“You mean blackmail?”
“Uh-huh. And that's what that list of hers was all about—blackmail. Zoe took a lot of time and trouble just to find out how much the Mamzel's operation was worth, how much everybody connected with the publicity campaign was being paid, how much the weekly gross was at each of the offices. She had all the cities listed on that sheet, with her estimate of their weekly gross, and even an estimated total gross for a year of the whole Mamzel's operation—over a million dollars, incidentally. Thorough, she was. That's why she visited so many people connected with Mamzel's—the Ad Agency, Gedder, and so on. It's why she phoned all the Mamzel's offices around the country. It explains everything she did, even her meeting Roy Toby—when she found out he was planning to muscle in on Mamzel's.”
Lita looked puzzled. “But why? Why would she go to all that trouble?”
“Well in the first place, it wasn't so much trouble. She spent only two or three weeks on the whole operation. And a professional blackmailer sometimes works as hard trying to get something for nothing as legitimate people do in legitimate jobs. She wanted to know how much money was involved, how much profit she might get a slice of, so she'd be sure to ask for the maximum amount. A little extra research, spadework, legwork, might mean the difference between maybe twenty thousand dollars and fifty thousand. A gal like Zoe would have been willing to do a lot of work for an extra thirty thousand dollars. Who wouldn't?”
Lita shook her head, that wonderful deep-autumn shade in her hair glistening under the lights. “I can understand that, I guess. Shell. But how could she blackmail anybody even with all that information?”
“Well, don't forget that gathering all that information was primarily so she could figure out how much she could get, the proper size of the bite. Zoe must already have had the info for the blackmail play. And that goes back to an item on Zoe's work sheet that fooled me from the beginning. Besides the seven cities in which there are Mamzel's salons, there was another city listed, an extra one—Corona. You know where it is, don't you?”
“About forty or fifty miles from here. Near Riverside.”
“Right. And a natural enough answer. That's what threw me, thinking Corona was the name of another city.” I began pacing again. “Actually, it wasn't that at all. It's a woman's name. It has to be. I even learned from Captain Samson that a woman named Corona—Ann Corona—did two years at Tehachapi for extortion.”
I had deliberately walked away from Lita toward a small mirror on the far wall. I timed my walk so that I could see her now, clearly reflected in the mirror. She picked up the .45 automatic and looked at it briefly, as if she had never seen one before.
She had, though. She had, and she knew how to use it. Without any more hesitation she slapped back the slide, cocking the loaded automatic.
Then Ann Corona aimed the gun straight at my back, and pulled the trigger.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The hammer fell with a dull click on the empty cartridge case I had earlier put in the clip. The case I had already “fired” once at Toby.
Lita's lovely face was blank for a long moment, then suddenly shock spread over it, her lips twisted and her eyes almost closed. Then she smoothed her face with an effort, and acted as if nothing had happened. But a lot had happened in those few seconds. Lita Korrel's whole world had come to an end. And a little of mine had, too.
I went on as if nothing had changed. “Another funny thing about that work sheet of Zoe's was that almost everybody connected with Mamzel's was named on it—except Mamzel herself. Except you, Lita. And the only other name on it that wasn't a city where a Mamzel's office was located, was Corona. If Corona wasn't a city, it was somebody's name. That—even without the info from Samson—should have told me that Corona was Zoe's name for Mamzel.”
I had walked across the room again and now I sat down alongside her and took the automatic from her lax fingers. She was still numbed, her face pale and her lips bent by shock. She said, “Shell, you don't know what you're saying. You've got some crazy idea in your head, and you're imagining—saying things you'll be sorry for.”
I unloaded the gun completely this time, before slipping it into my pocket. Then I went on, as if Lita hadn't spoken at all. “Some of it I'm sure of, some I've guessed, and some you'll have to tell me. But I know that Ann Corona—that's you, Lita—and Daniel Bryce were working the badger game eight years ago and got caught. Bryce went to Quentin for four years, and you went to Tehachapi for two. And here's where it gets interesting. At about the same time, among other gals sent to Tehachapi for the same crime, was one Zoe Avilla who also fell for extortion. Maybe she started her two-year jolt a few months before you did that year, maybe later—it doesn't make any difference. The important thing is that both of you were there at the same time. You and Zoe got to know each other.”
