“Half an hour,” he said, and slammed the door on me.
I had the uncomfortable feeling that I was locked in and might never get out. I think I was a little stir-crazy within thirty seconds.
It was ten minutes after nine when a woman jailer ushered Sharon Dain into my presence. I wondered if that ten-minute delay counted in my half hour.
None of the things anybody had told me about Sharon Dain was true that morning. This was no sex queen. There were no seductive false eyelashes or makeup; the grey prison clothes disguised what Mike Chandler had described as “built like you wouldn’t believe.” Dark hair was cut short. Narrowed dark eyes looked at me with a kind of hostility that actually hurt. You sensed how desperately alone she was.
“Who are you and what the hell do you want?” she asked. Her voice was harsh, almost as if she hadn’t used it for a long time and had to force it to work.
I told her my name. I told her the New York police had arranged for this interview. Then I realized she had no idea why the New York police could be interested in her, and I told her what had happened at the Beaumont.
“Sweet Jesus!” she said.
I offered her a cigarette and she almost grabbed the whole pack. Her hands were shaking. I held my lighter for her and she dragged smoke down into the bottom of the well. Then she sat down in one of the chairs, rigid.
“One thing is for certain, Haskell,” she said. “They don’t give you a furlough from this joint. I sure as hell didn’t kill anyone in your hotel. What am I supposed to be able to do for you?”
“Maybe I’m the one who can do something for you,” I said. “Max Steiner still believes you didn’t kill Hal Carpenter. Now, after what’s happened in New York, other people are beginning to wonder.”
“You mean there’s some chance I might—?”
“A chance. A good chance. But we need help.”
“ ‘We’? What’s in it for you, Haskell?”
“To keep someone else from getting killed, particularly in the Beaumont.”
She turned her head and looked around the upper molding of the white-washed walls. “You know this goddamned room is probably bugged,” she said. “You can’t go to the john in this cave without someone watching, listening.”
“Can’t be helped,” I said. “Try to listen to me, Sharon, and think while you’re listening. In New York they think there’s a pattern that goes something like this: A man who loved you, or wanted you so badly he was ready to kill Carpenter for the way he was abusing you. Then you get hooked for it. He doesn’t want to turn himself in, naturally, but he doesn’t mean for you to be convicted. He puts up the money for your defense.”
Her sudden laugh was bitter. “Mr. Anonymous? I tell you something, Haskell. I’ve been surrounded by men ever since I was fourteen years old. But I never knew one who’d put up two hundred thousand bucks for me.”
“Let me finish,” I said. “This man waits for your trial to be over; he waits for the appeals, down to the very last one, which was denied a month ago. He can’t save you, but he’s crazy enough to set out to punish the people who wouldn’t help, or perhaps failed you. We don’t think he’s through.”
“He’s not doing me any good, whoever he is,” she said.
“He’s got to be stopped, Sharon. Two people already dead, and maybe more to come.”
She gave me a look that made me uneasy, as if she was trying to read something very private about me. I had no idea what it might be.
“I don’t know how to help you,” she said. “When I got out to Hollywood as a teen-age kid, I believed what I’d heard—that the way to a career in the movies was to sleep with the right people. At first what I got were extra players and stage hands, the bottom-of-the-drawer agents and studio executives. Oh, I got one or two screen tests but nobody took any trouble with them. I guess my guys were the go-no-place people in the business. The film business, I mean. Because I suddenly had a business of my own.” She gave me a bitter little smile. “I found I had a special talent for listening to men who had big troubles. The little mother of all the world! But someone who would put up almost a quarter of a million bucks to help me out of a jam!” She shook her head slowly from side to side. “Could I have been comforting a gold mine and didn’t know it?”
“How did you get involved with Harold Carpenter?” I asked her.
