Find This Woman

by Richard S. Prather

And the little peroxide blonde was still working on the problem of keeping herself in shape, which is like trying to knock home runs one foot higher over the fence, but she slowly started to tone her stomach muscles.

  I was swaying back and forth, and I damn near lost my balance and fell into the room. But now I knew that my sleuthing was going to pay off: In just a second I'd know the truth about Mrs. Dante.

  It was there! And right where I thought it would be. The scar was a thin white line about four inches long and slanting back at the end like half an arrowhead, and even though it was difficult to see through the water in my eyes, I made it out. There was no doubt about it: Right there was where the can had hit her.

  And that took care of that. I felt a little silly standing outside a window like a Peeping Tom and staring at a naked woman doing her exercises. So I left.

  I turned around and started walking back into the desert, but I couldn't help thinking that she must have been doing those exercises for a long time. Because you know what? She did twenty of those things.

  A half hour later I dug my client's card out of my wallet. I squinted carefully at it in the light of a phone booth, then I called J. Harrison Bing and in a fast three-minute conversation told him to get up to Las Vegas fast because his daughter was here and was sure as hell going to be in trouble before morning and need some moral support. He squawked and sputtered, but I drove my point home and finally he said he'd be up on the very next plane. I gave him the address of the desert house and told him I'd meet him there.

  Then I hung up, feeling very damned proud of myself, and went to the Inferno and killed Victor Dante.

  Chapter Nineteen

  IT WASN'T that I went to the Inferno to kill the man; that was the last thing I wanted to do. All I wanted to do was get Dante and turn him over to the county sheriff. I had my reasons for charging around like a one-man army instead of gathering a crew of armed police and deputies about me, too. Law-enforcement agencies never look with a happy eye upon somebody who has killed another man, as I had, and I was in deep enough now so that I wanted all the weight of evidence—and all the friendly feelings I could get—on my side before I went to the courthouse and started explaining. I wanted to lay the whole mess in their laps, tied up with a pink ribbon, before I took a chance on getting tossed in the cooler and having this case blow up in my face. And it could still blow up, even though I thought I had almost all of it now, except for some little things. Things I might get from Dante.

  And, of course, there was the personal angle, too. Dante had been growing on me like a boil for almost seventy-two hours, and this thing between him and me had now come to a very personal head. But I wanted him alive and talking; he had to get smart. No pink ribbon for me.

  I'd called Bing from a service station I'd walked to at ten-forty-five p.m. It took me another half hour to get a cab and ride downtown to Fremont Street. In one of the clothing stores there I bought my third cowboy hat of this Helldorado. Then I phoned the Inferno, pretending to be a drunk trying to make reservations for the floor show at El Rancho Vegas, and found out that Dante was in his office. While I was in the booth I called the airport and learned that the next plane was already on its way and would land at Las Vegas at one-ten a.m. It was eleven-thirty now, so that meant I had over an hour and a half before Bing arrived. I figured that was plenty of time, so I crammed my Stetson on my head, caught a cab, and was on my way to see Victor Dante.

  Getting to his office was the easiest part. I got out of the cab at the main entrance to the Inferno, and walked right in behind a party of four enjoying this third night of Helldorado. I kept my head down, walked straight across the lobby, into the Devil's Room, and along the length of the bar with my gun in my coat pocket and my right hand on my gun. It took less than half a minute, and Dante and his men couldn't be expected to have their eyes peeled for me sixty minutes an hour, twenty-four hours a day. I walked right into the empty hallway, across it, and up to Dante's door.

  I was trying to make myself relax, keep as calm as possible now that I was so close, but my heart was pounding and my throat was tight as I squeezed the doorknob in my left hand and turned it gently as I lifted the gun from my pocket with my right. The door was locked.

  There's no good reason for a man in a night club to keep his door locked, because polite people usually knock anyway, but the damn thing was locked. I eased my hand off the knob and looked up and down the hallway while I waited to find out if anybody inside the office had noticed the knob turning, and it occurred to me that this would be one lousy time for somebody to spot me while I stood in front of Dante's door with a gun in my hand.