“This is crazy. You know it's all a ... just coincidence.” “There's no coincidence about it. Unless you call it a coincidence that two women, both in Tehachapi for extortion, met in prison and one was named Ann and the other Zoe. The rest of it all follows logically from that meeting—all the greed and violence and murder. Even Horatio Adair found out about your prison time, Lita—I guess I'll have to keep calling you that. I saw a telegram sent to Horatio by a man named Lester, probably a detective. The wire said that the subject did two years at Tehachapi for extortion. My mistake was in thinking Horatio was checking up on Zoe—but he wasn't, was he, Lita? He was checking up on you.”
Lita's face was strained, as if all the muscles and tendons under the skin were being held tighter and tighter. Those huge dark eyes looked more than ever like bruises in her face. “Shell,” she said shakily, “what are we going to do?”
“Do? Don't you get it yet, Lita? You're going back to Tehachapi. Or worse. They might even give you the gas chamber.” I spoke brutally, harshly. “Murder isn't any less ugly just because a woman does the killing. In a lot of ways it's uglier.”
She pressed both hands to her temples and said, “No, it's not true. You've got to help me. Shell. And I didn't do anything, anyway. At least I didn't ... murder anybody.”
I got to my feet. “The hell you didn't. You want to know what I think? I think you killed all three of them. Maybe Dan Bryce helped you in a spot or two—but I think most of it was yours, all yours.” I paused. “At the jail, I remember, you said the bullet literally threw Randolph away from you. That whole story of yours was a little too detailed, too precise —”
“Stop it. You're out of your —”
“No, baby. You don't get off so easy. Besides the little things that might mean something and might not, like your knowing the canvas-covered plastic Mamzel was already up at Horatio's pool and in a pink bikini—which you probably wouldn't have known unless you'd been out there this morning to see it. And like the unwrinkled, un-slept-in nightgown you had on when you woke me up to go to the party at Horatio's. And Bryce's picture in your bedroom. And the fact that you must have been lying down in that big tub at the Lassiter—so you'd be even safer when the bomb went off—because your hair was soaking wet when I ran in after the explosion. Besides all of those things, there were some even more obviously murderous items —”
“Stop it, stop —”
“It had to be you who arranged for the little man with a bomb in his briefcase. It had to be you who told Bryce to tail me from Mamzel's yesterday morning when I'd barely been hired. And what in hell do you suppose I think you were doing with that big forty-five aimed at my back just now? Why do you think I fixed the gun so you couldn't kill me with it? You'd already tried to kill me once by blasting my back off like that little bloody man —”
She didn't even say anything. She just came apart. She buried her hands in her hair and jerked her head down, bending forward as shrieks and sobs burst from her mouth. She fell over on the divan and pressed her long, lovely, wonderful body against it, rolling, beating the sides of her face with clenched fists, sobbing, crying, almost screaming, the horrible broken sou
nds exploding from her lips. From those soft, warm lips that had moved so sensually on mine not long ago, those lips that had caressed my lips, and whispered to me, and lied, and lied, and lied.
When Lita sat up again her eyes were puffy from the tears, and mascara smeared her lids and cheek. Lipstick had been rubbed across the side of her mouth and down on her chin. She was all through, finished. And she was ready to tell me anything I wanted to know.
I started it off by asking, “When did Zoe show up?” “Two nights ago. She just came out of nowhere,” Lita's voice was dull, empty. “She waited until I was the only one left in the building. I was taking a shower before going home. She called me Ann Corona. It was the only time I'd heard my real name in years. At first I didn't recognize Zoe. But she knew me. She'd seen my picture outside Gedder's studio and thought she recognized me. That's when she started checking, made sure of everything before even talking to me. She knew almost as much about the business as I did.” Lita spoke mechanically.
I said, “How much did she ask you for? Fifty thousand?”
