Last Dance, Last Chance

Phoenix. He said his friend would wire him some money.”
    But Elledge had returned to their table looking grim. “He said his friend wouldn’t be able to wire the money until the next day—this was on a Sunday.”
    Kim admitted to DePalmo that she was beginning to wonder if Jim’s story about his high-paying job as an executive in the restaurant business was true. He didn’t seem to have any money at all. She ended up paying for their drinks.
    “I offered to loan him $20,” she said, “and I said I could take him to a motel. I wasn’t about to take him home with me.”
    Elledge had accepted the offer, and Kim headed for the I-5 freeway. She exited at the first off-ramp, and he went into a newer motel there. “He came back out, and he looked pretty disturbed because they wanted $20 a night. He said he wouldn’t pay that much, so I headed for “Old 99” and Aurora Avenue. I took him to an older motel there. Well, that was too expensive for his taste, too. Finally, I drove him to the Eldorado.”
    Kim Lane said she’d begun to be really nervous about Elledge. She just wanted to be rid of him and get home. “But I waited. I saw him talking to an older woman in the motel office, and then they walked out and went to the first room at the end of the driveway. Jim came out to my car and asked me to come in and see his room. I only went as far as the open door and peeked in.
    “Then the woman—the manager, I guess—came in with a coffee pot and coffee for him, and I just made my excuses and left.”
    “Did you see him again?” DePalmo asked.
    “He called me the next day and asked me to go to dinner with him at the Space Needle. I said ‘No,’ and I don’t know why—just something. I never saw him again.”
    Kim Lane said that Elledge was about 30 and good-looking and wore his blond hair in a crew cut.
    “How tall is he?” DePalmo asked.
    “Maybe five nine or ten—and he was average weight.”
    They probably knew now who the man was who matched the suitcase left in Bertha Lush’s office. Jim Elledge had checked into the Eldorado on Tuesday, May 14. He’d had $20 then—just about enough for three nights at the Eldorado prices.
    Bertha had talked about a man who couldn’t pay his rent. Maybe Elledge hadn’t paid for three nights; maybe he’d held out five dollars to buy a hammer. At any rate, by Saturday night, May 18, he would have been at least three days behind. Bertha was kind, but she wasn’t a pushover; she would have asked him to leave.
    Sergeant Jim Lehner in Albuquerque filled in more chinks in the case’s structure. Lehner said he had been tipped to Elledge’s alleged crime by one of the suspect’s own friends. Elledge had never been a restaurant executive, but he’d been a cook.
    The man who called Lehner was an air traffic controller. He said that he’d had a phone call from Elledge around the middle of May. He’d been calling from a motel in Seattle and asked that the informant wire him some money.
    “The woman who owned the motel came on the line,” Lehner said, “but our guy here said he didn’t promise to send Elledge money. Instead, he told her that if Jim didn’t pay her, she could bill him and he’d send it to her. He wasn’t about to wire money to Jim.”
    Calls kept coming into Elledge’s friend for the next two months, and Jim was always in a different spot on the map.
    “Elledge got back to Albuquerque on July 16,” Lehner said. “He told his friend here that he’d been so desperate that he started to rob the woman in the motel in Seattle. When she fought him, he said he had to hit her with a hammer. And he claims that he killed her. I guess he blamed himself for panicking. He said, ‘It was stupid—because I left the hammer there.’”
    “Yeah, he sure did,” DePalmo said. “We found it.”
    Elledge’s claim to be a murderer had been too much for the air traffic controller, and he called the police.
    “I told him I’d meet him on a certain corner of First Street,” the informant said. “He thinks I’m bringing him money. He says he’s driving a Buick with Louisiana plates.”
     
    Lehner and his crew had been on the prearranged corner on the evening of July 16. They spotted a 1967 Buick with Louisiana plates and asked Radio to run the plates through the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) computers. It came back as stolen from West Monroe, Louisiana, six days earlier.
    As they watched, the suspect left the car and walked south on