“I don’t believe it. You can’t prove that story. It’s fantastic.”
“I don’t have to prove it. Gelt talks, but iron talks louder. So hand it over, eh?”
“I’ll die first.”
“Maybe you will at that.”
I edged along the wall to the open door. Clare was standing flat against the opposite wall of the hallway. She was clutching a sheaf of bills to her breast. The gunman’s broad flannel back was to me, and he was advancing on her.
“Stay away from me, you.” Her cry was thin and desperate. She was trying to merge with the wall, pressed by an orgastic terror.
“I don’t like taking candy from a baby,” he said in a very reasonable tone. “Only I’m going to have that money back.”
“You can’t have it. It’s Ethel’s. It’s all she has.”
“– – you, lady. You and your sister both.”
He raised his armed right hand and slapped the side of her face with the gun barrel, lightly. Fingering the welt it left, she said in a kind of despairing stupor:
“You’re the one that hurt Ethel, aren’t you? Now you’re hurting me. You like hurting people, don’t you?”
“Listen to reason, lady. It ain’t just the money, it’s a matter of business. I let it happen once, it’ll happen again. I can’t afford to let anybody get away with nothing. I got a reputation to live up to.”
I said from the doorway: “Is that why you killed Dewar?”
He let out an animal sound, and whirled in my direction. I shot before he did, twice. The first slug rocked him back on his heels. His bullet went wild, plowed the ceiling. My second slug took him off balance and slammed him against the wall. His blood spattered Clare and the money in her hands. She screamed once, very loudly.
The man from Las Vegas dropped his gun. It clattered on the parquetry. His hands clasped his perforated chest, trying to hold the blood in. He slid down the wall slowly, his face a mask of smiling pain, and sat with a bump on the floor. He blew red bubbles and said:
“You got me wrong. I didn’t kill Dewar. I didn’t know he was dead. The money belongs to me. You made a big mistake, punk.”
“So did you.”
He went on smiling, as if in fierce appreciation of the joke. Then his red grin changed to a rictus, and he slumped sideways.
Clare looked from him to me, her eyes wide and dark with the sight of death. “I don’t know how to thank you. He was going to kill me.”
“I doubt that. He was just combining a little pleasure with business.”
“But he shot at you.”
“It’s just as well he did. It leaves no doubt that it was self-defense.”
“Is it true what you said? That Dewar’s dead? He killed him?”
“You tell me.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ve got the money that Dewar took from your sister. Where did you get it?”
“It was here, right in this house. I found it in the kitchen.”
“That’s kind of hard to swallow, Clare.”
“It’s true.” She looked down at the blood-spattered money in her hands. The outside bill was a hundred. Unconsciously, she tried to wipe it clean on the front of her dress. “He had it hidden here. He must have come back and hid it.”
“Show me where.”
“You’re not being very nice to me. And I’m not feeling well.”
“Neither is Dewar. You didn’t shoot him yourself, by any chance?”
“How could I? I was in Berkeley when it happened. I wish I was back there now.”
“You know when it happened, do you?”
“No.” She bit her lip. “I don’t mean that. I mean I was in Berkeley all along. You’re a witness, you were with me on the train coming down.”
“Trains run both ways.”
She regarded me with loathing. “You’re not nice at all. To think that yesterday I thought you were nice.”
“You’re wasting time, Clare. I have to call the police. But first I want to see where you found the money. Or where you say you did.”
“In the kitchen. You’ve got to believe me. It took me a long time to get here from the station on the bus. I’d only just found it when he walked in on me.”
“I’ll believe the physical evidence, if any.”
To my surprise, the physical evidence was there. A red-enameled flour canister was standing open on the board beside the kitchen sink. There were fingerprints on the flour, and a floury piece of oilskin wrapping in the sink.
“He hid the money under the flour,” Clare said. “I guess he thought it would be safer here than if he carried it around with him.”
It wasn’t a likely story. On the other hand, the criminal mind is capable of strange things. Whose criminal mind, I wondered: Clare’s, or Owen Dewar’s, or somebody else’s? I said:
“Where did you get the bright idea of coming back here and looking for it?”
“Ethel suggested it last night, just before I left her. She told me this was his favorite hiding place while she was living with him. She discovered it by accident one day.”
“Hiding place for what?”
“Some kind of drug he took. He was a drug addict. Do you still think I’m lying?”
“Somebody is. But I suppose I’ve got to take your word, until I get something better. What are you going to do with the money?”
“Ethel said if I found it, that I was to go down and put it in the bank.”
“There’s no time for that now. You better let me hold it for you. I have a safe in my office.”
“No. You don’t trust me. Why should I trust you?”
“Because you can trust me, and you know it. If the cops impound it, you’ll have to prove ownership to get it back.”
She was too spent to argue. She let me take it out of her hands. I riffled through the bills and got a rough idea of their sum. There was easily twenty-five thousand there. I gave her a receipt for that amount, and put the sheaf of bills in my inside pocket.
It was after dark when the cops got through with me. By that time I was equipped to do a comparative study on the San Diego and Los Angeles P.D.’s. With the help of a friend in the D.A.’s office, Clare’s eyewitness account, and the bullet in the ceiling, I got away from them without being booked. The dead man’s record also helped. He had been widely suspected of shooting Bugsy Siegel, and had fallen heir to some of Siegel’s holdings. His name was Jack Fidelis. R.I.P.
I drove out Sunset to my office. The Strip was lighting up for business again. The stars looked down on its neon conflagration like hard bright knowing eyes. I pulled the Venetian blinds and locked the doors and counted the money: $26,380. I wrapped it up in brown paper, sealed it with wax and tucked it away in the safe. I would have preferred to tear it in little pieces and flush the green confetti down the drain. Two men had died for it. I wasn’t eager to become the third.
I had a steak in the restaurant at International Airport, and hopped a shuttle plane to Las Vegas. There I spent a rough night in various gambling joints, watching the suckers blow their vacation money, pinching my own pennies, and talking to some of the guys and girls that raked the money in. The rest of Illman’s two hundred dollars bought me the facts I needed.
I flew back to Los Angeles in the morning, picked up my car and headed for San Diego. I was tired enough to sleep standing up, like a horse. But something heavier than sleep or tiredness sat on the back of my neck and pressed the gas pedal down to the floorboards. It was the thought of Clare.