“Yes. How did you know?”
“Zoe's scratch sheet said ‘Corona—50,000.’ It almost had to be the amount she was going to ask you for.” I paused. “So you killed her.”
“Shell, I ... it wasn't like that. Really, I got scared, lost my temper, hit her. We sort of wrestled around. But she was so much smaller than I...” The words trailed off. Then she continued, her voice soft. “We fell and I had my hands around her throat. It was so easy. So easy." Even now, remembering, Lita looked puzzled. “I just squeezed a little. And suddenly she was still...”
Suddenly she was still. I guess that told the story.
After a few seconds of silence Lita went on, “Before it happened, Zoe told me she'd written the whole thing down, all about me and my prison record, and mailed it to herself, so if anything happened to her the police would check up and learn about me. She thought the mails would surely be safe, and so would she. I knew Dan was in town. I phoned him and he came right over, took Zoe away in his car after dark. I told him about the letter she said she'd written, and Dan said he'd try to take care of it.”
Which he had, I thought. I'd seen Dan Bryce in his postman's uniform.
Lita had told me Saturday morning about Horatio's making a pass at her and her sudden laughter, but then she had minimized both the extent of Horatio's temporarily unrestrained passion and her own reaction. The story she told me now made it easier to understand why the pompous, vengeful little man must have started planning his own kind of revenge right then. In the hopes of finding something embarrassing to Lita, he had hired a detective to check into her past; the detective had informed Horatio of Lita's prison record, and Horatio had then passed that information on to John Randolph, knowing Randolph would broadcast it and it would hurt Lita plenty.
I broke into Lita's story. “How do you know what Horatio did?”
“He told me a lot of it himself. Just before he ... died. But I didn't know any of this when Randolph phoned me last night, when I was waiting for you. Randolph wouldn't tell me on the phone who'd given him the information, only what it was. I denied it, of course, made him agree to see me at his home. I called Dan then, but couldn't reach him. I knew about the guns on Dan's wall, so I went there and let myself in.”
“You mean Randolph had to die because he might broadcast the dope about your past?”
“By then the police had found Zoe's body. They surely knew she'd done time in Tehachapi. If Randolph—or Horatio, for that matter—had broadcast that I'd been at Tehachapi too, the police would soon have learned that I was in prison at the same time Zoe was, it's obvious they'd have found out I'd killed her. That was why I had to kill them. It was the only way to keep the police from learning about Zoe.”
“How'd you get into Bryce's home?”
“I have a key,” she said casually. “I knew that Dan kept all the guns in his den loaded—he said an unloaded gun was just a club. And he'd made sure none of them could be traced to him. So I just took the biggest one I could find. I thought that would make it look as if a man must have killed Randolph. I drove to his home and left the gun outside, then went in and talked to him. He admitted Horatio had given him the tip. I denied everything, but he was going to check with the prison and I knew he'd broadcast the truth. So I went outside, stuck the gun in the window and shot him. It ... it was just the way I later told you it was. It was awful.”
I said, “So there never was any Hyath Arkajanian there at Randolph's, no Ark running from the scene.”
“Of course not. I invented that. The police were there before I could get away, so I pretended to faint. That's when I thought of saying, a big ugly man ran from the house. I knew Toby was having trouble with Randolph, and I also knew you'd had a fight with Ark—Lawrance told me what you'd reported on the phone to him.”
It was possible that Ark had followed us to Lita's apartment from the Hollywood jail, but it seemed much more likely that he'd heard, or heard about, one of the news broadcasts that had been made by then, and called on Lita to ask her what the score was, why she had lied about him.
I said to Lita, “Ark was a good choice, but how did you manage to pick his face from the mugg books?”
“I met him once in Vegas when I was with Dan. You don't forget a face like that.”
Or like yours, I was thinking. But I said, “Speaking of faces. When I asked you about Bryce's picture in your bedroom—is that when you decided you'd have to kill me too?”
