"Yes," said the blonde.
"I guess so, sure," said her husband-to-be.
The jovial-looking lady said, "We wish you a great deal of happiness and it's just down the hall, the second door."
The four of them went out. I hoped they didn't wind up in the rest room.
In a few minutes, after checking the files, the lady was back in front of me. "Here you are," she said. "There is no record of an Isabel Ellis or an Isabel Bing. Mr. Dante was married here by Judge Orton on January third."
I needed a cigarette at this point so I lit one and asked, "Whom did he marry?"
"It's right here." She showed me on the marriage application. "Victor Dante and Crystal Claire."
I dropped my brand-new cigarette and stepped on it. I looked at the application. It was there, all right, just as she'd said. I told her, "Thanks. Thanks very much. I'd like this information and a copy of the marriage certificate if it's available."
She smiled. "Surely. You can get a photostatic copy of the certificate at the county recorder's office."
I thanked her and left. The four young people were already going down the stairs ahead of me. Holy vows had been made, and let no man put them asunder.
When I got back to my room at the Desert Inn I draped my coat over a chair, unstrapped my holster, and stuck it, gun and all, under the bedspread and pillow, then flopped on the bed to look over the stuff I'd accumulated.
All I knew from looking at the Nevada marriage application was that this Crystal Claire was twenty-six years old, this was her first marriage, and she resided in the City of Las Vegas, County of Clark. About Dante I learned that he was thirty-six years old, marrying for the second time, his first wife was deceased, and he resided in the City of Las Vegas, County of Clark. And that was all except that the application had been sworn and subscribed on January 3, 1951, and the license had been issued the same day. They'd been married, all right. I'd seen the marriage certificate and copied the information from it.
I noted that January 3, the marriage date, was almost a month from December 6, the date on which Isabel Bing-Ellis-Dante-Smutch or whatever had sold her house and then apparently vanished. That sure did me a lot of good.
I shook my head. Right now the only thing I was sure of was that I wasn't sure of anything. But obviously I had to find out if the lovely who had fainted was my client's daughter. Well, at least I knew what to look for. Also, if there were some way I could get her fingerprints, I'd know for sure. That seemed to sum it up: fingerprints or fanny.
I tossed a coin and it came up just the way I'd hoped it would, and that settled that, but how did I go about it? It just wouldn't do to rush up to her and say, "Ah, there you are, Mrs. Dante. What ho! I say, old girl, would you swish off your bloomers and give me a bally old squint at your fanny?" No, that wouldn't do at all.
I needed a feminine viewpoint, and all these ideas running through my mind had made me want to see Colleen again, anyway. I picked up the phone and gave her a ring.
"Hello." It was that cute, crackly little voice again, and I could almost see her misty-eyed, innocent face. I could almost see more than that.
"How's my Irish Colleen, Mrs. Shawn?"
"Shell?"
"Sure it's Shell. Who else have you got calling you?"
She laughed. "Jealous? Nobody important, Shell. I missed you at lunch. Where were you?"
"In bed. I missed you, too."
She laughed again. "You must have gone to bed late. What were you up to?"
"Oh, I—" I shut up fast. I sure as hell couldn't tell her that. "I was investigating things. I'm still a detective."
"Shell," she said softly, "it is good to hear you talk. I was worried, honest. After last night—you know. Are you still in trouble with whoever. . . did that?"
"Yeah. I'm O.K., though. You can keep on worrying about me if you like. I don't mind at all."
"You looked so sort of grim when you got out at the Inferno last night. Oh! You weren't mixed up in that thing, were you?"
"What thing?"
"Some sort of a riot at the Inferno, I guess. Crazy man throwing money around like water, and a whole load of people ran out and fell down in the street or something. Everybody's talking about it."
"Uh. . . they are?"
"I should say so. Haven't you heard?"
"Yeah, I think I did hear something about it. Say, Colleen." It seemed time to change the subject. "I need some help. You know Victor Dante?"
"Know of him. I don't know him personally."
"You know his wife?"
"No, why?"
