A. Fair - Gold Comes in Bricks

“We don’t have to take him to no magistrate,” the man said.

“Where are you going to take him?”

“To jail.”

“I wouldn’t advise you to go anywhere without stopping to see the nearest and most accessible magistrate,” the lawyer said.

Bertha Cool said, “Now listen, you, this man’s working for me. I’m running a respectable detective agency. He was working. You yanked him off the job and chased him down here. Don’t think for a minute you’re going to pull this stuff and get away with it.”

The man from the district attorney’s office said, “Just a minute, boys. Stick around.” He said to the lawyer Bertha Cool had, “Let’s talk things over a minute.”

Bertha Cool horned in on the conference. Her diamonds caught the rays from the spotlight, and made blood-red scintillations as she moved her hands. “I’m in on this, too,” she said.

“Now listen,” the D.A.’s man said, obviously worried and pretty much on the defensive, “we don’t want to put any charges against this boy. For all we know, he’s just a nice kid that hasn’t done a thing in the world, but we’re trying to find out whether he’s the man who went into Jed Ringold’s room the night he was murdered. If he isn’t, that’s all there is to it. If he is, we’re going to charge him with murder.”

“So what?” Bertha Cool asked truculently.

The D.A. man looked at her and tried to outstare her. Bertha Cool pushed her face toward him, and, with her eyes glittering belligerently, demanded again and in a louder voice, “So what? You heard me, you worm. Go ahead and answer.”

The D.A.’s officer turned to the lawyer. “There isn’t any need for a habeas corpus , and there isn’t any need to take him before a magistrate because we don’t want to charge him.”

“How did you get him down here if he wasn’t arrested?” Bertha asked.

He tried ignoring her question, and said to the lawyer, “Now the clerk at the hotel takes a look at this guy’s picture and says he thinks this is the bird. All we want to do is to take him into the hotel. The clerk takes a look at him. Now that’s reasonable enough, ain’t it?”

For a fraction of a second the lawyer hesitated. Bertha Cool reached out with an arm and shoved him to one side as easily as though he’d been just an empty bag of clothes. She pushed her face up in front of the deputy from the D.A.’s office and said, “Well, it isn’t all right, not by a damn sight.”

A little group had gathered. Passengers from one of the airliners that had come in, a few of the ground crew, and a couple of aviators. The red spotlight was out of my eyes now, and I could look around and see their faces grinning. They were getting a great kick out of Bertha Cool.

Bertha said, “We know our rights. You can’t identify a man that way. If you’re going to charge him with murder, you lock him up. You put him in a line-up, and you be goddam certain there are two or three other men in that line-up who have the same build and physical characteristics as the man you’re looking for. Then you bring the clerk in and let him look at the line-up. If he picks Donald, that’s an identification. If he picks somebody else, that’s different.”

The D.A.’s man was bothered.

The lawyer said, “As a matter of law, officer, you know that’s absolutely correct.”

“But we don’t want to cause this bird a lot of trouble. It may be just a flash in the pan. If he isn’t guilty, what’s he making such a squawk for?”

I said, “Because I don’t like the way you did this. I told you I’d come down with you voluntarily tomorrow morning, go into the hotel, and talk with anyone you wanted; that I couldn’t leave tonight, that if you brought me down in that plane tonight, you’d have to put me under arrest.”

“Aw, nuts,” one of the officers said.

“What did you do?” I demanded, raising my voice. “You and two highway police grabbed me and gave me the bum’s rush out to the car. You threw me in and dragged me down here without any charge being made against me. That’s kidnapping. I’ll have the federal men on your neck. I’m not going to be pushed around, that’s all. Wait until tomorrow morning, and I’ll go to your damned hotel.”

There was a moment of silence.

I turned to Bertha and said, “You know where this plane came from, and you know a lawyer up there who has pull with the sheriff. Get him on the phone, have him get the sheriff out of bed, and get a warrant for kidnapping issued against this officer.”

“Listen, punk,” one of the officers said, “it isn’t kidnapping when you arrest a man for murder.”

“What do you do with him when you arrest him for murder?”

“We take him down to jail and throw the book at him, and if he acts rusty, we throw something else at him.”

“Swell,” I said. “Take me to a magistrate, and if he says so, you take me to jail, but don’t detour me to any hotels. The minute you do that, that’s kidnapping. Get the point, Bertha?”

The lawyer grabbed at it. “That’s right,” he said. “The minute they try taking you any place except in accordance with the statutes in such cases made and provided, it’s kidnapping.”

Bertha whirled to face the officers. “All right, you,” she said. “You’ve heard what the lawyer says.”

“Aw, dry up,” one of the officers said. I could see the district attorney’s investigator was getting little beads of perspiration on his forehead.

Bertha said, “And don’t think you’re going to strong-arm your way out of it simply because you’re in your own county. The kidnapping took place in another county, and if you knew how some of these other counties hate the guts of you men from this part of the state, you’d know what’s going to happen.”

That was the bombshell that did the work. I could see the D.A.’s man cave just as though his knees had buckled. He said, “Now, listen, there’s no use losing our tempers and yelling at each other. Let’s be reasonable. If this man’s innocent, he should be as anxious to prove it as anyone.”

I said, “That’s better. What do you want?”

“We want to find out whether you were the man who had the adjoining room in that hotel on the night of the murder.”

“All right, let’s find out.”

“Cripes, brother, that’s all we were trying to do.”

I said, “Let’s find out in a fair way.”

“What do you think’s a fair way?” one of the officers asked.

I said, “I’ll go down to the jail. You get five or six other people that are generally of my build and complexion, and have them dressed just about the same. While we’re doing it, let’s do it right. How many people saw this man who went to the hotel?”

“Three.”

“Who were they?”

“The night clerk, a girl who runs a cigar counter, and some woman who saw him standing in the door.”

“All right, get those people, put them side by side in three chairs, and tell them not to make any comments until after the whole line-up has filed past. Then ask them separately if anybody in the line-up was the man they saw there the night of the murder.”

The D.A.’s man lowered his voice. “Now, listen,” he said, “you sound like a good egg. Let me give you the low-down. The old girl that was in the upper corridor saw this man standing in the doorway. She had her glasses off. She could see him all right, but — well, you know how it is, brother. She wears glasses during the daytime, and she didn’t have them on. A slick lawyer could catch her on that. The minute we run you into the hoosegow, the newspaper men are going to be on the job. They’ll take flashlight photographs of you, and there’ll be big headlines. ‘POLICE ARREST PRIVATE DETECTIVE ON SUSPICION OF MURDER.’ Then in case the identification falls down, we’re sunk. Now, if you are guilty, go ahead and rely on all your constitutional rights. More power to you. We’ll send you to the gas chamber just as sure as hell. If you aren’t guilty, for God’s sake, have a heart and co-operate.”