He kept going like that in a soft voice that must have sounded like droning conversation or a monologue to people at the next table, but he kept building it up and telling me with a kind of relish what he'd do to me if I didn't go home like a nice little boy. Finally he said a couple of things about my sexual habits that made up my mind fast while I looked around the club to see how many people would notice if I killed this bastard right here.
I said, "Hold it, pal. Just quiet down a minute." I stood up fast and started back toward the dressing room. The orchestra was having a short intermission, so I went straight across the dance floor and was halfway across before he scrambled out of the chair. I stopped and waited for him.
He came up beside me and the smile was gone for the first time. "Don't get excited," I said. "You've got the wrong idea." I grinned at him. He started to reach for me, then looked around, and I went on ahead through the black drapes. He was a little confused now, just as I'd been, and two yards inside the hallway I stopped and turned around and said to him as he came up close, "Look, you don't understand. I'm sorry as hell about all this—" and cut it off while he was staring at me. I was looking right at him as pleasantly as I could with all that burn in me, and I reached up fast with both hands crossed at the wrist, my right hand going to my left and grabbing the lapel of his gabardine jacket while my left hand crossed over and got the lapel on the other side, my thumbs out and my fingers on the inside of his coat, and before he could even get his hands up I tightened my grip and scissored my arms outward hard, and my wrists ground into his neck
He didn't have a chance. He'd barely started to grab my wrists, but he couldn't do a damn thing about it because he was unconscious in no more than two short seconds, and I gave him a final squeeze as he sagged, then I dropped him.
I left him there and turned around and walked to the door of the dressing room. I was still so damned mad I didn't even knock, just slammed open the door and went in.
Chapter Two
I DON'T know what I expected to find in there after the warning old unconscious had just given me. Maybe I expected a dead body.
There was a body, all right, but it was about the least dead body I'd seen lately: Lorraine, Sweet Lorraine, and she looked up in surprise as I came bursting in.
She was sitting before a dressing table ringed with open light bulbs, wearing a yellow dressing gown that was too old for so young a lady, and she should have thrown it away, and she could throw it away any time she felt like it as far as I was concerned. And I was getting concerned. Close up, her face was cuter than it had appeared on the dance floor. She had impudent eyes and lips and a little button of a nose that wasn't quite big enough for the full lips that looked willing and big blue eyes that looked wise. I would have enjoyed talking to her immensely, only she wasn't alone.
In a chair on her left was a man who also looked up when I came in. There wasn't surprise on his face so much as a cold kind of fury, and in the few seconds while we all said nothing, I looked him over good.
He was somewhere in his middle thirties. He looked prosperous and well fed, though he wasn't tall, but he also looked as if he'd come up in the world the hard way and got tougher with every inch of the climb. There weren't any marks on his face that didn't look as if they'd been stamped there by time and ambition and maybe greed, but his face looked frozen, as if it had been dipped in liquid oxygen, and I got the crazy impression that if he smiled his face would crack and splinter like the animated-cartoon characters that jump into empty swimming pools.
Not that there was anything Donald Duckish about him. If he looked like any kind of animal other than man, it was like a predatory bird: a hawk. Primarily because of his eyes and nose. The nose was pinched in at the nostrils, making him look like a man with a head cold sucking for air, and his eyes were small and dark. But the small eyes were set far apart in his face so that the proportions didn't seem exactly right. It was almost as if he were looking at me from opposite sides of his brain, sizing me up.
And I guess he was sizing me up, but he did it fast, because shortly after I stepped into the dressing room he swore at me like a man who'd decided my ancestry in five seconds. It took him about that long; he stared at me when I came in the door, and that hard face seemed to congeal for a breath, then he pulled his mouth open like a man doing it from memory and said, "You son of a bitch."
What the hell was everybody so mad at me for? I thought about choking this one, too, for a minute, but though I was still so griped I could hardly think straight, I ignored him for the moment and turned to the girl.
