Find This Woman by Richard S. Prather Page B

from Los Angeles and you must already know that by now. You must also bloody well know I'm clean and I don't go around blowing up my own cars or spitting on sidewalks." I'd been getting nothing but lumps and shoving around up here, and now this razor-voiced lieutenant was slicing at me, and little red spots were getting ready to pop in front of my eyes. I leaned on the desk. "This is one lousy welcome to your lousy town. I'll tell you what the hell happened to that Cad of mine. I drive up here peaceably on legal business and a son named Victor Dante blows up my car, that's what happens. And I wouldn't be a damn bit surprised if he murdered a couple of other people up here—one Isabel Ellis and one William Carter—and murders me before he's through."
    Boy, I sure put my foot in it that time.
    He sort of shook when I said William Carter, and right then I knew Carter was dead. I stopped.
    Hawkins looked over at the girl. The girl was getting it all down. She was getting every pearl that spilled from my big loud mouth.
    Hawkins looked back at me. "This Carter, this William Carter. He's murdered, you say?"
    "Well, I don't know. I just guessed."
    "You guessed it. Well, you know what? That was a very good guess."
    "He's dead, huh?"
    Hawkins made it easy on the girl. He said not a word.
    I started in saying words. I rattled them at him faster than he'd snapped them at me. I told him how I was hired, what had happened then. I just blocked it in sketchily, without any details such as my leaving the Inferno—and I sure as hell didn't tell him about my two-goon ruckus at the airport—but I let him know why I figured Dante was my boy.
    We went round and round and the air got blue, but finally it cleared a little. Because apparently Hawkins didn't know I was the airport "fugitive" and also because I could account for all of my time in Los Angeles from May eighth till I'd left L.A., and sometime in there, as I learned from Hawkins, Carter had been murdered with three little .38-caliber slugs in his back. And, actually, all I'd said was that I thought William Carter was dead.
    After half an hour I said, "And, Lieutenant, I walked in here pleasantly of my own free will for two reasons: to see if you had anything on Isabel Ellis, whose picture I've shown you, which you say you don't; and to see if you could tell me anything about Carter, which you have. And Carter was on this same job just before me, Hawkins. Grant me that my nerves might be a little on edge."
    "You got up here last night?"
    "I did."
    "You didn't rush right down here for help."
    "No, I didn't. Actually I was, well, on another phase of my investigation. And sometimes I'm not happy wandering around in the dark. I was supposed to be in that Cadillac, and whether you believe it or not, there's a good chance I'll wind up like Carter."
    He sucked on his teeth and looked at me.
    "One thing," I said. "Do me the courtesy of phoning Los Angeles. Captain Phil Samson, Central Detective Bureau, Homicide Division, in the City Hall."
    He looked at the girl. "All right, Sarah." Sarah closed her notebook and went out. Hawkins leaned back in his chair and pulled the phone over to him. "I'll do that. Let me tell you something, Mr. Scott. I already have a pretty good report on you. And I, personally, would like very much to hang something on Victor Dante, believe me. But he is a man with much power and many friends, and there seems to be nothing. . . wrong with him. You give me something solid and I'll talk to Dante. I'm not going to look at him just because you have some wild ideas."
    "Not that I mean to contradict you flatly," I said, "but they don't seem wild to me." I gave him a very slight grin. "It's just that he seems bound and determined to kill me. And, Hawkins, speaking of killing, isn't there something about Dante and a guy named Big Jim White?"
    He frowned at me for a long time. "Nothing that holds water," he said finally. "I talked to Dante himself when he was