“What do you want?” asked Humphrey Bogart.
“Your car.” It wasn't what I had planned to say, not at all, but confronted with Bogart, the truth rushed to my head like a snort of cocaine.
“What?” He was friendly, calm, a bit loaded.
“Why do you want the car?” asked his companion. She was thin and tawny, with sleek brown hair, large intelligent eyes, and a mouth you could have used for collateral. She was, I realized, Lauren Bacall.
“To prevent a murder,” I said.
Bogart's mouth tightened. “You serious?” he asked.
“Very serious. Walter Adrian's widow is in terrible danger.”
“Jesus Christ,” said Bogart. He turned to Bacall. “Go inside, Betty, tell them I'll be late.”
“I can't come?” she asked.
“No, no,” Bogart grumbled. “C'mon, let this guy in the car. Helen Adrian. Christ alrnighty.”
Bacall got out and I got in, thanking her profusely. She put her hands on the window, her eyes worried.
“Bogey, don't be a hero. Take care,” she told him.
Bogart said not to worry, but we had to go; then he floored the gas pedal and sent us smoking out the driveway. He executed an impossible U-turn and went roaring up St. Cloud, which ran into Bel Air Road, and down a series of hair-raising curves to Sunset Boulevard. Bogart stopped at Sunset and turned to me.
“Which way and what's your name?”
I said I was Jack LeVine, a real-life detective hired by Adrian, then thought over where to go. It was some sweet decision to make because if I was wrong, I had let Helen slip out of my hands and out of this world.
“Santa Monica,” I finally said. “Pacific Way.”
“Pacific Way,” the actor repeated. “That's a little north of Santa Monica.” He bit lightly on his lip. “Okay, Chief, hang on.”
He was a skinny man, actually, almost frail-looking, with thinning hair and deep hollows in his face. But for all that surprising physical delicacy, he was commanding, impressive, and a regular egg.
And he drove like a holy madman. Cigarette dangling from his lip, watching traffic with liquid brown eyes, occasionally taking a drink out of a flask of martinis, Bogart roared down Sunset Boulevard at an even seventy-five, running numerous lights in the name of chivalry.
“I heard about you,” he said. “A New York detective, old school friend of Walter's; Larry Goldmark told me.”
“We went to City College together.”
Bogart chuckled deeply, the chuckle turning over into a cough.
“City College and you became a dick.”
“Life has its little jokes.”
“Ain't that the truth,” the actor said. “I was supposed to be a doctor.” His mouth tightened as he swerved to avoid a Buick that had just hit its brakes. “Who wants to kill Helen?”
“A guy.”
Bogart groaned. “C'mon, Jack. I'm risking my neck driving like a drunk to get you there, you can at least tell me what's going on.”
“I won't talk till it's over. You can understand that.” I stuck a Lucky into the corner of my mouth.
“Shit,” he said. “I've played shamuses. They blab like old women.”
“That's in the movies.”
He grinned.
“Everything's in the movies. That's all there is, movies. Doesn't America realize that yet?”
An ambulance cut us off as we headed down Burlingame to San Vincente Boulevard. It missed us by inches but Bogart didn't rattle. He was well-oiled but in full control, like any man comfortable with liquor. Booze was no opiate; it was fuel.
He lit a fresh cigarette with the butt of the old one, which snapped out his open window.
“The Carpenter murder,” he said suddenly, turning to me, “the robbery story is bunk, right?”
“Right.”
“I knew it. The day I read the story in the
Times
I told Betty it was a load of shit.”
“His murder is connected to Adrian's murder, I'll tell you that much.”
Bogart rubbed that chin.
“So those stories were true,” he said slowly. “Walter didn't kill himself.”
“He had no reason to.”
“No?” The actor stared at me, his eyes curious and his hand slack on the wheel as we whipped up San Vincente at eighty miles an hour. I reflexively pointed in the direction of the windshield.
“Don't worry,” he said placidly, ignoring the road, “I've done a hundred and ten with my head in an ice bucket.”
“Why did you believe Walter was a suicide?” I asked him.
Bogart shrugged.
“The trouble he was having with Warners, the probability that the House Committee would be after him.”
