A. Fair - Up for Grabs

I looked up.

Frank Sellers and another man were working their way down the steep slope.

“Hold it, Pint Size,” Sellers said.

I stopped.

The men came on down. The man with Sellers had a badge showing he was a Kern County deputy sheriff. He was fifty and heavy.

Sellers jerked his thumb, said, “This officer is Jim Dawson, a deputy of the Kern County Sheriff’s office. Now what the hell are you doing up here?”

“Looking over the scene of the crime,” I said.

“Why?”

”I’m checking.”

“Checking what?”

“Checking your conclusions.”

“I told you to keep the hell out of this,” Sellers said. “We don’t need any of your help.”

“I’m not so certain,” I told him.

“What do you mean by that crack?”

I said, “You notice these tracks going down the wash way below the place where the car was burned?”

“What about them?”

I said, “Somebody walked down along the side of the barranca until he reached a point where he felt sure no one would be looking for tracks, then he came on down the sandy wash here.”

“You’re nuts!” Sellers said. “Foley Chester pushed his wife off the road up there at the dirt detour. He left his car right up there within a hundred feet of where she went off the road, then he climbed back up, got in his car and drove away. We’ve got the deadwood on him. We’ve got the tracks and we’ve got photographs to prove it.”

“Then who is the man who walked down the barranca here?”

“I don’t know and I don’t care,” Sellers said. “All I know is that we’ve been setting traps all over, stakeouts waiting for Chester to come walking in and you keep going around springing those traps. We can’t afford to have you do it. We’re going to clip your wings. What’ve you got in that box?”

“A cigarette I picked up a hundred yards from here. It’s a half-smoked cigarette, and you can make a classification test on the saliva. There may even be a fingerprint or—”

Sellers grabbed the box, opened it, took a look at the cigarette stub, said, “Baloney! You and your damn theories!”

He threw the stub away.

I said, “You’ll wish you hadn’t done that, Sellers.”

The Kern County deputy wasn’t a bad egg. “Look here, Lam,” he said, “you’ve got an interest in this case. Now, why not put your cards on the table?”

“I’ll put them on the table,” I said. “Foley Chester had an automobile accident. It was his fault. The guy who was injured will hold up the insurance company for an exorbitant settlement once he gets the idea Chester is wanted for murder.

“If Chester killed his wife, that’s one thing. If he didn’t, it’s another, I want to find out which it is before I have to make a settlement.

“So far you’ve got circumstantial evidence. It points to Chester I want to find out if you’ve got all the evidence.

“The only way to evaluate circumstantial evidence is to be sure you have all the circumstantial evidence.”

The deputy was nodding his head.

Sellers said, “Oh, forget it, Jim. You listen to that guy talk and he’ll make you think there never was any corpse, never was any burnt car never was any scraped paint, never was any evidence.”

I said, “Foley Chester goes out on business trips. While he’s gone he leaves no forwarding address. There’s nothing to indicate this isn’t one of his regular business trips. You have some scraped paint on a car that he rented, and a chip from a headlight by way of evidence and that’s just about all.”

“Go on,” the deputy said. “If you have any theories we’d like to hear them.”

I said “All right, you folks went down there in the canyon to look at that burnt automobile.”

“Right.”

“But,” I said, “according to the tracks, you didn’t walk down this sandy wash.”

“Right again.”

“Therefore, you must have climbed back up to the highway.”

“Right the third time.”

“How long did it take you?”

Dawson grinned and ran his hand over his forehead. “I’m not as good at that stuff as I used to be,” he admitted. “I damned near passed out before we got there. I was huffing and puffing up that slope. It seemed like hours.”

“Did it take a half an hour?” I asked.

“It took all of that,” he admitted.

“All right,” I told him, “where that car went off the road it’s on a curve and the road is relatively narrow.”

“Sure,” the deputy said, “it had to be that kind of a place where he elected to push her off, because if there hadn’t been a curve and the road hadn’t been narrow, she could have dodged, put on her brakes, gone ahead or something and kept from getting pushed off right at that particular place where the car would go all the way on down.”

I said “Your theory is that the car was pushed off there. That it rolled down part way and came to a stop against a big boulder. That Chester stopped his car, went on down with a jack handle, clubbed his wife to death, took a jack, presumably out of his own car, jacked the rear end around so that it was clear of that rock It was resting against, then sent the car rolling down to the bottom of the canyon, a long, long, long ways down.”

“That’s right.”

“Then he climbed back to his car and went someplace waiting for it to get daylight. When it got daylight, he came back, parked his car climbed on down to the wreck, soaked rags with gasoline, left the cap off the gasoline tank and set fire to the wreckage.”

“Anything wrong with that?” the deputy asked.

“Then,” I said, “he must have climbed back up to his car.”

“That’s the way we figure it,” the deputy said.

Sellers spat on the ground.

“Then” I said “he must have left his car parked up there on that narrow curve in the detour for something like an hour and a half. You notice those signs that say, NO STOPPING. PARKING FOR EMERGENCY ONLY and all that. How long do you think you could leave a car parked up there on that curve without somebody reporting it to the traffic officers, or some traffic officer coming along and giving you a tag?”

Dawson said, “Say, you just may have something there.”

He turned to Sellers. “Let’s take a look at the traffic citations. There’s just a chance we’ve been overlooking a bet here.”

Sellers said wearily, “Don’t listen to him, just don’t listen to him. You see that road up there?” he asked the deputy.

“Sure,” the deputy said.

“All right, you listen to Lam and pretty quick you’ll be believing that it isn’t a road at all, that it’s just a piece of thread that got stuck to your eyeglass and you’re looking at it with your eyes out of focus and think it’s a road.”

He turned to me and said, “You always have lots of theories, Pint Size. Sometimes they’re okay but this is once we don’t need them. This time we’ve got the deadwood. We know what we’re doing. We’ve got all the evidence we need to convict. What we need now is the defendant. We’re more interested in an arrest than in a dissertation on circumstantial evidence.”

I said, “Circumstantial evidence is not so hot unless you have all the circumstances. The tracks leading down this sandy wash are part of the circumstances you haven’t had. That cigarette is part of the evidence you haven’t had. The murderer couldn’t afford to take a chance on leaving a car parked up at that dangerous section on the detour.”

“He could have gone on down the grade half a mile and left the car there,” Sellers pointed out.

“He could have,” I said, “or he could have had an accomplice who drove the car down the grade. Then all the murderer had to do was to walk down this sandy wash until he came to the place where the grade crosses the wash. It’s a matter of about a mile walk on fairly easy going as opposed to a half hour’s climb in the beating sunlight.”