The Burglar Who Thought He Was Bogart by Lawrence Block Read Free Book Online

ever go visit them I’m taking my own lunch.”
    “And your own woman?”
    “I don’t have a woman,” I said, “but if I did I don’t think I would take her to Tierra del Fuego.”
    “Where would you take her instead?”
    “It would depend on the woman. I might take her to Paris.”
    “How romantic.”
    “Or I might take her to the movies.”
    “Also romantic,” she said. A smile played on her lips. “I want to buy a book. Will you sell me a book?”
    “Not this one?”
    “No.”
    “Good,” I said, and closed Our Oriental Heritage, and set it on the shelf behind me. She’d been holding a book, and she placed it on the counter where I could see it. It was Clifford McCarty’s Bogey: The Films of Humphrey Bogart, the hardcover edition published thirty years ago by Citadel Press. I checked the penciled price on the flyleaf.
    “It’s twenty-two dollars,” I said. “And, because I’m honest to a fault, I’ll tell you that there’s a paperback edition available. The title’s slightly different but it’s the same book.”
    “I have it.”
    “It’s around fifteen dollars, if memory serves, and sometimes it does.” I blinked. “Did you just say you have it?”
    “Yes,” she said. “It’s called The Complete Films of Humphrey Bogart, and your memory serves you quite well. The price is fourteen ninety-five.”
    “And you already own it.”
    “Yes. I want a hardcover copy.”
    “I guess you’re a fan.”
    “I love him,” she said. “And you? Do you love him?”
    “There’s never been anybody quite like him,” I said, which, when you come right down to it, could be said of just about anyone. “He was one of a kind, wasn’t he? He had—”
    “A certain something.”
    “That’s just what I was going to say.” The tipsof my fingers rested on the book, scant inches from the tips of her fingers. Her nails were manicured, and painted a rich scarlet. Mine were not. I fought to keep my fingers from reaching out for hers, and I said, “Uh, I have a copy of the Jordan Manning biography. At least I did the last time I looked.”
    “I saw it.”
    “It’s out of print, and difficult to find. But I guess you already have a copy.”
    She shook her head. “I don’t want it.”
    “Oh? It’s supposed to be good, but—”
    “I don’t care,” she said. “What do I care about his life? I don’t care where he was born, or if he loved his mother. I don’t give a damn how many wives he had, or how much he drank, or what he died of.”
    “You don’t?”
    “What I love,” she said, “is what you see on the screen. That Humphrey Bogart. Rick in Casablanca. Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon. ”
    “Dixon Steele in In a Lonely Place. ”
    Her eyes widened. “Everyone remembers Rick Blaine and Sam Spade,” she said. “And Fred Dobbs in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep. But who remembers Dixon Steele?”
    “I guess I do,” I said. “Don’t ask me why. I remember titles and authors a lot, that’s natural in this business, and I guess I remember character names, too.”
    “ In a Lonely Place. He’s a screenwriter, DixonSteele, do you remember? He has to adapt a novel but he can’t bear to read it, and he gets a hat-check girl to come tell him the story. Then she’s murdered, and he is a suspect.”
    “But there’s another girl,” I said.
    “Gloria Grahame. She’s a neighbor and gives him an alibi, and then she falls in love with him and types his manuscript and prepares his meals. But she sees the violence in him when his car is in an accident and he beats up the other driver, and again when he beats his agent for taking his script before it was finished. She thinks he must have killed the hat-check girl after all, and she is going to leave him, and he finds out and starts choking her. Do you remember?”
    Vaguely, I thought. “Vividly,” I said.
    “And there is a phone call. The hat-check girl’s boyfriend has confessed to the murder. But