  Nobody was yet in the hallway, but I could hear the steady rumble of voices from the crowd in the game room at my back, behind the wall, and occasionally the louder drone of the dealers. Ten seconds passed and nothing happened, but I could hear somebody moving around inside the office. Well, if I had to knock, this was no time to be timid about it. I raised my left hand and slammed my knuckles hard into the wooden panel half a dozen times. Then, as footsteps came closer to me on the other side of the panel, I stuck the two-inch barrel of my .38 up at the crack of the door and waited.

  The steps came clear up to the door and stopped, and I knew he was only a foot away from me now, separated from me by only a half inch of wood. Then I heard a bolt slide back inside. The door started to open and I slammed into it and stuck my gun right up against Dante's still bruised and puffy mouth. He stumbled backwards as the swinging door hit him, and I stepped inside and gave the office a fast look to make sure we had the place to ourselves. We did. It was just Victor Dante and me now, and he wasn't near any buzzers, or even near his big desk.

  He'd stumbled away from me, but he caught his balance and stared at me from his small eyes, with his mouth open slightly, as I caught the door and slammed it shut.

  "Don't even move, Dante," I said quietly. "Don't buzz for anybody, don't yell, don't even make a noise. Just stand right there."

  He stood there, and he didn't jump me—not with my gun pointed at him from six feet away—but he did make a little noise. He said, "You damned fool. You are a fool, Scott. This time you're finished."

  His voice was flat and brittle, but the words were distorted a little as they passed his split lips. He was dying to get at me; it stood out all over him. It showed in his cold eyes and all over his hard, frozen face, even in the way he stood looking at me with his fists clenched and his head stuck forward toward me.

  I said, "I was finished last time, too. But you're the one that's through, Dante. Get this: I know it all. I know the whole damned thing. I know about Carter and Freddy and all the rest of it. And I'm handing you over to the sheriff and I'll be their fair-haired boy. You should have killed Lorraine, too, friend. Or was that next?"

  He didn't answer for a moment. Then he said, "You can't possibly think you'll get out of here again."

  "I'm not even going to try," I told him. "I don't have to." I nodded toward his desk. "You've got a phone there. All I have to do is use it. After I work you over a little."

  He glanced toward the phone, and for the first time that frozen face cracked a little bit. He looked back at me and licked his lips, then winced and put a hand to his mouth. His eyes flicked around the room, but there wasn't anything in sight that would help him.

  "The sheriff wouldn't know what to do with me," he said after a pause. "You're out of your mind."

  "He'll know what to do after I talk to him for half an hour. I'll turn you over to him, Dante, then we'll run out to see your peroxide mistress."

  "My what?" He looked surprised.

  I didn't say anything.

  He said, "You can't mean Crystal. She's my wife."

  I grinned at him. "The hell she's your wife."

  He dropped his mouth open as if he were surprised some more, but then he put his teeth together and his eyes narrowed. He started to speak, hesitated, then went ahead. I didn't like the look on his face. This was his last play, but I
didn't know it yet, and he was so casual and convincing that if I hadn't remembered him swearing at me and the hell he'd given me I might almost have believed him.

  He started talking easily, but rapidly. "You're really mixed up, Mr. Scott. Come now, you don't need that gun." He laughed with what sounded like genuine amusement. "Of course Crystal is my wife. We were married here several months ago."

  I didn't know at first why he was chatting like an old lady over the back fence, but right then he moved a little way toward his big black desk, and I got an inkling.

  He went on, "And as for the sheriff—hell, Scott, I'll call him myself if it will make you happier." He laughed and moved casually toward his desk as if I didn't have a gun on him, and I knew, for sure, what all this apparently idle patter was for. He kept moving toward the desk, and I didn't stop him.

  He continued, "We've got a big uproar between us for no reason. Believe me, there's no reason why we can't get along, Scott. We both got off on the wrong foot, that's all. And I honestly don't know what you're talking about. I don't even know any Carter or Freddy."