She smiled again, that bitter little smile. “My usual run of good luck,” she said. “I was hanging around a bar in L.A., looking for something promising to turn up. This handsome guy comes in, fancy sports clothes, smelling of money, I thought. He slides down the bar to where I am, offers to buy me a drink. The usual pickup.” She dropped her cigarette on the floor and stamped it out. “Don’t give me the critical eye, Haskell. I’m a professional hooker and I don’t care who knows it. It wouldn’t matter now, would it? After two years ago everybody in the United States knows it.”
“So your pickup was Carpenter?” I said.
She nodded. “I went back to his hotel room with him. Different men have different tastes. Some don’t want to talk at all. Some like to talk sex to get them to the ready. Carpenter wanted to know what it was like to be with two, maybe three, different guys a night. Suddenly he was ready. It—it was a little more athletic than I like it, but he didn’t ask my price. He just handed me two hundred bucks and said he’d be back the next day or the day after. That was double what I usually got, you understand. Maybe more than double most times. I was waiting for him.”
“And he came back?”
“The next night,” she said. “We didn’t have advance conversation this time. He beat me up a little, not bad, but I didn’t enjoy it. This time, however, he talked afterward. He asked me if I had a pimp I was working for. I didn’t. He asked me if I had a lover I went to bed with for pleasure. I told him I didn’t. Finally I was giving him my life story, which was that I was trying to screw my way into some kind of a career as an actress.
“ ‘Maybe I can help,’ he said. He told me about his job at High Crest, and how a lot of big shots in pictures came out there to ski and take lessons from him. He had some kind of Olympic medals, he said. He suggested I come out there with him and he might steer me to some guys who could do me some real good. So why not? I went. It sounded like maybe I’d hit something good.”
“But it didn’t turn out that way.”
“Oh, God, man, how it turned out!” That fierce anger she’d first shown me came back into her blazing dark eyes. “That bastard just wanted me out there in his isolated cabin so he could play his own game of beat the drum. I could scream my head off and nobody would hear or care. He warned me that if I complained to anyone or tried to run out on him, he’d catch up with me and make me wish I’d never been born.
“Oh, he showed me off around the cocktail lounge and the dining room. And there were a lot of famous people there, just as he’d promised, but if I started to have a conversation with anyone he was always right there.” She hesitated, and lifted the tips of her fingers to her face. “He —he never hit me in the face or marked me up where anyone would notice with my clothes on! That’s how he threatened me. If I tried to get away from him, I wouldn’t have a face left for any profession I might be in. Would you believe they’re still treating me for internal injuries in this crummy joint—after two years. Pieces of a broken rib dug a hole in my gut. That—that last night he was throwing, me around the cabin like a football and I—I passed out cold. When I came to, there he was, with his eyes popping out and his tongue black as a slab of licorice. You can’t begin to believe how glad I was. The sonofabitch! It never occurred to me I’d get nailed for it, because I hadn’t done it!”
I waited for her to go on, but she’d told it all. I handed her the list Nikki Chandler had supplied. “Is there anyone that you didn’t notice at High Crest on this list, who might date back to some other time in your life?”
She studied it quite intently. I think she realized I was on the level and that I might be able to help h
er. Finally she shook her head, slowly. “There were a lot of people there who might have helped my career as an actress, but Carpenter never gave me the chance to meet them, the bastard!”
“You’re positive?”
“Of course I’m positive! Wouldn’t I tell you? You think I look forward to staying in this dump for the next ten years? That’s how long it’ll be before I come up for parole.”
My prison guard friend appeared in the doorway. “Time’s up,” he said. He gave Sharon an odd look, as if he wondered how this piece of garbage could ever have been attractive to anyone in the hay. He’d certainly been listening.
I had drawn a blank, except for becoming convinced that Sharon Dain had been handed a bum rap. Nora Coyle had called her coarse and cheap; Mike Chandler had remarked on her distance from the right side of the tracks. Neither one of them had mentioned a strange kind of sympathetic sadness about her.
