ll be in and out without anyone even knowing we’re there. Charlie O. will find out later, but by then it’ll be too late.”
“All right, then. You can count on me.”
“I’ll pick you up in half an hour,” I said.
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The Chamber of Commerce was wrong. It did sometimes rain in Los Angeles. It was raining when I got in my new car, and I’d been right about that bullet hole. It was big enough to let in water. Not much, but enough to be aggravating. Luckily, it wasn’t raining hard, just a thin drizzle, as if the earlier fog had gotten better organized and decided to improve itself. The moisture gave the pavement a sheen that smeared and reflected the colors of the lights and signs as we drove back to Charlie O.’s.
“Did you clean your pistol before you went to bed?” Bogart asked.
“No. I didn’t clean any of them. I was going to do it in the morning.”
“The Army didn’t teach you much, did it.”
“Probably not. Did you clean yours?”
“I’m Navy. Of course I did. Are you sure about this wild idea of yours?”
“You thought it made sense when I called you.”
“That’s because you woke me up. Now that I’ve thought about it, I can see the holes in it.”
I couldn’t. As far as I was concerned, there was only one reason that Charlie O. would have let us off so quickly and with so few objections. And that was because he had something that meant more to him than his car or Barbara Malone or just about anything else we’d discussed. Maybe something that was worth more than the money Burleson owed to Charlie O.
And I thought that something was Frank Burleson’s little black book, or whatever records that Burleson had kept. I’d mentioned those records to Thomas Wayne. He’d looked a bit concerned, and it was no wonder. Especially if he knew that Charlie O. already had them.
They’d give Charlie O. even more power over Wayne than he already had, a scary thought since Charlie O. wouldn’t be anywhere nearly as easy to get rid of as Burleson had been, not for Wayne, not for anybody.
So Bogart and I were going to steal the book back.
“What if you’re right about there being a book,” Bogart said, “and Orsini has it in a safe? I can shoot a pistol, but I’m no safecracker.”
I hadn’t thought about a safe, which was a mistake.
“We’ll have to deal with that when we get there,” I said. “Maybe Charlie O. just stuck the stuff in a desk drawer.”
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“I’ll just bet he did, along with the day’s take from the club.”
Bogart was right. Charlie O. was certain to have a safe to keep the club’s money in, and he’d probably put anything else of value there, too. I should have thought of that. If I’d been smart, I would have turned the Packard around right then, gone back home, and tried to dream myself a kiss from Rita Hayworth. But I wasn’t smart. I kept right on driving.
It was raining harder when we got to the club. The parking lot was as deserted as it had been earlier, and water washed across it. The club’s neon sign had been turned off, and everyone had gone home.
Orsini liked to think he ran a respectable club, as opposed to some of his other operations, and he always closed down around 2:00 A. M.
It gave him a chance to think of himself as a legitimate businessman.
I parked around back. There were no cars there, and the whole interior of the building appeared to be dark. The only sound was the rain on the roof of the car and the slight ticking noise that hot metal made as it cooled.
“You should stick a rag in that hole in your roof,” Bogart said.
I thought that was a fine idea, and I took out my pocket handkerchief and crammed it into the hole.
“When it gets soaked, it’ll still drip onto the seats,” Bogart said.
“It’s better than nothing. Are you ready to go inside?” “Sure.”
We got out of the car. Bogart buckled his raincoat around his waist and pulled his hat down over his eyes while I jimmied the side door of the club in about ten seconds with a thin piece of metal I’d brought with me for that purpose. I’d also brought a flashlight with fresh Ray-O-Vac batteries. Bogart closed the door behind us, and I turned on the light and shined it down the hallway.
It was very quiet inside the club. I couldn’t even hear the rain on the roof. I went down the hallway and up the stairs. The door to Orsini’s office wasn’t locked. I opened it and went inside.
“Don’t turn off the flashlight,” Mike said. “It makes it a lot easier for me to see you.”
“Shit,” I said.
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37
And don’t try shining the light in my eyes to blind me,” Mike continued, “because if you do, I’ll just start shooting. I got you covered, so I’m not likely to miss.”
I kept the flashlight pointed at the floor, but I could see the desk well enough. Mike was leaning back with his feet propped up on it. One foot didn’t have a shoe on it because it was heavily band-aged.
“Just come on in,” Mike said. “And then put your gun on the floor.
I didn’t see that I had any choice, so I did both things. There was a bloodstain on the cheap rug by the pistol.