She said, "What are you doing in here?" She sounded just as she looked: surprised.
I said, "I sent you a note saying I wanted to talk to you. Didn't you get it?"
She shook her head. "No. What note? What for?"
"It was on my card. You worked with Isabel Ellis. I want to talk to you about her. Privately, if you don't mind." I calmed down a bit, remembering this was her dressing room and that I'd just barged in. I said, "I'm sorry about busting in this way, but I had a little trouble outside. I—got steamed up."
She shook her head. "But I don't even know any Isabel Ellis."
That stopped me. I said, "Huh?" I started to add some more, then looked at the frozen-faced guy who was still glaring at me. He glanced at the girl, and she said to me, "It's all right. Go on."
My head was still spinning. I said, "You don't know her? Maybe you knew her as Isabel Bing; that was her maiden name." She looked blank, and I asked her, "You know a detective named William Carter, though, don't you?"
She shook her head again. I was going around in circles. I asked her, "Can we go over this in private? It won't take more than a few minutes."
She didn't need to answer. The hawk-faced guy got up and gave me one last glare, looking as if he were ready to split down the middle, then stalked out. I wondered who he was and what he was doing here, but then I stopped wondering because I remembered my singsong friend lying in the hall right where he could step on him as he walked out. And I remembered that this call was supposed to be such a simple thing that I hadn't carried along my revolver. Perhaps I should have checked the fellow I'd choked and made sure he didn't have a gun. People hardly ever carry guns, at least nice people don't, but then, he hadn't been a nice person.
I said to Lorraine, "Look, I apologize for throwing my weight around your room, but I've got to get some information. And I—can't stay long. How about this Isabel?"
"I told you I don't know her."
"She worked with you here a few months ago. Cigarette girl."
She just looked blank some more. Then she said, "I don't even know who you are."
She was right. "I forgot you didn't get my card," I said. "My name's Shell Scott. I'm a private detective. Look, I'll make this fast. A couple of nights ago another private detective, a guy named William Carter, came here and talked to you. He wanted the same information I do. What you know about Isabel Ellis, and where she went from here. It was my impression that you told him and that he followed whatever lead you gave him—and he went from here straight to Las Vegas, Nevada. What about that?"
"Nothing about it. There's nothing to it. I don't know what you're talking about."
"You are Lorraine Mandel, aren't you?"
"Yes."
And that was the end of the conversation. That was very nearly the end of everything. Because behind me a voice said, "That's enough for now, Scott, so shut your face and let's go," and it was said in a singsong and I knew he had a gun before I even turned around. I was right.
I went peacefully into the hall and the guy pulled the door shut, making sure I wasn't close to him when he did it. He was wearing his big-toothed smile, but it looked tired. He said, "I told you what I'd do to you, Scott."
"I could have choked you a little longer, friend."
"Might be you should have. You better listen to me good this time, Scott. You stand right there for a minute, then you do what I say, and you listen good now."
He paused a second or two, then said slowly, no singsong, "Stay clear the hell away from Vegas. You got that? You don't, and you'll get killed. Killed for sure, all the way dead. And forget this Carter crap. Forget Carter, forget Vegas, forget Lorraine, forget me. It's a promise: If you don't forget good, you'll get killed by somebody."
He didn't say who would kill me, but that seemed relatively unimportant. But, also, he hadn't once mentioned any Isabel Ellis, and I thought that neglect might someday be important if I lived. And, right at this moment especially, I wanted to live. I wanted to live to be an old, old man.
"Go on, move," he said. "Out that way. Straight ahead."
Straight ahead was the end of the hallway. The hallway ran parallel to the street that fronted the club, so that open door ahead of me probably led into the darkness of an alley. I didn't like going out there, but the guy with the gun behind me was just far enough away so I couldn't get close to him, and close enough so he couldn't miss. I started walking, moving as slowly as I could, while the bushy-haired boy behind me talked and told me positively and definitely all over again what I was not supposed to do.