“But he's not the only one.”
Bogart nodded, cigarette smoke streaming from his nostrils.
“Very true, Jack. They'll nail anyone who ever scratched his ass during the National Anthem. But some people just get worried; others might string themselves up.”
“You worried?”
He fiddled with his bow tie.
“Anybody with half a brain is worried.”
He hit the brake and we went off San Vincente at a modest sixty, running a stop sign, cutting a swath through a service station, and ending up on Route 1, the Palisades Beach Road.
“You said Pacific Way?” the actor asked.
“Check. I'm looking for a place on the beach.”
“All right. That's about ten miles north of here.” He smiled and stomped on the gas pedal. “Here we go.”
Route 1 is a two-lane highway that runs alongside the sea. I've been told that it's quite scenic by day and positively dazzling the farther north you travel. But Route 1 twists and turns above that vast and turbulent ocean, and a person would not ordinarily think of doing one hundred miles per hour on it. But Bogart pushed the Caddy with quiet relish and made it seem unthinkable, unmanly, not to risk one's neck on this stretch of highway.
We began passing trailer trucks on the two-lane road, moving past them so quickly they seemed part of the landscape, like the houses and mountains and trees. It was a period of time, of motion, in which Bogart's life and my life were uninsurable, marked, doomed. And I enjoyed it, savored it even. The pursuit of a beautiful and good woman held captive by a two-time killer was the cleanest and simplest thing I had done in a long time.
And it crystallized to pure hunt, pure good and evil, when I saw the blue Nash proceeding at a modest pace about a hundred yards away.
“That's him,” I told Bogart. “Slow down and put your brights on.”
The actor effortlessly slowed us down to forty. While it felt as though we had stopped dead, we actually closed the gap between the two cars to maybe seventy-five feet. We were near enough to observe that only the driver was visible, his chunky figure planted solidly behind the steering wheel. My heart sank.
“Where's Mrs. Adrian?” asked Bogart. “And who's that driving?”
“We have to pass him,” I said urgently. “I've got to see if she's in there.”
“He'll notice us.”
“He's going to notice us sooner or later anyhow. Let's move.”
“You're the doctor.” Bogart rubbed his jaw again and brought us up to a cruising speed of seventy. White checked his rear view mirror and noticed us closing in, but, the brights blinding him, had to turn away.
Bogart pulled out to pass the Nash. At that precise moment, a trailer truck no bigger than the U.S.S.
Missouri
came whining around a curve and loomed massively before us. Bogart floored the brake pedal and we went into a skid. Time stopped as the actor wrestled with the wheel, bringing the Caddy onto the road shoulder, spraying pebbles and whirling toward that dark and indifferent ocean. I watched the whitecaps as we spun closer to the edge, thought about my swimming. The spinning slowed and Bogart somehow brought us to a stop as the truck rumbled past, yellow lights blinking.
Time in.
“Very nice,” I told Bogart. “Very, very nice.”
He hitched his shoulders and tossed another butt out the window, then eased us back onto the road.
“We're going to pass this son of a bitch,” he said briskly, “if it takes all night.”
White was a few hundred yards away again, and picking up speed.
“I think he knows now,” I said.
“That we're tailing him?”
“Yeah.”
“Then I'd say we better catch him.”
Within ten seconds, Bogart had stoked the Caddy up to ninety.
“This is some machine,” I told him.
The actor merely nodded as we gained on the Nash. White had opened up to perhaps eighty. Bogart continued to accelerate and we hit a century.
“You can't do a hundred in a fucking Nash,” he growled.
White tried, though. A race had developed, but the FBI man was outclassed. We hit a straight expanse of road and there was nothing but night on the southbound lane. Bogart pulled out to pass and drew to ten yards of the Nash. To five yards. We drew up to the rear of the car, which is when I saw the pair of trim legs horizontal on the back seat.
“That's Henry Perillo!” Bogart shouted.
At that moment Clarence White turned his head and faced us, his eyes peering myopically into the high beams. He shouted something, but I couldn't understand a word. Then he faced front. A second later, he whirled back and extended a revolver out his window.