“What are you doing here?” I asked when I’d straightened back up.
“Waiting for you.” Mike swung his feet to the floor. “Mr. Orsini thought you might be a little smarter than you looked, so he told me to hang around just in case you showed up here.”
“How’s the foot?”
“You can shut up about the foot right now. That movie star pal of yours was lucky. All he did was pull the trigger when I hit his arm.
Another quarter of an inch to the right, and he might have crippled me. Where is that son of a bitch, anyway?”
“Home,” I said. “Asleep, I suppose.”
Bogart was, I hoped, wide awake out in the hallway, having been standing to one side when I opened the door. If Mike hadn’t spoken 229
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so soon, Bogart might have followed me right into Charlie O.’s trap.
As it was, I still had a chance to get what I’d come for. I might not be smart, but for once I was lucky. It was about time.
“Kick the pistol over here with your foot,” Mike said. “Don’t kick it hard. Jus
t slide it.”
I did what he told me. The pistol slid across the floor and came to a stop near the desk.
“You can turn the light on now,” Mike said. He kept his eyes on me while he picked up my pistol. “Move real slow.”
I took a couple of steps back and flipped the wall switch. The room light came on.
“Did Charlie O. tell you why he thought I might show up?” I asked.
“No. He just told me to take care of you.”
“I hope he meant by that to give me a good breakfast and send me home happy.”
Mike didn’t laugh. I didn’t blame him. It wasn’t very funny. Maybe it wasn’t funny at all.
“Slappy Coville don’t have a thing to worry about,” Mike said.
“You’ll never be a comedian.”
“You know Slappy?”
“No, but I hear him on the radio. He cracks me up.”
Well, if I learned nothing else from my experience, I now knew who Slappy Coville’s audience was.
Mike started to get up, and I said, “I came here to find something worth a lot of money. Maybe we could work out a deal.”
“No way in hell. And I’m tired of talking to you. Mr. Orsini don’t like you at all, and neither do I, not after what you done to Herbie and Tank. Taking care of you is going to be a pleasure.”
He stood behind the desk and looked around as if trying to decide what to do with my body when he’d finished with me.
“If you kill me here, you’ll have to carry me downstairs,” I said.
“You wouldn’t want to have to do that, not with your foot hurt the way it is.”
“I told you to shut up about the foot. But you got a good idea there.
I don’t want to mess the office up any worse than it is. You can walk downstairs.”
“Are you sure you can make it?”
“If I start having trouble, I’ll shoot you.”
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He sounded far too pleased with that idea to suit me.
“I figure you’ll fall the rest of the way,” he said, and I liked that even less.
He hobbled across the room and stopped about three feet from me.
“Go,” he said.
I turned and walked out the door, careful not to look to either side.
Mike followed me, and Bogart clubbed him on the back of the head with his pistol.
I didn’t see that, but I heard the cracking of the impact. I heard Mike say, “Ummmp,” and I heard him hit the floor.
“I wasn’t sure that would work,” Bogart said. “I never really hit anybody like that before.”
I looked down at Mike. He was breathing but not moving.
“You do good work for an amateur,” I said.
“Thanks. Now what?”
“Now we get him back in the office and tie him up.”
“I think we should tie him up first,” Bogart said.
We found the safe before Mike came around. It was in a little closet, and it looked like a good one. Charlie O. could, after all, afford the best. There was a note to prospective safecrackers painted on the front of the safe: WARNING! POISON GAS INSIDE. I didn’t really believe it.
“How could you ever open the safe if that was true?” Bogart asked.
“It doesn’t mean inside the safe,” I told him. “It means inside the door. That’s to discourage you from using explosives.”
“I didn’t bring any explosives. Did you?”
I hadn’t brought any explosives, either. We’d have to find another way to get the safe open, so we’d never know about the poison gas.
I hoped.
Mike wasn’t coherent for a while, and I thought he was probably concussed. When he was finally able to make sense, he started cursing us. Not very imaginatively, either.
“I hate to interrupt,” I said when he stalled for a second, “but do you happen to know the combination to Charlie O.’s safe?”
He started cursing again.
“I didn’t think so. Charlie O. would never trust a gunsel like you.”
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broke loose. However, we’d used our neckties to bind his hands and feet, and they were made of silk. He didn’t stand a chance.
“You think he knows what gunsel means?” Bogart asked.
“Maybe he saw The Maltese Falcon,” I said. “I’m pretty sure he didn’t read the book.”