Then he said, "Just to make sure you don't forget, Scott, I'm going to give you something to remember it by." He said it all in the same patter, but the tone of his voice wasn't light at all and I knew if ever anybody meant what he said, this boy did.
I had a reasonably clear idea of what he meant by now, but that last bit hadn't sounded as if he intended to put a bullet in me, and I was getting ready to take off as soon as I hit that open door. My head was still buzzing with what had happened in this last half hour and I was wondering where the frozen-faced guy had gone. I didn't really expect to find out, but just as I tensed my muscles to jump and stepped through the door into the darkness beyond, I did find out. The hard way.
Light glinted on something in the alley on my left, and by the time I saw it was reflection on a car's chrome it was too late and I'd swung my head to the left. Wrong way.
Whatever it was that slammed against the back of my skull was solid, and it was heavy, but it didn't put me completely out. Right from the beginning I wished it had, because then I wouldn't have felt the asphalt paving slam into my face, or the shoes in my ribs, or the next crashing blow on the side of my skull, and the darkness would have swallowed me up even sooner than it finally did.
But at least I found out there were two of them for sure, because no one guy could have slugged and kicked me in so many different places in so short a time.
Chapter Three
I SAT in the darkness of the alley, with the stench of garbage clogging my nostrils, and held my head while anger simmered inside me and grew bigger and hotter. Finally, though, I squeezed it down inside me out of the way for now. But I know it was still there, ready to flare up when the time came.
After a few minutes or half an hour I felt better. I thought that if I worked real hard at it I could move. Another case was starting out with bumps and bangs, and the bumps had been O.K. but the bangs had been on the top of my head. I pulled myself over toward the wall and my hand sank into something squishy on the asphalt, and for one horrible moment I thought it was part of me. That's how I found out the bastards had not only left me lying unconscious and half dead, but had turned the garbage barrel upside down over me. Even without that I'd have remembered them.
When the ringing died down inside my head I slid over to the wall and eased up against the rough brick, remembering that all the time I'd talked to J. Harrison Bing earlier this evening I'd had the feeling he wasn't telling me all he should or could. I'd even mentioned it to him, but he'd sworn he'd told me everything of the slightest importance.
That's what the man had said. But now I sat in this goddamned alley with my head spinning because I didn't know what the hell the score was and also because my head had been severely pounded, and I didn't know a thing for sure except that already in this screwy case something smelled even worse than the stinking garbage.
I looked at my watch and saw it was already after two a.m. and the club was closed. I hobbled around, though, and banged on the doors to get in, but it was no soap. I didn't know where Lorraine was or where I could find her tonight, so I headed back toward my apartment thinking that I'd see about Sweet Lorraine in the morning even though the way I felt now I didn't know if I'd last that long. As I tooled my antique yellow Cadillac back toward Hollywood I couldn't help thinking that I was the boy who'd wanted to live to be an old, old man. Well, now I'd made it.
Dr. Paul Anson, whose apartment is two doors from my three rooms and bath on the second floor of the Spartan Apartment Hotel, said, "Next time get killed; I've got an operation tomorrow," grinned at me, and shut the door in my face. He'd just finished looking me over and it appeared that I was relatively whole and would live after all. I walked down to my apartment and let myself in.
Inside I stopped long enough to feed the tropical fish I keep in two aquariums just inside the door, then I went into the kitchenette and mixed a stiff drink, poured half of it down my throat, and went back into the front room. I lay down flat on my back on the oversized chocolate-brown divan, grabbed the phone, and plopped it down on my stomach.
Now that I'd had time to relax and slow down a bit I realized that although I had a score to settle with the frozen-faced guy and a singsonging jerk, that part was personal and should come after the job. And my one and only job was to find Isabel Ellis, so I dialed the operator and put in a long-distance call to Wilbur Clark's Desert Inn in Las Vegas. Before this went any further I wanted to be sure Detective William Carter wasn't up there getting sloppy at the bar.
