I couldn't leave yet, though, so we sat quietly for a while smoking cigarettes that didn't taste good because we'd already had too many. And I had a not very pleasant taste in my mouth, anyway. Hawkins had brought me up to date on what I didn't know. Nils Abel, whose bald skull I'd cracked at the airport, actually did have a cracked skull and was in the hospital; his chum, Joe Fine, was going to be picked up; and bushy-haired Lloyd, whose last name I finally learned was Weaver, hadn't died from that knife in his middle, but he was a very sick man—and was now talking a blue streak.
As for me, Hawkins was convinced that none of my "flights" had been to avoid prosecution but had merely been considered attempts to live another day. And he didn't mind having the Big Jim file closed, either. I had plenty to answer for, but Hawkins assured me that a "justifiable homicide" verdict by the coroner's jury was almost a foregone conclusion and there probably wouldn't even be a preliminary hearing.
I thought about that, and about the people in the case. Funny thing. Isabel would have a hard time blaming anybody but herself for the mess she was in—and Harvey Ellis hadn't even violated his parole. I knew now that all the things Ellis had said he'd told Carter were actually things Carter had learned and told him, but it had fooled me for a while. I thought some more about Isabel and what she was up against, and even though I knew she deserved anything she got from a jury, and even though there was little chance that she'd be sentenced to death, I couldn't help feeling glad they used gas for executions in Nevada.
No matter what she'd done, I sure would have hated the thought of Isabel getting the chair.
Chapter Twenty-Two
HOLLYWOOD looked good to me, as it always does after I've been away for a while, but I felt, in a word, lousy. I'd sold my sweet old Cad for junk before I caught the late-afternoon flight from Las Vegas and left the fourth and final day of Helldorado behind, and that was a good reason for feeling low, but there was a better one. Even the fact that I had $1,900 in my pants—fee, bonus, and some unusual expenses—didn't cheer me up much. After reaching L.A. I'd stopped off to see Ellis at the address Sam had listed in his telegram, and collected my entire fee before I'd spilled a word to Ellis about his "daughter." Then I'd left and the plain-clothes men had taken over to ask new questions about $260,000. None of that had cheered me up, though, because when I'd finally got back to the Desert Inn before I left Las Vegas, Colleen was gone. Her room had already been rented to somebody else, and the clerk at the desk told me she'd checked out.
I couldn't understand it. Even if Colleen had misinterpreted my sleepy words on the phone, I couldn't imagine her flying off in a huff. I'd thought she was made of more solid and sensible stuff than that. And, I had to admit it, I really did miss her.
I got out of the taxi that had brought me to the Spartan Apartment Hotel and went inside. I stopped at the desk and asked Corky for my key. He grinned at me. "Oh, sure, you're some card." Then he peered at me and his face grew a surprised look. "Didn't you—Oh, no."
I blinked at him. "What's the matter? All I asked for was my key."
"It's up there. I thought—"
I didn't wait for him to finish. I spun around and sprinted up the steps to the second floor three at a time. I ran down to my rooms and slammed the door open and stepped inside. She was there, all right. Damn her to hell, she was there, and I was surprised at how good I felt when I saw her. There was a dryness in my throat and my heart pounded with the excitement of seeing her again.
Colleen was sitting on the oversized chocolate divan that's almost straight in front of the door of my apartment, and she looked up and smiled when I came in. She held a half-empty highball glass in her right hand and she leaned back on the divan and waved the glass at me. "Hi," she said. "Thought you'd never get here."
"Damn you," I said. "Damn you to pieces. What's the idea of worrying hell out of me? I thought you were mad at me. I thought I'd never see you again."
She was smiling. "That's the idea," she said gleefully.
I grinned at her, walked over, and sat down on the divan beside her. "So you're a smart one, huh? Scheming at me. Then you weren't really angry?"
"But I was. I was furious. I packed and almost checked out before I woke up—literally—and realized how silly I was being. But I checked out anyway and drove down here. You'd told me where you lived and also promised to show me Los Angeles." She stopped and smiled at me. "I figured if you were going to worry about me at all, it was time you started. Can't have you getting lost in rooms all night like you did."
I knew what she meant. Blast her, would she never forget that Lorraine business? I pointed at the glass in her hand and changed the subject. "Uh-huh," I said. "Stealing."
"You said any time people come to see you, you want them to make themselves at home. I do what I'm told, Mr. Scott."
