He yawned, but that didn't fool me into thinking he was sleepy. He said, "A man could tell me that so he could shoot a guy and then claim self-defense."
"A man could if he was nuts," I said. "I shot Dante after he tossed two slugs at me, and if I hadn't shot him you'd be out here looking at holes in my face." I paused a moment and then said, "I take that back. I meant holes in my face and my back, and you'd be looking at me in the desert if you found me at all. Like William Carter. Because ever since right after I hit this town Dante's been trying to kill me."
Hawkins said, "Two shots he took at you? First? Any witnesses?"
"Yeah. No people, but two bullets in the wall that was behind me when he shot at me, nitrate particles in Dante's left hand that will show up in a paraffin test and prove he did fire a gun, and a hole in his brain. He didn't do any shooting at me after he grew that hole; he did it before."
Hawkins stuck his tongue in his cheek, let it rove around a little, and sighed.
I said, "There's one more act in this business. If you'll let me go—take me—to Dante's home in the desert, I can explain a whole lot of things that have happened in the last three days and more: Carter in the desert; Freddy Powell at the airport in my Cadillac; a couple of bruised muscle men at McCarran Field, a couple of Dante's men at the Desert Inn—one, named Lloyd, with a knife in him, and the other one dead. And there's more. But we've got to get out to Dante's home before the next plane lands at the airport. Dante's not going to do any explaining."
Hawkins' eyes just kept getting wider and wider and wider. It was eight to five he thought one of Dante's bullets had gone in my ear and was rattling around inside there. But I told him we had to get going fast, and that it was all his case, he could have it, and I'd give him enough so maybe he could hang me. I screamed at the top of my lungs that otherwise I'd clam up instanter or just fall down on the floor and die and he could guess what I'd been talking about, and that we had to hurry, there wasn't time for an advance blow-by-blow account now. So we went. Three uniformed deputies and Hawkins. And the prisoner: me.
It was fifteen minutes after one in the morning by the time we got to the desert house and walked up to the front door. The house was dark, and my heart was flapping against my lips while Hawkins rang the bell. If the place was empty I could kiss Los Angeles good-by, because I'd be in Nevada a long, long time. I hadn't been kidding Hawkins when I told him there wasn't time for a blow-by-blow account, but I'd had another reason for not spilling all I knew back there at the Inferno.
Then lights went on inside and I saw little Blondie coming to the door with more on than when I'd last seen her, and I almost flipped with relief. Because even if I wasn't out of the woods yet, I could see the prairies ahead. And now I could fire my ammunition at Hawkins. If J. Harrison Bing had arrived ahead of us and Blondie had taken a powder, then I could have chattered at Hawkins till my tongue came loose and flew away like a bird, and it might not have done any good; he'd have been devilish hard to convince. Now, though, I had a chance. And Bing was due any minute, because by now his plane was in.
She opened the door and we walked inside. I waited till we were all in and she was still sputtering, half asleep and shocked and surprised, then I said to Hawkins, "Now I can talk for hours. And I will."
Then I turned to her and I said, "Hello, Isabel. I've been looking all over hell for you." And while she stared at me coldly I said to Hawkins, "Here's the tomato who put three little holes in William Carter's back."
Isabel gasped and Hawkins stepped toward her. Looking through the window behind his back, I could see headlights tearing up the road from Highway 91, almost to the house now.
I turned back to Isabel. "I phoned your father earlier," I said. "There's been a lot of hell because of you and he's got a right to be here. Besides, I wanted it this way."
There was a trace of panic in her blue eyes, but she was pretty much under control. She said, "I didn't kill anyone. I don't understand. My name isn't even Isabel."
She looked cute as hell, still, but I didn't like her very well. Those were the first words she'd ever spoken to me, and she'd told me three lies. And she understood, all right. I understood something, too: The way this was shaping up, she was one of the most cold-blooded bitches I'd ever run across.
Then the car pulled to a stop outside and her father came running up on the porch and inside, and I took a very good look at him as he came in.