I got the room clerk at the desk of the Desert Inn. Even over the phone I could sense the color and lights and gaiety that I remembered from two previous trips to Las Vegas, and I could almost hear the ivory ball rolling around the rims of the roulette wheels, and the whir of the slot machines. Just imagining it was so pleasant that the anger still with me faded a bit and I felt better.
But that was the only part that made me feel better. I learned that Carter hadn't used his room at all and couldn't be reached. After futilely having him paged I asked the clerk, "He hasn't checked out, then?"
"No. We're holding his bill. He came in on the eighth, as you said, for an indefinite stay."
That was about as much as I could get on the phone. "O.K., thanks a lot. Now, I'll be in Las Vegas tomorrow—or, rather, later today—probably in the afternoon. I'd like to make a reservation for about—"
He cut in, "I'm sorry, sir. There are no vacancies."
"Huh? This is Thursday morning, isn't it? I thought—"
"I'm afraid that almost everything in town will be taken, sir. This is the beginning of Helldorado Week. May tenth through May thirteenth, sir. Thursday through Sunday, inclusive."
That was all he needed to say. Helldorado. The wildest, shootingest, rooting-tootingest ruckus since the West was really wild; the biggest thing since MacArthur's arrival in New York. Four days when Las Vegas, which jumps plenty all the year around, jumps clear up into the air and clicks its spurred heels. I had as much chance of getting a good room as I had of waking up in the morning with no bruises.
I thought a minute, remembering the guys I knew in Vegas. I'd bumped into plenty, but there was only one I could think of right away who was actually a good friend. I said, "Say, you still got a young bartender there named Freddy Powell?"
The clerk's voice got less impersonal right away. "Sure. You know Freddy?" Then he must have remembered the foolish dictum not to get chummy with customers, and added, "However, he works days, sir. He's been off since six o'clock."
"Any chance he's still around? If I remember Freddy, he might still be at the bar."
I heard him chuckle. "Yes, indeed, sir. I'll have him paged. Even if he is here, it may take a while."
"Yeah," I said, "I know." I gave the clerk my number and asked him to have Freddy phone me if he was present and conscious. I added, "Tell him it's Shell Scott," then I put the ph
one on the carpet and relaxed. Freddy Powell might not be at the Desert Inn, but wherever he was, I'd have made book he was doing one of three things: sitting somewhere with a highball or a bottle, in bed with a woman, or bending some blonde's ear. He was a bastard, but he was sure an interesting bastard.
I met him on my first trip to Las Vegas, where I'd wound up after locating a witness in Boulder City. Freddy was tending bar downtown then and we got to talking across the mahogany. He gave me a couple of drinks on the house, then I bought him a drink and he gave me another on the house. We took off together when his shift ended, two hours later, and from then on things got a bit fuzzy. But we'd had such a rip-roaring time together that my next trip to Vegas was a vacation trip motivated as much by a desire to see Freddy again as by the fact that Vegas is a hell of a town. I was still thinking about that second trip—fuzzier even than the first one—when the phone rang. I picked it up.
"Hello, Shell? That you, Shell? Hi, you old satyr, you. What's up, and don't answer that. Say hello to Shell, Angel. Hey, Shell, this is Angel."
I hadn't got a word in yet For all he knew, he was talking to the janitor. Then another voice, a low, soft, feminine voice, rustled over the phone, "Hello, Shell," it said, and all of a sudden I wanted to go to Vegas whether I was on a job or not.
I said, "Well, hello. Tell me, are you a blonde?"
And Freddy said, "You think she's listening? Think I'm gonna let you at her? No, sir. How are you?"
"Freddy," I said, "you've been drinking." It was five minutes before we got around to my reason for calling him, but finally I told him, "Look, chum, since I'm coming up sometime today, I'll need a room. I forgot about Helldorado starting. Can you fix me up with a place to sleep?"
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