"Well—" I stopped again. This was a rather ticklish little question. "Tell me, Colleen. When you gals go out for a dip in the pool at the hotel here, where do you change?"
"In our own rooms. What in the world—"
"No sort of community bathhouse or dressing rooms?"
"No. Shell, tell me, why would that interest you?"
"Look, how about this? Meet me here or somewhere for a drink. I need a woman's viewpoint on a little problem."
"How about the bar in fifteen minutes?"
I would have much preferred my room, but the bar would have to do. I was going out later, anyway, and if I had to hide in my room all the time, I might as well give up and go back to Los Angeles.
"O.K.," I said. "See you down there."
"'By, Shell."
I hung up. She said fifteen minutes, and nine times out of ten when a woman says fifteen minutes she means an hour. If I went down now I'd probably be plastered by the time she arrived. I might blurt out exactly what I wanted to talk to her about and it could be that Colleen wouldn't cotton to the kind of thoughts I think. Particularly when I pointed out Mrs. Dante to her, if we could find her, and she noticed that cute little— Damn! There I went again.
I walked over to the window and looked down at the front of the hotel. It looked as if even more people had arrived for Helldorado today, because a steady stream of cars rolled up and down the highway, and in front of the hotel people were standing and laughing and horsing around, some of them in Western garb. There was a lot of horseplay, even more than I'd noticed yesterday. Helldorado was gathering momentum, rolling faster, and more liquor was being drunk and more hell being raised. Mix me another, and anything goes.
Even in the hotel there was a near bedlam. I could hear whoops and hollers in the hall outside my door, guys yelling hoarsely back and forth. Down below a taxi drove up and six men climbed out, all of them sporting beards two or more inches long. I wondered who'd won the beard-growing contest.
About ten minutes had gone by since I'd phoned Colleen, and the noise was growing outside now. Then somebody banged away with a will on the door. Damn fools. I didn't care if they had fun, but they could leave me out of it. I was in no mood for any of the Helldorado horseplay right now.
They banged again like they were going to bust the door down. I walked over, unlocked the door, and swung it open.
There were three guys in the hall outside my door. Three cowboys. All dressed up in cute little cowboy suits and having a hell of a good time. Three clowns. They seemed to be about half drunk, and they were whooping and yelling and waving toy guns at me, and one guy was carrying a rope or lariat with a hangman's noose in one end. That was a laugh. A hangman's noose. What would the crazy characters in this town think of next?
Chapter Twelve
YES, SIR, that was sure a clever old noose, but I got only a quick glimpse of all that happiness and right then one of the big ugly men stuck his little toy gun up in my kisser and I came very close to throwing up. Because that was no toy, that was sure enough no toy.
Things happened fast after that. I started to slam the door but a foot was in the way and the first guy gave me a stiff arm in the face. I staggered back, started to jump toward the bed and my gun, out of sight under the pillow, and then didn't even wiggle. The guy who'd shoved me was a red-faced character with big pink ears, and he had a gun four feet from me, and there were two other g
uns in two other fists, which made three real guns pointing at me. I was the center of attention again.
And now I recognized the big-eared guy and the other two. The one farthest away from me, who had been half hidden by others in that first quick look I got at them, was naturally the sadistic blighter who'd started going around with me at the Pelican: Lloyd something or other, the bartender had told me. So Lloyd had seen me. The others were the two who had first started with bushy-haired Lloyd into the crowd at the Inferno after me last night.
I stood still when I'd caught my balance, but I said, "You guys nuts? You can't pull anything in here."
"Shut up!" Big Ears snapped at me. "Keep it shut." He moved around behind me. I started to turn so I could keep an eye on him. I hated the thought of getting a gun butt on my skull. But Lloyd stepped up in front of me and wiggled his gun at my face, the big vein bulging in his brown forehead.
"You just hold still, Scott, or you'll get this mixed up with your teeth, Scott," he singsonged. "Hold it steady and you won't get hurt. Honest."
He lied.
