Authors: Richard S. Prather
Everything so far had been routine, so I spent a half hour finding out where Lorraine Mandel lived, went to her hotel, and got the first big, fat shock. She'd joined the act. I wouldn't be talking to Lorraine this morning.
The landlady, a thin, bony woman of about fifty, came to the door of the office when I knocked. I said, "Good morning. I'd like to see Miss Mandel, if I may."
"Oh," she said, "she's not here any more. She moved."
I stared at her. "Moved? You mean left? She's not here?"
"No, she just left this morning. I'm sorry."
I almost said, "
You're
sorry!" but I held my tongue and started easing questions into her. And, finally, as usual, money talked louder than I did. For a twenty-dollar bill she finally said, "Well, she asked me not to tell. I really shouldn't say anything."
I grinned at her, rather a strained grin. She already had my twenty stuffed down the front of her dress. "You do know where she is, though."
"Well, not exactly. She told me where to forward her mail, is all. But I wasn't supposed to say. . . Well, she said to send it up to that new night club. Place called The Inferno, she said. In Las Vegas."
"Las Vegas?"
"Las Vegas."
She'd said Las Vegas, all right. That town was popping up too much in this case for comfort. My comfort. That was all that the landlady could tell me, so I left. I stopped at the Hall of Records and picked up my photostats, still thinking about the landlady. What she'd told me seemed pretty poor information for twenty dollars when I might have got it for nothing at the post office if Lorraine had put in for a change of address. And then one little brain cell exploded. I was back in the Cadillac and driving down First Street when I remembered that J. Harrison Bing had repeated for me something that Detective William Carter had said. As far as I knew, they were Carter's last words, too. Carter had said, "I'm going out to Dante's place tonight." And Lorraine's mail was to be forwarded to The Inferno. I juggled it, but there was only one answer. InfernoâDante: Dante's Inferno.
And with that little thought shivering in my brain, I tromped on the gas and headed, not too gaily, for Las Vegas, Nevada, and the Lord knew what.
The road slanted downward from the hills behind me and stretched rigidly ahead through shimmering desert as dry as a dead man's bones. I couldn't help thinking in terms of dead men, because in less than an hour I'd be rolling down the Strip in Las Vegas, and I had the growing feeling that at least one dead man might already lie somewhere up there ahead of me, and maybe one dead woman, and I remembered, too, a singsong voice in my ear last night telling me to stay away from Las Vegas unless I liked dying.
I pushed the old Cadillac up to seventy-five crossing the barren, cracked earth at the California-Nevada border, and she purred along like a two-ton tiger. The Cad's an old '41, and she's a sort of hideous yellow, but she's got power under the hood and responds to every touch of my hand like the wise old lady she is. I've got a deep and abiding affection for two inanimate things: my Cad and my gun. On that first business trip to Boulder City I'd got a permit to carry a gun in the state of Nevada, so now my short-barreled .38 Colt Special, with five cartridges in the cylinder and an empty chamber under the hammer, nestled comfortingly in the holster at my left shoulder. It was a comfort to me, but if anyone else got ideas about sapping me, it wasn't going to be a comfort to him.
This was the afternoon of May tenth, the first day of Helldorado, and I was bruised and tired. My head ached and my hands tingled from the hours of steady driving from L.A., but I was keyed up and I had to tell myself to relax, take it easy, save my energy for what might be coming later.
It was coming sooner than I thought. A few minutes before five p.m., when I was ten miles from downtown Las Vegas, things started happening. It wasn't going to be until later in the evening that I'd be sure they were happening the wrong way for me, but I was just jittery enough to play it extra-safe. And maybe that saved my life.
It started with a robin's-egg-blue Chrysler sedan, the big 1951 New Yorker model. I didn't pay much attention to it except to note that it was pretty and that it was coming from Las Vegas. It whooshed by me going in the opposite direction, and I wouldn't have thought any more about it except that the two men in it craned their necks at me or at my too damned distinctive Cadillac as they went by. But I caught them in the rear-view mirror as their car slowed, swung around fast in the middle of the road, and came roaring like a singed bat out of hell after me.