Because I'd never seen this fat old pappy before.
Chapter Twenty-One
J. HARRISON BING pulled two hundred and twenty pounds to a stop inside the door, and panting, said, "Who called me? Which of you? What—" He stopped and frowned, looking around him. "What is this? Why all these men?" He looked at Blondie and said, "Isabel, what's going on?"
It was getting to her, piling up on her, and that was partly what I was counting on: Bust out of the night with no warning and throw it at her fast, one thing after another, a little like Dante had tried to throw conversation at me a while back. Only I'd stacked everything I could in my favor. This was a rough way to do it, but it's worse lying in a desert, with blood on your mouth, or having part of a Cadillac blown through your chest.
I said, "Mr. Bing, this is Lieutenant Hawkins. He's out here to arrest your daughter for murder."
I didn't like what that did to his face, but I liked what happened to hers. Because maybe I was brutal, but I had my back against the wall, too. This one was for keeps, and some of it had to spill out of Isabel's pretty mouth.
She spoke rapidly, in a voice that was a little shrill. "You're insane! I haven't killed anyone. I'm Mrs. Victor Dante. None of this makes sense, not any of it."
"Your father's right here to help make a liar out of you," I said.
Mr. Bing broke in. "See here, what's this all about? There must be some mistake." He was still shocked and his fleshy red face was pained. He looked at me. "Are you the one who called me? I don't know you."
"We've never met. Your son-in-law hired me, pretending to be you, and gave me one of your business cards. That's how I reached you tonight. I'm sorry about this, sir, but there isn't any mistake." I paused momentarily, then asked him, "You can prove you're J. Harrison Bing, can't you?"
"Of course I can prove it. What—"
"This is your daughter, isn't it? It's important."
He sighed, looked at the uniformed deputies, and answered, "Yes, she's my daughter."
"She and Harvey Ellis were never divorced, were they?"
"Why, no. I don't understand. Why ask me that?"
I glanced at Hawkins and back to Bing, and hesitated. After a moment Hawkins spoke softly to one of the deputies, who came over to Bing and took him outside.
I turned to Isabel. "You'll feel better if you start talking about it now, Mrs. Ellis."
"I'm not Mrs. Ellis. And there's nothing to talk about."
"Look," I said quietly, "of course you're Mrs. Ellis. Your father just said you were, and you know we can prove it other ways now. Fingerprints, old friends." I paused and added, "We can even bring Harvey up here."
Her face went a little blank at that. She started to say something, stopped for several seconds, then said, "I. . . divorced Harvey. And I haven't killed anybody."
"The hell you divorced him. You couldn't, Isabel. And that helps explain why you killed Carter." She opened her mouth again but I kept talking. "You were sure as hell married to Ellis when he went to San Quentin over a year ago. That felony conviction gave you grounds for divorce, all right, but it takes over a year to get a final decree in California, baby—and you married Dante long before that year was up."
There was more than a trace of panic in her eyes now, and she slowly closed her mouth and didn't say anything. She looked rattled enough so that I might get away with a bluff. I stepped up close to her and said roughly, "Maybe you don't understand how much we know. Listen to this, Isabel: When your husband got out of prison he started looking for you—you know why—and he was anxious enough to
hire detectives when he couldn't find you himself. He used your father's name so there wouldn't be any trail from you back to one Harvey Ellis, but also so that you might not guess your husband was breathing down your neck. He had to have a reason for that, didn't he, Isabel?"
She was biting on her lower lip, and her breasts rose and fell with her rapid breathing. I kept it going. "When it figured that my client wasn't really your father, you can guess what I did, can't you, Isabel? I phoned Ellis and had quite a chat with him."
She gasped, then her eyes widened as she pressed her lips together. That was enough for me. I said, "The L.A. police had already told me they suspected you'd turned your own husband in. And Harvey Ellis could certainly figure out who sent him to prison—especially when she stopped writing him and disappeared. He told me who turned him in, Isabel."