While I was still wondering about the guy behind me and looking at the hard metal of Lloyd's big .45 automatic, it happened. I didn't hear a thing; there was just the now familiar explosion inside my head.
There was a cottony taste in my mouth and I was on something soft. I was afraid to open my eyes; I was afraid that soft stuff might be a cloud. And my head hurt like blazes as I remembered what had happened and I knew my head shouldn't hurt if I were dead, and I started peeling open my eyes, a fraction of an inch at a time.
Finally they were open. I was still in my room and on the bed. Maybe— But there was no maybe about it. The three goons were looking at me, and I might possibly have jumped up yelling and killed them except that my hands were tied behind my back, and that cottony taste in my mouth was from a big wad of cloth stuffed between my teeth for a gag, and I felt absolutely horrible. I could feel something across the front of my face, too, but I couldn't tell what it was.
The three guys grinned and made some cracks about my being cute, and then I noticed something peculiar. When they'd come in they'd all been completely outfitted in the spirit of Helldorado days: cowboy Stetsons, shirts, neckerchiefs, jackets, and chaps. There were pieces missing now. Lloyd had no Stetson or neckerchief; Big Ears didn't have any colorful jacket; and the other guy was minus his chaps.
I'd been wondering how the devil these guys figured they could pull anything in the Desert Inn, but all of a sudden when I looked at them my stomach felt cold and slimy because now I knew what they were going to do. I bent my head down and took a look at Shell Scott, still the Cactus Kid. I was a real cowboy now, dressed up in all their missing articles, with my mouth gagged and something else looped around my neck and hanging down on my chest—a foot-square, hand-lettered sign that I couldn't read—and my hands bound behind me.
Lloyd was twirling that laughable noose in his hands, and I knew what they were going to do. They were simply going to walk me right out of here and hang me.
I started to yell at them that they must be out of their minds, that they couldn't possibly get away with such a crazy, idiotic scheme as this one, but all I got out was a strangled "Mmmmph!" through the gag and they whooped and hollered because I was so funny.
Lloyd said, "How you feel, Scott, how you feel? You only been out five minutes. Think you can walk? Navigate? Git up, podner, git on yore hoss." And they whooped and yelped some more, but I failed to see the humor in the situation.
Lloyd meant it, though, when he told me to get up. He came to the bed and bent over me and I tried to kick him in his big teeth and missed and he even thought that was funny. They hauled me to my feet, and my feet weren't tied. For two seconds the thought skittered in my mind that there might be a chance I could run for it, but it was for only two seconds because that was the length of time it took Lloyd to toss the rope over my neck and jam the thirteen turns of a hangman's knot tight up against my Adam's apple.
I wanted that gag out of my mouth so I could tell him to take it easy; already I could feel the strain in breathing because of the tightness of that loop, and I knew, even if he didn't, that a man doesn't have to swing free to hang himself—that he can hang from a doorknob or a bedpost or a noose in a man's hands. And if Lloyd didn't know how quickly a man becomes unconscious when the neck arteries and veins can't carry blood between the heart and brain, then he had a bad memory.
He played out five or six feet of the rope and pulled me after him, and I could feel Big Ears hauling away on the rope attached to my hands behind me. That rope was looped a time or two around my wrists, but it didn't end there and Big Ears wasn't holding it at my wrists. Like Lloyd, he'd played out a few feet of the line and held it a couple of yards behind me. They had me fixed so that I couldn't even run toward Lloyd. I couldn't even move enough to kick the bastards, and my arms were pulled out and up behind my back till I was afraid they'd pop out of place at the shoulders. I was stretched in between them as Lloyd went to the door, and I mean stretched, so I couldn't possibly run.
Before Lloyd opened the door he said to the other two men, "Now, don't screw this up, you guys." He looked from one to the other of them coldly. "Remember, this is a gag; it's gotta go smooth. Don't act nervous. If you gotta, then talk to people, but only if you gotta, and let's get him outta here as fast as we can. But play it smart. You don't have to worry about him; he can't say a thing."