I was still hitting a good seventy, but the big Chrysler must have been pushing a hundred because it was rapidly looming larger in the mirror, and I knew I was being too jittery and that these boys might only be going back to town because they'd remembered some unfinished business; but I couldn't help thinking, in view of what had happened to me lately, that maybe that unfinished business was me. So I pulled my .38 out of its holster and held it ready in my lap, steering with my left hand. The Chrysler came up fast and I slacked off on the accelerator a little. As I slowed down they swung out on the left to pass and I lifted my foot off the gas ready for the quickest stop in the Cad's history if the boys alongside had guns or tried to crowd me off the road.
Because they were alongside now. There were two of them, the driver and the one on this side, and they didn't have any guns but they were sure grabbing an eyeful of me. I had the .38 out of sight but pointed in the proper direction to put a hole in the nearest guy's face, but they just slowed down as I slowed down, right alongside, got their big fat look, then zoomed away from me as if I were parked.
I didn't know what that meant except that those guys weren't casual sight-seers and that they'd scared me. They'd taken a good look at me, but I'd had just as good a look at them, and I wouldn't forget them. Not ever. Not, at least, for the rest of my life.
The blue Chrysler was almost out of sight. They must have been very nearly into town, and right now I was prejudiced against driving boldly into Vegas after them. I knew, when I decided to drive up, that if anybody wanted to spot me, he could do itâeven if he didn't know meâwith one look at my car if he had seen it before or even heard what it looked like. I couldn't think of any other reason for those two boys to stare at me; I'd never seen either of them before.
Now I almost wished I'd flown up, but I'd checked the plane times before I left and figured by pushing the Cad I could get here as soon as the plane. And that gave me an idea. I glanced at my watch and noted that it was five o'clock, ten minutes before the arrival time of the next L.A. plane. And I could see the airport now. McCarran Field is about five hundred yards off the road on the right of U.S. Highway 91, and two or three miles before you reach the Flamingo, the first club on the Las Vegas Strip. I turned in at the airport road, drove in, and parked around at the right of the long, low building that houses the offices and soda fountain.
I sat smoking part of a cigarette and decided that my best approach would be money. Then I put the car keys in my coat pocket, got out of the car, and walked inside the building. It took me five minutes of the ten remaining before the plane arrived, but I finally spotted the young kid about twenty-two in the black chauffeur's cap. Otherwise he was dressed in ordinary civilian clothes. I walked up to him.
"Friend, how would you like to make a fast ten bucks?"
He had a pink face and bloodshot eyes, as if he were recovering from celebrating Helldorado early. He blinked at me and said, "What do I gotta do?"
"Nothing. No kidding, it isn't a gag. Come on outside."
He looked puzzled, but he followed me out to a spot where we wouldn't be overheard. I asked him, "You drive the limousine that takes the passengers into town? That black Packard out front?"
He nodded.
"Let's just say I've always wanted to drive a limousine. It's worth ten bucks. All you have to do is lend me your cap. And the limousine."
He blinked some more. "Jesus, mister, I can't do that."
"Why not? You'll get it back. I'll even deliver the plane passengers. Where do you take them?"
"Anyplace in town they want to go. But I can't. . . " He stopped, thinking, then shook his head. "I might get fired. I been thinking about quitting for Helldorado, but no sense getting
fired
."
"Hell, nobody'll even know about it. You can take a nap or something. Better than that, you can go along."
"I don't know," he said. "You could go in with me. Why you gotta
drive
the thing?"
If anyone were looking for me, I didn't think he'd expect me at the wheel of a black limousine. Besides, no matter what I was in, I wanted to be at the wheel just in case. "Well," I said, and stopped. We could hear the drone of twin engines now as the plane started coming in. "Because," I said quickly, "there's twenty-five bucks in it for you. You can put it on the red tonight."
"Twenty-five?" His eyes got a gleam in them and I added, "That's positively tops. I'll drive, drop off the passengers, then get out at the Desert Inn. You can drive straight back." He looked ready to weaken, so I said, "Oh, the hell with it," and turned around.
He said to my back, "O.K. Gimme the twenty-five." He sighed. "But look, if anybody asks what's wrong, tell them I suddenly got sick and you're helping me out." He sighed again. "I was gonna quit anyway."