"That's encouraging." I hoped it was, because she looked wonderful. She'd apparently spent some time prettying herself up after the drive from Vegas, and she'd done a terrific job. She was barefooted, with her bare legs curled underneath her, but she was wearing a vivid green velvet gown that emphasized everything she had, and she had everything. A man could look from that face with its wide-eyed innocence to that ye-gods body and get dizzy. I got a little dizzy. I could tell she still wasn't wearing a brassiere, and I couldn't help wondering about those black frilly things I'd seen her pick up in her room at the Desert Inn, and wondering if something like that were under the green velvet.
"Get that look off your face," she said.
I cleared my throat. "Where's my drink?"
She jumped up and padded on bare feet across the thick shag nap of my yellow-gold carpet and disappeared in the kitchenette. She was back after some glook, glook, glook sounds out there and handed me a tall drink.
"I'm ahead," she said. "Whee!"
I grinned at her. "I'll catch up."
Colleen sat down on the divan again and, leaning forward, poked me in the chest with a red fingernail. "Since you're taking me out," she said, "how do I look? Is this gown too daring for Los Angeles?"
"Not too daring for me. But the vice squad will have you in the back room grilling you."
She giggled. By George, she was ahead. I pulled lustily on my highball, then said, "I'll drink this and get ready."
"No more work? All done?"
"All done for now. Case solved. You helped, Colleen."
"Me? How?"
"Talking about divorces and six weeks' residence and what a funny name Isabel Bing was and so on. That was up in your room when I wanted you to come out and let me dry your back."
She smiled. "I remember."
"You were in the shower and I wondered if you could possibly have a scar on your—on you, and I put that with your talk, and with a card on the dresser that was the only proof I had that a man was who he said he was, and no wonder he didn't get any letters, and then I knew you didn't have a scar."
"You're ahead of me," she said.
I grinned. "Then when I learned that little Isabel had a scar and had bleached her hair, it was settled."
"Who?"
"Mrs. Dante."
"How do you know she bleached her hair?"
"My goodness," I said. "My drink's empty." I got up and went to the kitchenette and made another.
"Answer me," Colleen said.
"It'll take me a few minutes to shower and get ready."
"We're off!" she said. She looked at her wrist watch. "You'd better hurry. It's after nine already. I saved time by getting dressed. Oh, I used your shower. You mind?"
"You can use anything that's mine. Seems like we go through life taking showers almost together. Have another drink. Make two. I'll be finished with this one in a minute."
She scurried into the kitchenette and I piled into the bathroom, finished my drink, undressed, and climbed into the shower. In a minute Colleen was banging on the door.
"Come on in," I yelled happily.
"You decent?"
"You kidding? Come on in."
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I had the shower curtain pulled across the entrance to the shower, and in a moment a white hand holding a very brown drink snaked around the curtain's edge. I grabbed the drink, then stuck my head outside and looped the heavy cloth under my chin.
"Colleen, tell me something," I said. "When I first saw you at the bar in the Desert Inn I looked at your face and thought it was one of the most beautiful, most innocent-looking faces I'd ever seen. Then I wandered afield and my spine crinkled. Tell me, which is the real you?"
She laughed, backed up one step, then pursed her lips and blew me a kiss. Then she laughed again and went into the living room. I didn't know exactly what that meant, but I was sure as hell getting out of this shower.
I turned around and warm water squirted into my highball, and it struck me that this particular happening had never happened before. I jerked my glass out of the stream of water and eyed it for a moment. I was drinking these dark brown drinks awfully fast, but there seemed nothing to do but finish it, so I finished it. I sat the empty glass in the soap rack and broke into a chorus of "I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate" as I finished soaping, rinsed off, climbed out, and toweled down.
With the big Turkish bath towel wrapped securely around me I strode toward the bedroom and clean clothes, but stopped a few feet before I got there. I looked over at Colleen.
"'Lo," I said.
"You get dressed!"
Ahh, she was a sly one. I said, "Sure. But how about one more drink first?"
"Well," she said hesitantly, "all right."
I walked over and sat down—carefully on the divan. Colleen brought me another highball and sat down beside me.
"Whee!" she said.
"Whee. Whee you want—I mean, where you want to go first?"
"What'd you suggest?"
"Strip."
She shook her head. "Impossible," she said. "Impossible, impossible."
"Sunset Strip. Mocambo, Ciro's, Shmiro's," I said. "Finish our drinks, I'll get ready, and we'll go. O.K.?"
"You'd better get ready. You can't go like that!"
I leered at her. Right in front of the divan is a big, low, black-lacquered coffee table with water rings on its top. I placed my still full glass on the table, carefully maneuvering it so that I would get it exactly on one of the old rings. Colleen watched this, fascinated.
I blinked at her. "Clever?"
"Clever. Kiss me."
"What?" Must have been those three fast bourbons, but I said it again. "What?"
"All this time," she said lightly, "and you haven't kissed me."