“Down!” I screamed at Bogart. The actor ducked and braked the Caddy, but too late; the FBI man aimed carefully and sank one bullet into our right front tire. He fired at the left front, but he had lost his angle and missed. The Caddy rocked a bit but didn't skid. Limping like a great steel cripple, it came to an uneventful but frustrating stop at the side of the road.
“Goddamn it to hell!” I roared, banging my fist on the dash. Bogart was already out of the car and opening the trunk.
“C'mon, Jack!” he shouted. “Stop pissing and moaning; the son of a bitch could have shot out the radiator. Help me get this spare on.”
It took no more than ten minutes to change the tire, but ten minutes can be an awfully long time. Bogart and I, stripped to our shirtsleeves, labored wordlessly in the cool, wet seaside air, communicating through grunts and pointed fingers. I hoisted the flat and dropped it into the trunk.
“A tough break,” I said. “Maybe a fatal one.”
“You pays your money and you takes your choice,” the actor said, climbing into the driver's seat and starting the engine. “I'm telling you we'll catch him.”
As fast as we drove, and the speedometer read 120 on one straightaway, we couldn't find the blue Nash.
“You still want Pacific Way?” Bogart asked.
“Yeah.”
“Henry Perillo,” he said contemplatively. “This is unbelievable. What's with him?”
“A lot. His real name is Clarence White and he's an FBI man, undercover variety, who lost his cover and had to kill Adrian and Carpenter in order to regain it. The catch is that
he's
the one who's investigating the two murdersâfor the FBI. Pretty ingenious.”
The actor turned to me and now there were tears in his eyes.
“Outrageous,” he said softly and with difficulty. “It's horrible.”
It was horrible all right. Unthinkable, bizarre, a bad dream. But here it was and here we were, pulling onto Pacific Way.
“I'll kill the lights,” said Bogart.
At the end of the street I could see the three-story salt-box home, dark and desolate against a child's dream of a starry sky. The Nash was in the driveway.
“I'll get out here,” I said. “Thanks for everything.”
“Don't give me that crap,” Bogart said, stopping the car and opening his door. “You're going to need help.”
“You could get hurt. I only have one gun.”
“Stop being a sap. Let's get going.”
I got out of the car.
“All right,” I told him. “But stay behind me and stay low.”
“Don't worry.” The actor grinned, suddenly filled with the giddy daring of the moment. “I've played this scene a hundred times.”
We started up the road, jogging in a crouch, and we had gone maybe ten feet when we noticed the boat.
It was a cabin cruiser, about fifty feet long and anchored a few hundred yards out on the gently rolling ocean. At least two men were aboard making preparations for what appeared to be the start of a considerable journey. Barrels of gasoline were arranged in rows of three on the rear deck of the boat.
“That's an awful lot of gas,” I said. “They're not just making a run up the coast.”
“Looks like a couple of thousand miles worth,” Bogart said quietly. “What do you think?”
“I think they're going to take Helen for a long ride.”
“And PerilloâWhite you say his name is?âhe stays here?”
“Yeah.”
The actor ran his hand through his sparse hair and stared at the ground, then turned to me, pale and worried.
“You think she's alive?”
“White is very careful. I can't imagine he'd drive through Los Angeles with a dead woman in the back seat.”
“Then how do we get her out of here?”
A very apt question. I folded my arms and looked up at the stars.
“Well,” I began, “we obviously have to intercept him before he gets to the boat and we have to do it in such a way that those bozos out on the cruiser don't notice.”
“He's bound to take her out in a launch, but there's none on the beach.”
“So it's in the back of the house.”
We looked at each other and nodded.
“I get into the boat,” I told him. “Definitely.”
The two of us continued loping up Pacific Way, hunched like marines about to hit a beachhead. I removed my Colt and held it tightly in my right hand. We reached the saltbox house and ducked down by the grill of the Nash.
“There he is,” whispered the actor.
The bulky figure of White suddenly emerged from the rear of the house. He was carrying Helen in his arms and heading for the water. Her arms dangled loosely down to the sand and I detectedâmaybe wished into factâan involuntary movement of her head.