A. Fair - All Grass Isn't Green

“What did you do?”

“I knocked.”

“And you left fingerprints.”

“Knuckles don’t leave fingerprints.”

I said, “What were you intending to do if the guy had opened the door — ask him if he was the dope peddler your that girlfriend, Nanncie, had been telling you about?”

“No, I was going to sound him out a bit, pretending I a yachtsman and wanted information about launching facilities at San Felipe.”

“At three o’clock in the morning?” I asked.

“I tell you I was worried sick about Nanncie,” he said “I wasn’t thinking clearly.”

“And you’re not thinking clearly now,” I told him, then I asked him abruptly, “Do you own a gun?”

He hesitated, then nodded.

“Where is it?”

“I... why, home, I guess.”

“Where is home? Where your wife is living or in the Mantello Apartments?”

“In the... in the home, I guess.”

“You sure?”

“No, I’m not absolutely certain. I haven’t seen it for some time.”

“What is it?”

“A thirty-eight-caliber revolver.”

“You’re sure you didn’t bring it with you when you came down here last night?”

“No, certainly not. Why would I have brought it?”

“Sometimes people carry guns when they’re traveling at night over lonely roads in an automobile.”

“I don’t. I’m law-abiding.”

“All right,” I said. “The best thing for you to do is to lick to Los Angeles.”

“Are you crazy?” he asked. “I’ve got to stay down here and together we’ve got to look for Nanncie.”

“Not together.”

“I want to be kept posted. I want to know what you’re doing. I want to work with you.”

“You would simply clutter up the scenery,” I told him.

“I have reason to believe she’s in danger.”

“If she is, I can help her a lot better if I’m alone than if you’re hanging around. What are your feelings toward Colburn Hale? I want to know.”

“I hate him,” he said.

“Jealous?”

“I’m not jealous. I just tell you that the man dragged Nanncie into danger, fooling around with this article of his on dope smuggling.”

I told Calhoun, “If you won’t go back to Los Angeles, there’s just one thing I want you to do.”

“What?”

“Get in that Cadillac of yours, drive to the De Anza Hotel, go into your room, close the door, don’t do any telephoning, and stay put.”

“For how long — I’d go crazy.”

“Until you hear from me,” I said.

“How long will that be?”

“It depends.”

“On what?”

“On when I can find some of the answers.”

“Answers to what?”

I looked him straight in the eyes and said, “Answers to some of the things you’ve been doing and have lied about.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I mean that I have a feeling you’re not being frank with me.”

“I’ve paid you everything you’ve asked. You’re working for me.”

“That’s right,” I told him, “and if you want to keep me running around in circles like a trotting horse that’s being trained at the end of a rope, that’s your privilege. I’ll trot around just as far as you want and as fast as you want at fifty bucks a day and expenses.

“On the other hand, if you want to take the rope off my and let me trot straight down the road so I can get somewhere, I’ll try to get somewhere.”

“Perhaps then you’d get to some place that I don’t want you to be.”

“There’s always that chance.”

“I can’t take it.”

“You can if you tell me where you don’t want me to go,” I said, “and why you don’t want me to get there.”

He shook his head.

I said, “Has it ever occurred to you that you could find yourself charged with murder?”

“With murder?”

“With murder in the first,” I said. “Sellers is measuring you for size right now. A fingerprint or two or just some bit of evidence and you’d be elected.”

“Why, they couldn’t... they wouldn’t dare.”

“And,” I said, “there’d be nice, juicy big headlines in papers. LOS ANGELES MILLIONAIRE ARRESTED IN DOPE-SMUGGLING MURDER.”

He acted as though I’d hit him in the stomach.

“Think it over,” I told him. “I’m trying to help you. Despite all the double crosses you’ve given me, I’m still trying to help, but there are certain things I can’t do. I can’t suppress evidence. And when I know that the police are investigating a murder case, I can’t lie to them. After all, I’m a licensed private detective and I have certain obligations under the law.

Now get out of here. Go to the De Anza Hotel. Shut self in your room and stay there.”

He looked at me as a wounded deer looks at the Then he got up and walked out.

I didn’t have much trouble finding where the houseboat had been parked. I drove slowly out of town, watching the road.

There was still a little crowd hanging around, enough people so that it was impossible to tell anything about footprints or wheel tracks. The police had apparently roped the place off earlier in the morning, and after they finished with their search and photography they had taken the ropes away, presumably when they moved the pickup and trailer. Then the people had moved in.

I looked the place over.

It was a real wide space on the west side of the road, which would be the left-hand side going north. It must have been a good fifty feet from the edge of the pavement over to a drainage ditch that was along the side of the road. On the other side of the drainage ditch was a barbed-wire fence and beyond that was an alfalfa field.

As the alfalfa field was irrigated, the surplus waters ran down into the drainage ditch, which was still moist with a base of muddy clay on the bottom.

I walked along the road, looking at the drainage ditch to see if I could see any footprints.

There weren’t any in it, but there were lots of them along the side. The police, and presumably some of the spectators, had looked to see if anyone had crossed that ditch. It couldn’t have been done without leaving a set of tracks.

I took off my shoes and socks and waded through the clay mud in the bottom of the ditch, climbed the bank on the other side, and crawled through the barbed-wire fence, holding my shoes and socks in my left hand, trying act natural and unconcerned — just a loco gringo doing something that didn’t make sense.

I walked about fifty yards along the bank, looking over the alfalfa field; and then I walked back to where I had started and walked fifty yards in the other direction.

I started back, and then I saw it, a gleam of bluish metal, reflecting the sunlight.

I glanced around. Everyone seemed to have lost interest in me.

I walked through the alfalfa field for about twenty feet.

The gun was lying at the foot of an alfalfa plant.

I studied it intently. It was a blued-steel .38-caliber, nosed revolver.

I turned and walked slowly away from what I had found.

I had taken only a few steps toward the fence when a little ten-year-old, black-eyed, barefooted urchin came running across the muddy bottom of the drainage ditch.

“What did you find, mister?” he asked.

“Find?” I echoed, trying to look innocent.

“You found something. You moved over. You... I’ll look.”

He started to run back to where I had turned into the alfalfa.

“Wait!” I called after him.

He stopped.

“I found something,” I said, “that is of great importance. I don’t want the other people to know. Can I trust you?”

His face showed intense excitement. “Of course, sure,” he said. “What do you want?”

I said, “I am going to wait here to see that what I found is not disturbed. I was going to call the police myself, but it is better this way. You have your mother and father near here?”