A. Fair - Up for Grabs

“So it’s Melita who gets the thing in the neck, and I’m just downright mad about it.”

“Going to do anything about it?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Sometimes I think I’d like to go down there and snatch that Howard woman baldheaded.”

“You don’t work in the same hospital?”

“I’m on special,” she said.

“Night or day?”

She shrugged her shoulders and said “Any time.”

“Keep you pretty busy?” I asked.

“Off and on,” she said vaguely.

“Melita has a sick mother?”

“I’ll say she does. She’s keeping her mother in a nursing home and it’s bleeding the girl white, but it’s the only thing that can be done and Melita just works her head off.

“Of course, she gets some professional courtesies from doctors, but her mother had to have an operation and. Melita had to put up money. That’s one of the reasons that this hatchet-faced superintendent tried to lower the boom on Melita. She knew Melita was up against it for money.”

“Well,” I said, “I guess that covers all I need to know. Thanks a lot.”

I got up to go.

Josephine came over to stand close to me. “Donald,” she said, “what are you really after?”

“What do you mean?”

“Who’s interested enough to ask you to make a checkup on Melita?”

“It’s just a routine checkup,” I said.

“Who’s your client?”

“Heavens,” I said, “I don’t handle the business end of the office, my partner does that. I get out on the firing line and make the investigations.”

“You could be working for that Howard woman for all you know?”

“I could be, for all you know,” I told her.

She pouted and said, “You’re not being a bit nice, Donald.”

She moved even closer. “Donald, tell me,” she said.

“Tell you what?”

“Who your client is, and why this investigation?”

I said, “You’re trying to get me to betray my solemn obligations and you’re using sex in order to get me to do it.”

She looked me straight in the eyes. “I haven’t used it yet ,” she said.

I said, “You’re weakening my wall of resolution, woman.”

She put her hands on my shoulders, pushed her body close to mine. “Donald, tell me, is Melita going to get into any trouble?”

“Why should she get into any trouble if she hasn’t been doing anything wrong?” I asked.

“I just don’t trust that Howard woman. I have a feeling that there’s something going on in that hospital, that the Howard woman is mixed up in something pretty deep and she s trying to use Melita as a patsy.”

“Well,” I told her, “I’m making a fair investigation.”

“Donald, will you do one thing?”

“What?”

“Will you let me know what you find out when you finished?”

“Perhaps.”

“Donald, I mean it. I’d be... very grateful... very, very grateful, Donald.”

“I’ll see,” I promised, and with that, left the apartment.

Josephine stood in the door watching me down the corridor. When I was at the elevator she blew me a kiss, then stepped back into the apartment and gently closed the door.

I telephoned the office and got Elsie Brand.

“Elsie,” I said, “call Dolores Ferrol at the Butte Valley Guy Ranch and ask her if Melita Doon had a long-distance call which came in between now and the time you talk with Dolores on the telephone.

“You can catch her at two o’clock. It’ll be right after the lunch hour and just before the people go to siesta. She has a little free time then.

“Tell Dolores who you are, and tell her that you’re calling at my request, that I’ll be seeing her shortly, and tell her to keep the inquiry confidential.”

“Okay,” Elsie said. “Where are you going?”

“I’m headed for Tehachapi right now,” I told her. “I’ll be back sometime late this afternoon.”

I took my camera, some films, and drove up to Tehachapi.

It wasn’t too difficult to locate the scene of the accident. The police had winched the wrecked car up the hill, and since the tires had been burned off the car, the operation had left quite a furrow. Finding any clues to indicate what had originally happened wasn’t so easy. Tracks had been obliterated.

I followed the detour and picked the place where I thought Mrs. Chester’s car had been crowded off the road. There were tracks indicating that the car had gone end over end down the steep slope for about two hundred yards, then had come to a stop against a big rock. There were bits of broken glass around this rock and places where the paint had scraped off the car.

Studying the tracks, it became evident that someone had wanted the car a lot farther down the hill than it was and had apparently taken a jack and pushed the rear end of the car around so that it cleared the rock and started on down the hill again.

This time the car took a long, erratic journey.

The hill was a good forty-five-degree slope and it went down and down and down, until finally it hit a place where the bottom of the hill terminated in virtually a straight drop of fifty or sixty feet down into a sandy canyon.

Police had been all over the place and had evidently taken lots of pictures. There were burnt-out flashbulbs lying on the ground as well as cigarette stubs and all sorts of shoe tracks, both at the place where the car had crashed against the rock and then farther down the hill at the bottom of the canyon.

It took me five or ten minutes to find the tortuous path do the rocky wall so that I could get down to the place where car had finally come to rest.

Police apparently had winched the car right straight up the side of the rocky wall, letting the car scrape against the rocks, and then had hoisted it completely up the hill to the highway where they must have loaded it on a truck and taken it down to the county sea

Apparently there must have been evidence in the car that the police thought it would be wise to perpetuate.

Raising that car up must have taken a lot of cable, a lot power and been rather an expensive operation — the police really wanted that car, or what was left of it.

The place where the car had been crowded off the road was way up at the top of a high, steep mountain that was studded here and there with rocks but for the most part, covered with a smooth dried grass and stunted sagebrush which is so characteristic of certain hills in Southern California.

After that high place, the road wound on down the mountains at places winding way back from the canyon, then circling around ridge and coming back until, looking down the bottom of the sand wash, I could see where the road came to within a few yards of the termination of the canyon — a distance of perhaps a mile or so.

I studied the terrain carefully, then started walking down the sandy bottom toward the mouth of the wash.

The sides became less precipitous and after a while I ran out of tracks. Police hadn’t gone down the canyon this far.

There were still steep rocky sides, not quite so high, but covered here and there with sagebrush and it was difficult working my way along, but I stayed with it for a few hundred yards.

At length I came to a place where there were tracks still visible in the sand.

It had been some time since those tracks were made, but there they were.

They were a man’s tracks, a man who wore shoes but in that dry, coarse sand there wasn’t enough shape to them for me to find any marks of identification.

About half a mile down the sandy wash, I came to a place where someone had tossed away the stub of a half-smoked cigarette.

I picked it up with the point of my knife, put it in a little cardboard box I had brought along just in case, and was following the tracks on down the wash when a rock rolled down from above me.