Well, whatever she was—little mother of all the world or a cheap whore—she didn’t deserve being shut away behind those grey stone walls for something she hadn’t done. I could see no reason why she should be covering for anyone. The very best years of her life as a woman, her thirties, were going to be spent shut away from the world unless we could come up with something. I found I wanted to help her. Maybe what I felt explained the “Defense Committee”—something intangible about her.
The drive back to High Crest was beautiful and uneventful. What Chambrun had called my “talent” as a listener hadn’t done me a damn bit of good so far. I’d listened to Mike Chandler, and Nikki, and Lance Wilson, and Sharon Dain, and I might as well have stayed back in New York making a sneaky pass at Nora Coyle. I’d developed a pretty clear picture of Hal Carpenter, a sadistic monster who’d provided a small army of people with motives for choking off his life with a length of picture wire. But the people at High Crest who’d had motives had not been in New York yesterday. The fog in which a murderer had been hidden for two years simply wouldn’t clear away.
There were two people left for me to see, Jack Galt, the private eye, and Sandy Potter, the newspaper gal. Galt was waiting for me back at High Crest when my teen-age car jockey got me back there.
The detectives I knew back in New York dressed in sober business suits. I suppose, when they went under cover, they changed their appearances like chameleons to fit the world into which they moved. In the Beaumont, my world, they always reminded me of undertakers’ assistants.
Jack Galt was something else—slim, blond, bright eyed and gaudy. He wore plain sports slacks, white buck shoes, a gold and green shirt. A white linen sports jacket was draped over the back of a chair in the dining area where I found him. He was drinking coffee laced with brandy, which the barboy had brought him in a little glass carafe. He was a chain smoker and he’d been waiting for me for at least three butts, snuffed out in an ashtray on the table. He’d been briefed by Max Steiner, his employer at the time of Carpenter’s murder, and we didn’t have to go into any preliminaries.
“If Steiner had told me why you were coming before you’d started,” he said, “I could have saved you the trip. I spent six months, while the trail was still hot, looking for what you’re looking for. Nothing, dead end, zilch.”
I sat down, ordered coffee.
“How did you find the lady?” Galt asked.
“Never having seen her before I can only guess how much she’s changed,” I said.
“No beauty parlors out there,” Galt said.
“Nor could she make any guess about who paid her bills, Steiner’s and yours, and whatever else.”
Galt lit a fresh cigarette and sniffed at his coffee. “Like I said, I spent six months looking for him,” he said. “Not a clue. Quite a trail, though. Little Miss Roundheels must have slept with an army of Hollywood dudes. Always looking for someone who had enough drag to give her alleged career a boost. Actress! From all accounts she had no great gifts in that direction. But what she did do well—” Gale shrugged. “I never found a sign that she ever had a permanent lover, just a long string of one-night stands that stretched out into the wild blue yonder. I don’t mean she never repeated with the same customer. You ever had dealings with a professional prostitute, Haskell?”
“No business dealings,” I said. I knew the call girls at the Beaumont but I’d never investigated their charms.
“The good ones are surrogate lovers,” Gale said. “Stand-ins for someone lost, someone never found. Those last two weeks with Hal Carpenter were the nearest thing to something permanent I ever found in her history.”
“And that was because she was afraid to run out on him,” I said.
“The more I found out about Hal Carpenter,” Galt said, his voice turning tough, “the more I wished I could have spent a little time alone with him. I’d have killed the sonofabitch myself; do the world a favor.”
Something was nagging at me and I remembered what it was, the list of names. I took it out of my pocket and showed it to Galt. He nodded.
“I checked out every name on that bloody list,” he said.
I pointed to the name with the question mark after it —Charles Davis of Las Vegas.