She was about two feet away from me on the divan. At first. She leaned closer, her arms sliding sinuously around my neck, and her lips moved slightly, her eyes narrowed just a trifle, and she raised an eyebrow no more than a fraction of an inch, but the same things happened again to my spine.
Both her clenched fists met at the back of my neck and she pulled me toward her, and she must have been surprised at how easily I pulled, and then her lips were pressed against mine. I raised my hands to her shoulders and started to slide them around to her back, but she pulled her head away and laughed softly in my face.
"This is me," she said.
I looked at her for long seconds, my eyes inches from hers as the smile slowly faded from her face, and suddenly, right then, all the light banter ended. Always up until now we'd been joking with each other, never really serious, but that was over in this moment and we both knew it, knew it for sure. I could see it in the almost sullen, narrow-eyed look that came over her face, and hear it in the quick intake of her breath, and feel it in the pressure of her fingernails as they pressed into the skin of my back. We weren't playing our usual game with words and innuendoes any more; honesty and wanting were between us for quiet, brittle moments as we looked at each other, neither of us smiling now.
When I slid my arms around her she came eagerly to me, her eyes closed, the long dark lashes trembling, and her mouth raised toward me as I bent my head to hers, and then her lips were warm and alive on mine, caressing, squeezing, moist, clinging. It was, again, as it had been before when I kissed her, but this was an even more complete giving of herself, a more frenzied intimacy that sent a weakness through all my body at the warm touch of her. With a kind of hunger I kissed her again and again on her blood-full, curving lips and the corners of her closed eyes while she whispered almost unintelligible words against my mouth and cheek, and the desire that had been smoldering in me ever since I had first seen her swelled and pulsed like fire, hotly inside me.
Colleen was softer, warmer, more desiring, and more desired than I had imagined even she would be. She pulled her mouth from mine and let her head hang back as she whispered my name, the white smoothness of her throat before me, and I pressed my lips to the hollow where the blood pulsed close to the surface, felt the beat of her heart against my lips as I kissed her throat and the white mound of her breast. Her hands pulled me close to her, pressed my mouth tight against her breast as she whispered, "Shell, oh, darling, darling. . . love me. . ."
I picked her up in my arms and carried her into the near darkness of the bedroom and lowered her gently to the bed. Her eyes were wide, staring up at me, and her breath came rapidly between her parted lips as I sank down beside her and curled my fingers in the velvet cloth at her shoulders.
"Wait," she whispered. She reached quickly with her hands and in a moment wriggled free of the green gown, and then a wisp of frilly blackness slid noiselessly over the pale gleam of her thighs and dropped to the floor. Completely naked now, she lay quietly with her arms at her sides, the palms of her hands up and the fingers curling. As I leaned toward her, the rounded whiteness of her arms went convulsively around me, her nails tracing shivering paths over the skin of my back, and she whispered tightly, "Love me, Shell," then over and over again, "Love me, love me, love me," until my mouth muffled the words and finally stilled them.
She lay motionless for a moment with her eyes closed and her breathing rapid and heavy while my lips caressed her throat and descended slowly to the brazen fullness of her bare breasts, my fingertips gentle against the smooth firmness of her thigh and the swelling curve of her hip, and then her fingers dug into my shoulders when my mouth found hers again, and she pressed her teeth into my lips as I caressed the soft, warm, myriad-curved length of her, and then there was only the intimate caress of her tongue against mine, and her fingers clutching at my flesh, and her yielding body writhing against me.
I turned on the small table lamp at the side of the bed and lit two cigarettes for us, and we talked for a few minutes in half sentences and soft phrases, our voices, like our bodies, relaxed and lazy. Little by little the languor left us and the conversation was laced with smiles and soft laughter. Finally Colleen sat up on the bed and stretched luxuriously, arching her back and thrusting her arms high over her head.
I grinned at her. "Hussy. You're absolutely shameless. Besides being wonderful. Also, this is the first time I've seen you with your hair down. I like it."
She looked at me and smiled, then put both hands behind her head and shoved a mass of long, red hair forward over her face. "Shameless hair," she said. "Kind of a tangle, isn't it?"
"Looks good," I said. "You look good. You look wild. You look wicked. You can still fix your hair—and we can still go out. I promised to show you the town, Colleen, and I hereby promise to keep my promise." I grinned at her. "At least we can catch the last show."
She tossed her head and blew at a few stray strands of hair, then looked at me again. "Why, you silly," she said. "Who wants to go out?"
THE END
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or
are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2000 Richard Prather
Cover design by Open Road Integrated Media
ISBN 978-1-4804-9884-6
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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Find This Woman Page 17