“Hardly anybody who saw the movie or read the book knew, either.”
Bogart grinned. “I’ll bet Bob Carroll would know.”
“He might, but would he know the combination to the safe?”
“No, and neither do we. Mike doesn’t know or won’t tell. Are we just going to go home?”
“We’ll find it,” I said. “Everybody keeps the combination written down somewhere, just in case. Charlie O.’s memory is no better than anyone else’s.”
Bogart thought I could be right, so we started looking. There weren’t that many places to look, and we didn’t find a thing. Mike cursed us the whole time, but by then it was easy to ignore him.
“Orsini must keep that combination on a piece of paper in his wallet,” Bogart said. “It’s over, kid. We’re not going to get in that safe, and it’s going to be daylight before long. We’d better get out of here.”
I thought it over. We’d looked in the desk drawers. We’d taken them out and looked on the bottoms and backs. No soap. We’d looked on the bottoms of the chairs, too, with no results. The metal wastebasket by the desk didn’t hold anything of interest, either. There was nothing else in the office, and the only thing in the closet was the safe, black and heavy, with a silver dial in the middle of the door and the gold-painted warning.
I was ready to give up, too, but then I thought about the safe. It sat about three inches off the floor on short legs that ended in heavy casters.
I went into the closet, knelt down, and reached under the safe.
There was a piece of paper taped to the bottom. I brought it out and looked at it. It was the combination.
“Who’d ever look there?” Bogart asked.
“A desperate man,” I said.
I got the safe open in under a minute. There were bundles of money, but I hardly glanced at them. I didn’t steal, not even from a crook like Orsini.
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What interested me more was a couple of small blue notebooks, the kind you can fit into a shirt pocket if you’re so inclined. They were held together by a rubber band, and I picked them up and removed it. I flipped open the cover of the top notebook, and on the first page was Thomas Wayne’s name. Under it were scrawled notes about Wayne’s relationship with Orsini and some bigger names from the underworld, along with some dates and telephone numbers. I flipped through the pages until I came to Barbara Malone. The details I’d suspected I’d find where there, including a doctor’s name and address. I was tempted to see if there was anything about Buck Sterling, but I didn’t really want to know.
“These are what we came for,” I said.
“What do you plan to do with them?” Bogart asked.
“Build a little fire,” I said.
I tore some pages out of the notebooks and dropped the books and the loose pages into the metal wastebasket.
“Got a match?” I said.
Of course Bogart had a match. He used it to light a cigarette and then dropped it into the wastebasket. One of the loose pages caught fire, and then the others started to burn.
When the smoke started curling up out of the wastebasket, Mike stopped cursing and said, “You two are crazy. Mr. Orsini will kill you for that.”
“No, he won’t,” I said. “He’ll just add it to the list of things he hates me for. He hasn’t really lost anything by it, not anything that was really his to begin with.” I looked at Bogart. “Are you ready to go?”
“Sure. Do y
ou think it’s safe?”
The fire was already almost out, the notebooks already nicely charred.
“It’s safe,” I said.
“Untie me,” Mike said.
“Not a chance.”
“I gotta take a leak.”
“I’ll leave a note downstairs for Leo. He’ll untie you when he gets here.”
“That’ll be an hour or two.”
“You can hold it,” I said.
The rain had stopped by the time Bogart and I got back to the Garden 233
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of Allah. I felt as if some of the grime had been washed out of the air and I could breathe more easily. The sky was reddening in the east.
The sun would be up soon, and the streets would fill up with cars and pedestrians, and things would go on pretty much as they always did.
Charlie O. would be angry for a while, but he hated me already. I didn’t expect any reprisals. What I wanted to do was finish my dream about Rita Hayworth.
“Want to come in for a cup of coffee?” Bogart said as he was getting out of the car.
I thought about the coffee he’d made for me earlier.
“No thanks,” I said.
“I don’t blame you.” Bogart gave me a confident, self-mocking grin. “You forgot to leave that note for Leo, didn’t you?”
“Darn,” I said.
Bogart grinned again.
“I’ll see you around, kid,” he said.
He turned and walked away. With his raincoat and hat on, he looked just as he had at the end of Casablanca when he and Claude Raines had walked away from the camera. I wondered what had happened to Rick and Louis Renault after that night, whether they’d really had that beautiful friendship.
Probably not, I thought, and I drove my new, slightly damaged, Packard down the rain-washed street.
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