I grinned down at her and she said frantically, "That doesn't mean anything. What if I did? It doesn't mean I'd kill anyone. Why would I—"
I broke in on her. "I'll tell you why, honey. Bigamy, for one, and prison for you—among other and maybe better reasons. Hell, Isabel, it's obvious now. When Carter showed up here and got a look at you, it was all over. Incidentally, baby, the gun you shot him with must be around somewhere. That can be traced."
She was shaking her head back and forth, but I didn't stop. I said rapidly, "We can even ignore the bigamy angle. You must have known, or learned, that Carter had been hired by your husband, and you certainly couldn't afford to let him go back and tell Ellis where you were. Ellis wasn't going to kiss you after you'd sent him to prison, left him flat, sold his home, maybe stolen him blind, and God knows what else. Honey, that's why you couldn't go ahead and get a divorce up here after you got your six weeks in: because hubby was already out of the can when you'd established residence, and the divorce summons would have told him where you were. If he were still in prison, where he couldn't get at you, it wouldn't have made any difference; but with hubby out, you couldn't go ahead. He'd have found you without hiring detectives."
I stopped and looked at her as her eyes darted around the room, from Hawkins to the uniformed deputies and back to me. I said, "What were you going to do? Get rid of Ellis, then marry Dante again, legally? It all fits now, Isabel. When Dante fell for you at the Pelican and popped the question, you'd already changed your name and appearance so you could drop out of sight and lose Ellis for good. Becoming Mrs. Dante would really complete the switch. Anyway, you married him—as Crystal Claire. There's another reason for killing Carter. If Dante ever learned what you'd done to one husband, and that you were still legally married to Ellis, he'd have known you weren't the sweet little twenty-six-year-old bachelor gal you claimed to be. Dante just isn't the kind of guy who'd enjoy being taken for a ride. You want more? You want to tell us about Carter now?"
"No. . . there's nothing." It didn't sound like her voice at all any more. She knew by now that even if I didn't have every bit of it, I had enough.
I said, "Hasn't it been on your mind? Who dumped Carter in the desert? Dante? He was covering up for you at the Pelican when I walked in on him there, so you must have told him about it. What kind of lies did you tell him to explain your killing Carter? And what's Dante going to think when he knows your real reasons for murder? And how did it feel to shoot a man three times in the back? A man with a nice little wife and a kid in Los Angeles."
She put her hands over her ears and started to turn away, but she wasn't talking yet. She still hadn't admitted a thing, and I still wasn't out of the woods, so I stepped even closer to her, grabbed her wrists, and pulled her hands down. Her face was inches from mine and her white skin was even paler than it had been a minute before. Her lips were parted and dry, and I could tell she was ready to go now, on her way. So I broke it off in her, and I didn't like it a hell of a lot but I made myself look into her upturned blue eyes as I gave her the last of it.
"There's no help for you, baby; not even from Dante. It's no good now, no happy-ever-after, but Dante never did know you were playing him for a sucker."
She frowned a little, her eyes puzzled, and I continued softly, "He never even knew you weren't Crystal Claire. He still thought you were his sweet little Crystal when I killed him."
Her face sagged and she blinked into my eyes, then she let her gaze slip down to my chest and slowly back up to my face again, and I said, "It's true, baby; all over. Just a little while ago I shot and killed Victor Dante."
And that was the one that did it. She swung her blonde head over toward Hawkins and saw the answer in his face, and I hammered the one question about Carter at her, and the answer spilled, twisted, out of her mouth. Not much, just the age-old "Oh, my God, I did. I killed him," and then for the second time since I'd first seen her she fainted dead away.
I was a brutal son of a bitch, but those prairies were closer now, and maybe I was climbing over the bodies to get there, but I was getting there.