She didn't answer, but I felt pretty sure that was when she'd made up her mind. Then she said, “I told you he was Tom Westland, didn't I? A representative of the Internal Revenue Service. The detective Horatio hired came to see me and that's the name and story he gave me. That's how I happened to have such a glib explanation on the tip of my tongue.”
“About Horatio. The only chance you had to get at him, the way I figured it, was when I was asleep on the couch in your suite at the Edgeway Arms.” “That's when I did it.”
Lita said that she had waited until I was asleep, taken a stimulant, and then dissolved a handful of sleeping pills in water and filled an empty perfume bottle with the liquid. Then she'd phoned Horatio, said she wanted to see him, that she was sorry about the way she'd acted before. Horatio naturally had no way of knowing Lita had killed Zoe—and by that time Randolph too—so he was willing and even eager for her to come to his estate. She'd asked him to keep his people away from the front of the house so that nobody would see her, and Horatio—expecting something entirely different from what he got—agreed.
Lita went on, “I had him get us something to drink, highballs, and poured the sleeping-pill water into his drink. It didn't put him clear out, but it made the rest easy.”
“Why the scissors, and all those other items? Just to be sure he was dead?”
“I did that to confuse things, make investigation more difficult, and mainly so it would seem completely different from the way Randolph was killed—as if two different people must have killed them. And it was on the spur of the moment, anyway. The gun was there in his desk, it was Horatio's own; the cord, too. And the scissors were right there on the table.”
Almost to myself I said, “And all the time I was sleeping.”
She nodded. “When I got back to the apartment I undressed and put on a nightgown so you'd think I'd just gotten up.” She paused. “Shell...” There was a new note in her voice. “You know what will happen if you tell the police about me. They'll kill me. Legally, but they'll kill me. Do you want that?”
It's funny. She was turning on the sex, the charm, the heat, flaunting the famous Mamzel beauty. I knew why, and I knew, too, that she was as bloodthirsty and coldblooded a killer as I'd yet run across. And you'd think, because of all I knew about her, I would find her less beautiful. But I didn't. Not a bit of it. Even the way she looked now, she was still one of the most gorgeous women I had ever feasted my eyes upon. She looked soft and warm and luscious, but somehow we j
ust didn't click any more.
“You could let me go.” She waited, and when I didn't say anything she went on, “Do you want worms crawling in this body of mine. Shell? Maggots burrowing in my breasts?” She cupped the big warm breast in her hands, caressed them slowly and then ran her fingers down over her waist and hips. “Beetles nesting on my thighs?”
“No,” I said, mainly to stop her from going on. “However, my dear Lita, I recall that body well. When I was learning it, shall I say, you had one eye on the clock.”
“What?”
She wasn't puzzled a bit, and I knew it. “In the Lassiter,” I said. “Just before the arrival of Dan Bryce's messenger boy, carrying his briefcase.”
“Oh.”
“Uh-huh. We both know you've tried to kill me at least twice, so let's just consider the romance over. I suppose you phoned Dan Bryce's little man when you had me fill the tub for you, when you said you were phoning Lawrance.”
She sighed heavily. The worm and beetle bit had been the last of her ammunition. “No, I called Dan,” she said. “After he found you at his home, he headed for Las Vegas, but he called me at work first and told me what had happened. He owns a little cabin on the desert outside Vegas, where we've stayed before. He was at the cabin when I phoned; he's there now.”
“Whose idea was the dynamite? Dan's?”
“No, that was mine, too. It was a different method from the others and I thought it wouldn't seem to have any connection with them. Besides, I knew we'd have to be especially careful with you. I saw you with a gun in your hand, you know, facing Ark. Anyway, Dan said his man would show up at exactly five o'clock, on the dot, and for me to be in another room. He told me he could work everything out by phone, and for me not to worry.”
And for her not to worry. I thought that was a nice touch.
“Lita,” I said. “there's one other thing I'm really curious about. Before I saw Horatio's body, I had never seen a man apparently killed in so many different ways. And since then I haven't even had time to check on the coroner's findings. So tell me, of those four ways, what really killed him?”
Take a Murder, Darling (The Shell Scott Mysteries) Page 16