“The one phony on the list,” he said. “I put that question mark after his name. I was never able to locate a Charles Davis in Las Vegas. Common enough name. There are probably thousands of Charles Davises. But I couldn’t find this one.” He reached for a briefcase that was on the chair where he’d hung his white linen jacket. “Reams of notes on the whole damned case.” He shuffled a stack of notes written on yellow, legal-size paper. Finally he found what he was looking for. “Charles Davis,” he read from his notes. “One eleven Peace Street, Las Vegas, Nevada. There is no such address, by the way. I’ve got friends out there and no one ever heard of this guy. Mike and Nikki Chandler didn’t know him. His reservation was made through a travel agent in New York City, who didn’t know him either. Just a walk-in customer. He stayed here at High Crest three days, took some skiing lessons from Carpenter. He’d reserved a room for a week, but he left as soon as the cops were through questioning people after Carpenter’s murder.”
“Nothing fishy about him?”
“Not till much later, when I couldn’t find a Charles Davis who matched High Crest’s guest.”
“The cops didn’t spot the fact that he’d registered under a false name?”
Galt made an impatient gesture. “The cops had the case wrapped up in the first ten minutes—they thought. Sharon Dain was it. All they asked was if people had seen or heard anything. They weren’t looking for anyone else. They had their pigeon. Max Steiner believed the girl and he hired me to make the only proper investigation that was made.”
“And you believed her?” I asked.
“I was hired to believe her,” Galt said. “I came to believe her after a while.”
“This Davis. The Chandlers didn’t check him out before they let him sign in?”
“My God, you don’t have to show a birth certificate to register. Do they at your hotel?”
Damn near, I thought, thinking of Chambrun.
“Did this Davis have friends here, or make friends?” I asked.
“No one remembered that there was anyone obviously a friend. He chatted with a few people at the bar. Anyone you don’t know at High Crest you assume is in the movie business. This Davis never said so to anyone I could find, but a couple of people got the notion that he was in the art department of one of the big studios. It didn’t check out. I thought he might be connected with one of the big showcase places in Las Vegas. That didn’t check out either.”
“But you got a description of him?”
“I got a couple of dozen descriptions,” Galt said. “Almost everyone said ‘middle aged.’ Depending on how old you are yourself that means anything from forty to sixty. Dark, most of them said, except for one girl who’d persuaded him to buy her a drink, who swore he was as blond as I am. Everyone wears ski clothes out here in January, just the way they wear cowboy duds here this time of ye
ar. Nothing stood out about this guy. He wasn’t a physical cripple for sure. Carpenter didn’t teach beginners—unless they were pretty girls. You had to be in good physical shape to take lessons from him. So you have a dark, middle-aged man, who was in pretty good physical shape.” Galt frowned at his notes. “This Davis told the police he came to High Crest specifically to take lessons from Carpenter. He’d heard how great he was. The only person who might have told us anything about Davis was Hal Carpenter, who was dead.”
“Had you thought Davis might be the man who was paying the bills?” I asked.
“I’ve thought of everything there is to think of in the last eighteen months,” Galt said, “but I haven’t come up with a single, substantial, provable fact. I decided a while back that Davis was just an irritating red herring; some big shot who used a fake name to keep from being recognized.”
The barboy came over to the table. “There’s a long-distance phone call for you, Mr. Haskell,” he said. “You can take it in the office, just beyond the door there.”
It would be Chambrun, I thought, impatient for results. It was Betsy Ruysdale, sounding far away.
“Nothing of any consequence so far, luv,” I told her.
“You’re wanted back here, Mark,” she said. “It’s—it’s happened again.”
“What’s happened again?” It didn’t click at first.
“Another picture-wire job,” Ruysdale said.
“My God! Who?” I asked.
“A stranger to us, so far,” Ruysdale said. “Registered yesterday. Name of Charles Davis. Nobody here seems to know much about him.”
I was staring at the phone, not believing what I heard.
“Ruysdale, listen to me,” I said. “Would you believe I was just talking about a Charles Davis when your call came? He was here when Carpenter was murdered. Galt, the private eye Steiner hired, has never been able to track him down. Address he gave here was a phony.”
“One eleven Peace Street, Las Vegas,” Ruysdale said.
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