“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 eye-witness 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.
Clare was with her sister in the Mission Rest Home. She was waiting outside the closed door of Ethel’s room when Mrs. Lestina took me down the hall. She looked as if she had passed a rougher night than mine. Her grooming was careless, hair uncombed, mouth unpainted. The welt from Fidelis’ gun had turned blue and spread to one puffed eye. And I thought how very little it took to break a young girl down into a tramp, if she was vulnerable, or twist her into something worse than a tramp.
“Did you bring it with you?” she said as soon as Mrs. Lestina was out of earshot. “Ethel’s angry with me for turning it over to you.”
“I’m not surprised.”
“Give it to me. Please.” Her hand clawed at my sleeve. “Isn’t that what you came for, to give it back to me?”
“It’s in the safe in my office in Los Angeles. That is, if you’re talking about the money.”
“What else would I be talking about? You’ll simply have to go back there and get it. Ethel can’t leave here without it. She needs it to pay her bill.”
“Is Ethel planning to go some place?”
“I persuaded her to come back to Berkeley with me. She’ll have better care in the hospital there, and I know of a good plastic surgeon–”
“It’ll take more than that to put Ethel together again.”
“What do you mean?”
“You should be able to guess. You’re not a stupid girl, or are you? Has she got you fooled the way she had me fooled?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. But I don’t like it. Every time I see you, you seem to get nastier.”
“This is a nasty business. It’s rubbing off on all of us, isn’t it, kid?”
She looked at me vaguely through a fog of doubt. “Don’t you dare call me kid. I thought you were a real friend for a while, but you don’t even like me. You’ve said some dreadful things. You probably think you can scare me into letting you keep our money. Well, you can’t.”
“That’s my problem,” I said. “What to do with the money.”
“You’ll give it back to Ethel and me, that’s what you’ll do. There are laws to deal with people like you–”
“And people like Ethel. I want to talk to her.”
“I won’t let you. My sister’s suffered enough already.”
She spread her arms across the width of the door. I was tempted to go away and send her the money and forget the whole thing. But the need to finish it pushed me, imperative as a gun at my back.
I lifted her by the waist and tried to set her aside. Her entire body was rigid and jerking galvanically. Her hands slid under my arms and around my neck and held on. Her head rolled on my shoulder and was still. Suddenly, like delayed rain after lightning, her tears came. I stood and held her vibrating body, trying to quench the dangerous heat that was rising in my veins, and wondering what in hell I was going to do.
“Ethel did it for me,” she sobbed. “She wanted me to have a good start in life.”
“Some start she’s giving you. Did she tell you that?”
“She didn’t have to. I knew. I tried to pretend to myself, but I knew. When she told me where to look for the money last night – the night before last.”
“You knew Ethel took it from Dewar and hid it in her house?”
“Yes. The thought went through my mind, and I couldn’t get rid of it. Ethel’s always taken terrible chances, and money means so much to her. Not for herself. For me.”
“She wasn’t thinking of you when she gambled away the money she got from Illman. She went through it in a week.”
“Is that what happened to it?”
“That’s it. I flew to Las Vegas last night and talked to some of the people that got her money, dealers and stickmen. They remembered her. She had a bad case of gambling fever that week. It didn’t leave her until the money was gone. Then maybe she thought of you.”
“Poor Ethel. I’ve seen her before when she had a gambling streak.”
“Poor Dewar,” I said.
The door beside us creaked open. The muzzle of a blue revolver looked out. Above it, Ethel’s eyes glared red from her bandaged face.
“Come in here, both of you.”
Clare stretched out her hands towards her sister. “No, Ethel. Darling, you mustn’t. Give me that gun.”