He looked at me then and gave a tug on the rope. "How you like getting choked, Scott?" Then, just before we left the room, he said the words that were to be the last I'd ever hear him say to me in this lifetime. "Scott," he said happily, "we're gonna kill you. Murder you. I guess you know you're dead. You should have listened to my advice."
Sort of an epitaph: You should have listened.
Lloyd opened the door and started out, and as we passed the dresser I got a quick glance at the procession in the mirror: noose around my neck leading forward to Lloyd, me all dressed up pretty, then rope around my hands leading back to Big Ears. It was almost as if they were leading a burro or a jackass. And in that flashing glimpse into the mirror I saw what was across my face. A black bandanna was stretched over my nose and mouth, hanging down below my chin, then passed around my face and tied in back. The Stetson was jammed down on my ears, and about all that was visible of me were my eyes and eyebrows, and the rest of me was dressed as I'd never been dressed before. Not even God would have recognized me.
We went out the door, with them still gaily waving their guns, and no matter how silly I'd thought this was before, I didn't think it was silly now. Because they could get away with it. They'd planned it all before they came, they'd been ready, and now we were on our way. And I knew that downtown and even here on the Strip scenes similar to this were going on, the only difference being that this was a little more elaborate than most. Men had been thrown into Helldorado jail for no reason at all; other men were waving guns at the sky; kids played cops and robbers and shot each other with cap pistols. Yeah, they could get away with it.
And, like that, we went out the door, and I heard it bang shut behind me, and we started down the hall. Me and my three clowns.
Chapter Thirteen
THE LOBBY was jammed. I was really scared now, and it seemed as if I caught a dozen impressions of the color and noise and activity all at once and grabbed onto them and held them as if I might never see anything like them again. I got a flash of a woman's face as she laughed, a beautiful face with flashing white teeth and the tip of a red tongue curling. In the confused blur of men's suits and women's cocktail dresses and sports outfits, there were several Western outfits similar to mine, plus a lot of blue jeans and bright shirts. And everybody seemed to be laughing or smiling. This was the same feverish having fun intensity I'd noticed in the Inferno last night, only now it seemed even gayer and brighter and better.
There were other guys with guns, and one little brat about five or six years old, in a Hopalong Cassidy set of
junior cowboy togs, held a water pistol in his right hand and squirted a stream of water across the lobby.
I caught all that in a flash as we got to the bottom of the stairs and then we were right out in the lobby passing the desk on our right and people caught sight of us. I thought, Maybe, maybe here's where these smart bastards get theirs, but people started grinning and laughing. They pointed and nudged each other and some of the goddamn fools roared their heads off. They were dying laughing; this was a scream. Our procession was stalled momentarily as a group came past us and a couple of other guys came up to offer all four of us comedians a drink, and one fat old guy about fifty-five and drunk as a lord reeled up alongside me with tears streaming from his eyes.
He pointed at the sign I hadn't been able to read on my chest and his big belly jiggled. "Waaaahh!" he roared. "Hoss thief!" Then he haw-hawed for a couple of seconds and gurgled, "What you gonna do with him?"
Lloyd, with a tight grip on the rope that was choking hell out of me, answered happily, "Gonna hang him."
The fat guy couldn't stand it. He whooped and roared and doubled over. "Hang him!" he yelped in hysterics. "Oooohhh, boy! That's good!"
Yeah, it was good. It was so good I wanted to kick the old bastard square in his manhood.
And then I saw Colleen Shawn.
She was standing right at the edge of the lobby with her back to the casino, and a short, dark jacket draped over her shoulders, and I knew she was the only person in this whole building who might recognize me and the trouble I was in, and, some way or any way, help me. And she looked at us, and looked straight at me, and looked away.
But she was still looking, looking all around her with a worried expression on her lovely face, and I knew she was looking for me. She was looking for me, but she'd looked right at me and it hadn't meant a thing.
I could feel sweat on my forehead and under the black mask that covered up my face, and I didn't know what I could do, but I was ready to try anything.
The fat guy clapped me on the shoulder and said, still giggling, "What's your name? You're terrific."
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