  He kept talking away, hardly stopping for a breath, and that was the way for him to work it if he was going to be fool enough to try a hundred-to-one chance. Keep me listening, try to get me interested, not give me any opportunity even to interrupt his chatter while he kept it going and got closer, to the desk. Perhaps he might even make me start wondering for a moment if I could be wrong, get me off balance for the half second that might mean he had a way out.

  Because his back was to the wall, and he must have known he was through and that there wasn't anything left to him except the last, desperate gamble. And Dante was first and foremost a gambler. This time he didn't have the edge he liked, but neither did he have a choice.

  I took two steps closer to him as he reached the corner of the desk, because I knew he was going to try for a gun, and I said, "That's enough, Dante. Stop right there."

  He acted as if he hadn't heard me. The almost pleasant expression stayed on his face and he continued, "If you want the sheriff here, fine. We can all sit around a table and clear this mess up." He shook his head. "And I can clear up any strange idea you've got about my marriage to Crystal right now. There's a copy of the license here."

  He reached down to the top right drawer of his desk and pulled it open about a foot. I thumbed back the hammer of my gun as he moved, and the double click was loud in the sudden stillness of the office as he stopped speaking.

  In that stillness I said, "Don't be a sucker, Dante. You haven't a chance."

  But he did manage to catch me a little bit off balance. I'd expected him to slam the drawer open and dive for the gun, leaping to get out of the line of my fire, and swinging a gun up to blast at me. And he did nothing of the kind.

  He simply pulled the drawer open, then dropped his hand to his side and looked back at me. He said, "I don't understand, Mr. Scott. Chance for what?"

  And because I hadn't expected that, I was a little bit off base at the next thing he did. It wasn't violent or a flurry of motion. He just straightened up and swung slightly to his right, and his left hand brushed the side of the open drawer as he looked over my left shoulder and grinned. It was a wide grin, almost a grimace, but it looked real enough. And looking past me to the door, he took one step toward me.

  He didn't yell or push it too far, and maybe that's what did it. Or maybe it was because he actually stepped toward me while my cocked .38 was pointed straight at him. But he looked happy and confident, and there was a flashing fraction of a second in which I thought that this was the oldest gag in the world, and that it was old because it was good, and even while I knew damn well that nobody was there behind my back I still remembered that I hadn't bolted the door behind me when I'd hurried in here. I knew there was nobody behind me, but I also knew that if anybody were there I was dead sure as hell this time, and without looking around or turning I hunched my shoulders involuntarily and jumped a step to my right as the smile on Dante's face went away and he whirled and slammed his left hand into the drawer.

  He was fast now that he'd started, and he had the gun in his hand and was dropping to his knees behind the desk as I got my feet planted solidly and pulled my gun back to bear on him.

  Before I even squeezed down on the trigger he fired twice. Two shots that were almost one and that he couldn't have aimed, but just snapped at me in his haste, and while they slammed past me and the roar still filled the room I pulled the trigger of my gun once and started to squeeze it again, but that first shot sent a 158-grain lead slug crashing through the bone of his forehead and into his brain.

  He fell back away from the desk and the gun slipped from his hand onto the carpet. He sprawled on his back and slowly, like a man relaxing instead of dying, his arms went limp and fell to the floor, and his legs, still bent at the knees, swayed apart in opposite directions, away from the center of his body. His heels slid downward a few inches along the carpet and stopped, and he lay there, awkwardly, with his eyes staring and blood just now bubbling from the hole in his forehead.

  I looked down at him with my brain almost blank for those few seconds, and my teeth ground together till the muscles in my jaws ached, then I snapped out of it and jumped to the door. I slammed the bolt home moments before footsteps pounded down the hall.

  I ran across the room to the phone, scooped it up, and broke records getting through to the sheriff's office. Somebody yelled outside the door and I said into the phone, hardly caring who I was talking to, "I'm at the Inferno. Dante's office. Victor Dante's been shot and killed, and get the hell out here fast."