I told him O.K., slipped him the money, and took the cap. Then I hustled over and got my bag out of the Cad and put it up front in the limousine, climbed behind the wheel, and put on the cap. The kid told me all I had to do was wait for the passengers to climb in, then take them where they were going. Another guy handled the baggage, he said, which would make it easier for me.
The plane came in, the passengers got off, and some of them straggled up to the limousine. I kept my face turned away in case any of them were old hands on this line and wanted to know what the score was. In about five minutes we were ready to go, with the kid sitting on my right on the front seat acting sick. I put the buggy in low and took off. This was easy. This was a breeze. I felt pretty good, but as we approached the Flamingo on the right, I saw the blue car just this side of it about ten feet back in the curving drive that swung in front of the ornate entrance of the club that "Bugsy" Siegel used to control. The Chrysler was facing out, ready to go, and one of the two men was standing beside the car looking out toward the highway. I swung my face away, around to the left, just as two things happened: I thought how cute it would be if somebody wanted out at the Flamingo, and a booming voice from the rear said, "I'd like out at the Flamingo."
I kept my head to the left as we passed the entrance to the big hotel, then turned it straight ahead as the voice boomed, a little angrily now, "Don't you hear? Stop. I say
stop!
"
I wasn't about to stop. I rolled right on by. The kid groaned sickly. I was past the first road block by now, and maybe there weren't any more, so I looked over my shoulder at the man with the big voice, who was big and sloppy-fat and about fifty, and said, "I'm sorry, sir, I'll drop you off on the way back. I'm new onâ" and I busted it off in the middle when I saw Lorraine, Sweet Lorraine, eyeballing me with her chin damn near down to her gold dust.
I think I squeaked a little when I saw her sitting clear over on the right side of the back seat, but then it occurred to me that I should have known that if she were heading for Vegas she could well be on the plane, and I finished my sentence miserably: ". . . the. . . job."
I turned around to the front again with my brain a little numb, and decided that numb was its usual condition, and the Flamingo's loss shouted, "I want out now!
Now!
Aaaargh!" as the kid at my right groaned sickly and softly, "Oooh, the fat bastard," and then a tiny voice from the right of the rear seat said, "Let me out here," and I looked to the right of the road for my first glimpse of Dante's Inferno. Well, at least I'd seen the damned place.
I let Lorraine out along with two other people, then made the rounds till all were dropped off except the guy simmering in the back seat. Ever since I'd been so uncouth as to drive past the Flamingo so I wouldn't, perhaps, get killed, he'd been sitting back there muttering to himself and the other passengers about this-is-an-outrage-bloody-outrage-I'll-report-that-young-man and so on. He was all alone back there now, but still muttering. When I headed back up the Strip he said, "I'll report you."
"You'll report me, hell. I stole the damn car. I'm just going for a ride."
The kid chuckled happily, sympathizing with me, but the guy subsided for a moment. I don't think he believed me, though; I think he thought I was crazy. I had him pegged as one of those guys so full of his own importance that he could hardly stand it. He was so full of something else that I could hardly stand it. I've run into his type before. They think that anyone who chauffeurs a limousine or taxi, or waits table, or bellhops, is an animal on a par with the slug, and it gave me great pleasure to pull in at the Desert Inn and park in front of the entrance, trade the cap for my bag, and get out of the car. Fatty was sputtering as I got out of the car and he said, "What. . . what. . . " and the kid was almost hysterical with happiness.
I slammed the door and Fatty pushed out his lips, his jelly cheeks quivering, and he wiggled a pudgy finger at me. "You. . . you. . . I'll have you discharged. I
demand
that you drive me to the Flamingo!" His voice went up and up right along with his blood pressure.
I glanced at the kid and he was grinning, and I looked back at Fatty and said, "Mister, I just quit. And you can bloody well walk."
The car was still there and he was still in the back when I went into the Desert Inn. Possibly he'd had a stroke.
Chapter Five
THE second set of inch-thick glass doors swung shut behind me and I took three steps inside and stopped. This was for me. This was wonderful. I remembered bits I'd read in the Kefauver Report, and in the Volstead Act, and it was still wonderful.