Fifteen minutes later, as I watched Isabel's face and listened to her talk, I realized she was even more selfish and cold-blooded than I'd thought. She'd been money-hungry even when, at seventeen, she'd married a man twenty years older than herself, and finally, as has happened before and will happen again, Harvey Ellis had stolen to buy his little Isabel the things she'd craved. He'd done a hell of a good job of it, too. Captain Samson had mentioned wondering if Ellis might have got his hands on that quarter of a million dollars that had been lifted in L.A. Sam had wondered right, and there'd been almost $260,000 in the Harvey-Isabel kitty when Isabel finally got good and bitchy.
She continued almost as if she were talking to herself. "I wanted that money more than I'd ever wanted anything and I wanted to get rid of the old goat. I practically begged him to pull one more job, then I turned him in and filed for a California divorce. I changed my name and all, but I was afraid to start spending the money because of the cops. I still had it when I met Dante, and he was—well, he was all the answers, and I could use all that money easy, through him. He was crazy about me, too. Anyway, I married him and let him use the money to help finance his Inferno deal." She paused and smiled slightly. "He thought I gave it to him because I was nuts about him." The smile went away and she continued, "After—after Carter, I told Victor that I'd done it for him, because I loved him. I told him Carter had found out that Victor killed Big Jim White, and that he was going to the sheriff when I. . . stopped him."
Hawkins interrupted her there. "Dante killed Big Jim."
She didn't even look up. "It can't hurt him now," she said. "He killed him. Just before he stepped into the Inferno deal. Carter didn't know any more about it than anyone else, but Victor believed me." She stopped for a moment and then added, "He really did love me."
She went on talking, then went over it again, only the second time through she tried to make us believe that Carter had attempted to blackmail her. It would have been a sweet setup for blackmail, but it seemed to me like too much of an afterthought on Isabel's part. At least I had a better idea now why Dante must have come close to jumping clear up to the moon when I'd walked in on him and Lorraine at the Pelican. With Carter dead, if somebody—me, for instance—should start looking for him, that somebody might not only prove Isabel murdered Carter, but also stumble onto the same information Dante thought Carter had possessed. Isabel kept talking and we got it all, but it was a long night. Especially for Isabel.
The sun was up and Isabel was in a cell when I finished talking to a tired and red-eyed Hawkins.
"How about me?" I asked him.
"Like I told you before," he said wearily, "the only crimes that aren't bailable in Nevada are treason and first-degree murder. You get bail, but it'll be high."
I was so worn out and sleepy it was hard to think straight, but I knew there was something I'd been meaning to do. Then I remembered. "Use your phone?" I asked Hawkins.
He shoved the phone across the desk and I called the Desert Inn and got put through to Colleen's room. Her voice was sleepy when she answered.
"Hello, there," I said. "I didn't think about your being asleep." Just saying the word made my eyes droop.
"Shell? Is that you?"
"Uh-huh. Look, it's all finished. I'll be going down to L.A. tonight, but I'll have to come back up in a couple of days for a coroner's inquest."
"What happened? Are you all right?"
"Yeah. I've been going over the thing all night; I don't think I could run through it again right now, Colleen."
There was a little pause while I blinked sleepily at the far wall, then she said, "You're going back to L.A.? You're going to stop and see me, though, aren't you?"
"Oh, sure," I said. I was thinking that after the binge I'd been on, topped by this past night, I might have to be carried to Colleen's room, but I'd sure as hell get there. I added, "If I can make it, that is." I yawned. "Look, honey, why don't we go down together? You want to—"
I stopped. Right in the middle of my yawn there'd been a click in my ear. It suddenly occurred to me that Colleen had, for no reason at all, hung up on me. I looked at Hawkins with my mouth open.
He was grinning. "You sure kill the ladies," he said.
"What happened? She hung up. What—"
Hawkins said in a sticky voice, "I'll see you, dahling. That is, if I can make it, dahling." He sounded like Tallulah, but I got it, and I groaned.
"Hell," I said, "I meant I was so beat—" I turned it off. There was no point in explaining to Hawkins. I phoned again, but there wasn't any answer. What the hell? Now I'd have to clear all misunderstandings away like magic when I got back to the hotel.
Find This Woman Page 16
