The Burglar Who Thought He Was Bogart - By Lawrence Block Page 0,74

was definitely Rockwood, I decided—and chose a telephone in the front room, where I could keep an eye and ear on the door.

I made my phone calls.

When I was done I treated myself to a tour of the apartment. Aside from a massive Chippendale highboy and a closet they’d cleared out for him, the Lehrman possessions remained essentially undisturbed during their absence. I window-shopped, leaving everything where I found it, and being much more careful about fingerprints than I’d been two flights up.

I left the refrigerator unopened.

And, when I let myself out at last, I locked up after myself and left the little brownstone house without incident. The blind woman on the first floor might have heard my footfall on the stairs, the neighbors across the street might have seen me emerge from the entranceway, even as they might have seen me go in some hours earlier. But I’d given them no cause to note my passage. I’d come and gone, leaving no trace.

In King of the Underworld, Bogart plays the title role of Joe Gurney. Kay Francis and John Eldredge play a husband-and-wife team of doctors, Eldredge with a mustache almost as unfortunate as Bogie’s in Virginia City. Eldredge saves a wounded henchman of Bogart, who enlists him as the gang’s doctor. When their hideout is raided, Bogart decides Eldredge must have ratted, and shoots him. Bogart and his men get away, but the cops arrest Kay Francis.

Then, in what I thought was a terrific touch, Bogart kidnaps a writer and forces him to ghost his autobiography, planning to kill him when he’s done. First, though, he busts two captured gang members out of jail, gets wounded in the process, and manages to find Kay Francis, who’s been trying to dig up evidence that will clear her at the trial. A big help she turns out to be; she tips off the cops, infects Bogart’s wound, and blinds him with tainted eyedrops. He’s stumbling around the hideout after her and the writer, trying to kill them even if he can’t see them, when the cops burst in and gun him down.

I watched this from my usual seat, with my usual barrel of popcorn on my lap, and what was becoming my usual second ticket in the hands of the ticket-taker. While I was on line to buy the popcorn I’d caught the eye of the tall guy with the goatee and the glasses. He smiled and looked away quickly, not wanting to stare at the poor loser who was all by himself once again. Reflexively he slipped an arm around the barely perceptible waist of his girlfriend, the Pillsbury doughgirl. I guess he wanted to make sure she couldn’t get away, lest he wind up like me.

A lesser man than I might have felt sorry for himself.

During the intermission I stayed right where I was. I had plenty of popcorn left, and I didn’t need to use the john or duck out for a quick smoke. I stayed put, and after a decent interval the lights went down again and the second feature began.

Beat the Devil. Directed by John Huston, who shared the screenplay credit with Truman Capote. The cast included Gina Lollobrigida as Bogart’s wife and Jennifer Jones as a compulsive liar married to a fake English nobleman. Peter Lorre’s in it as well, along with Robert Morley and a bunch of great character actors whose names I can never remember.

I settled into my seat, thinking that maybe this time I’d be able to understand what was going on on the screen. I must have seen the movie three or four times over the years and was never able to make head or tail out of it. Everybody was trying to hoodwink everybody else, and when Jennifer Jones prefaced a statement with “in point of fact” you knew for certain she was about to come up with a whopper, but beyond that I could never quite manage to follow the plot. Maybe this time would be different.

Five or ten minutes in, I sensed a presence in the aisle. Without averting my eyes from the screen, where Morley and Lorre had their heads together, I listened hard for approaching footsteps. But I don’t know that I actually heard her draw near. It was more a matter of simply knowing, some extrasensory awareness that quickened the pulse and made it hard to breathe.

Then she was settling into the seat beside me. I still couldn’t take my eyes off the screen.