Find This Woman (21 page)

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.

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."