Find This Woman by Richard S. Prather

illumination of the beginning day during which we'd looked at each other and murmured nothing-phrases. I walked back to the Desert Inn and little happened except that I saw a lanky brunette walking down the road in her stocking feet with her high-heeled shoes in her hand. I didn't remember seeing her at the Inferno, but she must have recognized the ring-tailed billionaire, because she said something unintelligible and threw a shoe at me.
    No guns had been aimed my way, but I was shot. Those stairs certainly looked steep. I was Shell Scott, the Cactus Kid: a worn-out, world-weary Atlas with fallen arches and noodles for muscles. But at least I was away from Victor Dante and I was half alive.
    I contemplated getting down on my hands and knees and crawling inch by inch up those stairs, but it didn't seem like the thing to do. Not that I cared a damn about conforming to the approved and socially acceptable stair-climbing routine; I was just afraid if I once got down there I'd never get back up.
    I went up to the second floor and down the hall and stopped. Suddenly I felt sick, and it had nothing to do with the liquor or anything else. I'd gone, without thinking, back up to Freddy's room, as if nothing had happened and he'd be glad to see me. But finally I went on in. There was no other place for me to stay, and the room was no good now to Freddy.
    Some of his things were still scattered around the room. I went on into the bathroom and showered, then turned out the lights and went to bed. I didn't go to sleep right away, even as tired as I was. There were too many things on my mind, too many unexplained angles. I'd come up here to look for Isabel Ellis but it didn't look as though I'd accomplished a thing. I was on a treadmill, running and running and running, and not getting anywhere. From the moment I'd hit town until now, somebody had been after me, pushing me, rushing me, and that meant something all by itself. But I hadn't even had time to do the simple, beginning things, the groundwork. I hadn't even unpacked my bag, and the picture of Isabel was in there still. I wanted to show that around; I wanted to go to the police, check with them on both Isabel and William Carter; and I wanted to check the funeral homes, because the more I thought about it, the likelier it seemed to me that there was where I'd find them.
    At least I knew a few things and could add them together for something. I knew now that Victor Dante was the man who'd been talking to Lorraine at the Pelican-just the night before she'd shown up in Las Vegas—and that is was he and his sidekick who had beaten hell out of me simply to convince me I should not talk to Lorraine, not look for Carter, and not come to Las Vegas.
    And Dante was acting like other men I've run across in other cases: like a man covering up his tracks, or a trail. And it appeared, now that I was hounding him, that he wanted me covered up, too.
    Thinking drowsily, with the thoughts threading lazily among other pictures and memories in my mind, as they will when you're resting on the soft edge of sleep, I thought: Wouldn't it be funny if Dante had, for some reason or other, murdered Isabel—who had suddenly disappeared and wasn't being heard from these days—and then a detective hired by Isabel's father had stumbled onto proof of the murder and been killed because he had stumbled? It didn't fully explain what Dante had been doing at the Pelican Club, but that was where Carter had apparently picked up the trail, and if that was the answer, or part of it, Dante would be almost sure to resent my snooping around.
    My thoughts were sluggish and circling and elusive, but almost the last thing I considered was that I had busted in on Dante at the Pelican and, right after that, started asking questions about Carter and Isabel, and that now Dante knew I was aware of his identity since we'd met at his Inferno. I was thinking that it looked as though Dante would have no other choice but to kill