  A comparatively calm voice at the other end of the line asked me who I was and what was happening, and I said into the phone, "This is Shell Scott. I'm at Dante's Inferno, in Dante's office. Dante is dead; I just shot him. Tell Hawkins and get out here fast before somebody else gets killed."

  I didn't wait for an answer. I hung up the phone, went around behind the desk, and waited with my gun in my hand, as there was a muffled shout in the hallway and something heavy slammed into the door of the office.

  Chapter Twenty

  THAT goddamned door was going to give. There was a regular hubbub out there now. Shoulders slammed into the door and each time I could see it spring inward and the bolt quiver, getting ready to bust loose. Somebody crashed into the door again and it sprang half an inch inward, the wood splintering, and I knew the next one would do it.

  In the comparative silence as whoever it was outside got ready to ram a shoulder into the door again, I yelled, "Hold it right there. I'll shoot hell out of the first man through."

  Nobody slammed into the door. I realized then that the men outside couldn't know who or what was in here. All they could know was that there'd been shots, and then nobody had answered their shouts. They were out there thinking now, and I hoped to heaven they were slow thinkers. Because it wouldn't be long, unless whoever I'd called at the sheriff's office thought I was mad, till a couple of cars full of deputies came blasting out here.

  Then it came, the biggest crash yet, and the door splintered as it gave all the way and swung around on its bent hinges to slam into the wall, and I dropped to one knee behind the desk, thinking, This is how Dante got it. I caught a confused blur of men outside in the hall and one man falling forward as he stumbled through the door and another man hunched over inside the room. I saw the gun in the hand of at least one man, but he didn't fire it and I didn't shoot, because then, as if the slamming of the door had set it off, we heard the shriek of the siren getting louder and closer, slurring down and then swinging up again in the horrid noise that was heavenly music. And then it was shrilling through the walls and dinning into our ears as another siren whined a counterpoint behind it and, at least for now, the shooting was over.

  I was going to compliment the Clark County sheriff's department on its efficiency even if the deputies beat a tattoo on my skull, each and every one of them. And they might.

  Sheriff's deputies ca
me pouring in and people milled around in the hall and gasped in the casino, and it was as if I had another parade. Only this one wasn't going anywhere; it was standing in one spot and jumping up and down with a red face, jumping up and down on one spot, and that was the spot I was on. This was a big one, for sure.

  But the deputies got things under control quickly and efficiently. They knew their jobs and they did them in a hurry. And pretty soon I was looking at Hawkins, and Hawkins was looking at me, and it occurred to me in a flash that I was not the fair-haired boy.

  Time passed excruciatingly. We were still in Dante's office. And so were three other arms of the law. I'd been talking to Lieutenant Hawkins for forty-five minutes, but only about what had happened in this room. Now I said, "Believe me, Hawkins, I told Dante before this thing exploded that I was phoning the sheriff's department and turning him over to you."

  He sucked on his teeth. "And for what was it again?"

  "For murder."

  "Seems like the smart thing would have been to call us before you came here."

  "Maybe it would have. But you'll understand why I didn't when I—explain the rest of it."

  "The rest?" The deep creases alongside his nose got deeper as he frowned.

  I looked at my watch: twelve-fifty a.m. This conversation was taking time, too much time. I knew that there was a plane due to land here in twenty minutes or less, and that J. Harrison Bing would be on it, headed for Dante's desert home. This damned thing could still blow up in my face, and I might learn all about the state prison at Carson City. From the inside.

  "Hawkins," I said, "we've spent a lot of time jawing about this, but it's only covered the last hour or so. There's more, but I'd have to go back over three days to get it all in." I stopped and thought about what I'd say next, thought about it for fifteen dragging seconds while Hawkins stared at me, then I said, "This is one hell of a story you're going to hear. One hell of a story. And this may sound silly, but I don't have time to tell every bit of it this minute." He opened his mouth, but I hurried on. "I'll tell it; I'll tell it all, and I'll tell it any way you want. But my way you'll like it a lot better." I went on after what I hoped was a significant pause. "About this here in the office. I told you down at the court house that Dante was trying to kill me. Well, he tried it himself and I shot him."