Erle Gardner - The Case of the Drowsy Mosquito

Mason grinned. “Make up your mind, Pete.”

Sims heaved a long sigh. “Give me a cigarette.”

Mason gave him one, and Sims lighted it. All the resistance seemed to have oozed out of him. “All right,” he said. “I did it. That’s what happened.”

“Now tell us about the arsenic,” Mason said.

“It’s just like I told the sheriff. I got that for...”

“For what?” Mason asked as Sims hesitated.

“Just for experimenting.” Sims twisted his position in the chair.

“Perhaps you’d better get the sheriff after all, Della.”

Pete might not have heard. He went on as though he had never balked at the question in the first place. “This lost mines business could be quite a racket, Mr. Mason. I realized that when I saw the way Banning Clarke fell for that six-gun business. I’d been a fool — going around salting claims and juggling samples and all of that kind of business. All you’ve got to do is see that people know about some of these famous lost mines, and then leave just a little clue that will make ’em think they’ve got hold of a lost mine. You pretend that you don’t know a thing in the world about the significance of it or what it is. You get me?”

Mason nodded.

“Now on that Shooting Star claim,” Pete went on, “the time I sold it to Jim Bradisson I certainly went at it crude. I’ll tell you the truth. I was pretty well plastered at the time, and Jim kept shooting off his mouth about what a big mining executive he was — and he was so damned easy I just didn’t take any pains to cover my tracks.

“But when I realized I needed to fix it up so he wouldn’t yell he’d been stuck, I tumbled onto this idea of planting a six-shooter and letting Banning Clarke find it and tell Jim. I’d found this old six-shooter out in the desert quite a while back. I simply etched the name Goler on the handle and rubbed wet tea leaves over it until the printing looked good and old. Then I planted it down by a little spring that’s on the property, leaving just a few inches of the muzzle sticking up, the rest of it buried in the sand. I got Banning Clarke out there with me. That was before his heart got so bad he couldn’t travel at all, but it was bad enough so he had to keep quiet. I told him I wanted to do just a little prospecting around, and I knew he’d go over to the spring and sit down. I’d planted a whole bunch of nuggets in the spring right near the gun. Well, there was nothing to it. As soon as I came back, I saw the gun wasn’t there, and Clarke was so excited he could hardly talk. I pretended I didn’t notice nothing.

“I thought Clarke, being a stockholder in the company, would see that they didn’t make any squawk about the deal I’d handed them, but Clarke got so sold on the idea he’d uncovered the lost Goler Diggings that he actually wanted my wife to get the claims back. He thought she was entitled to them more than the corporation, I guess. Well, there I was, in a devil of a fix, Mr. Mason.

“Later on, I managed to see that Jim Bradisson got tipped off that Clarke had discovered the Lost Goler Diggings. Clarke hadn’t been out in the desert for six months before that time he’d been with me. I thought Bradisson would be smart enough to put two and two together and figure the mine must be located on the Shooting Star Group. But Jim wasn’t smart at all. He went ahead with the fraud action, and darned if Banning didn’t get you to fight the lawsuit. By that time, it was all mixed up. I didn’t know just what he was doing. I see it now. He was trying to have ‘Nell put up enough fight in the case so that Jim wouldn’t get suspicious and decide to hang onto that property. — Now, that’s the absolute truth.”

“And this arsenic?” Mason asked.

“Well, if you want to know the real low-down, Mr. Mason, I decided to go into this lost mines as a racket. I guess I’m just a miserable, no-good skunk. But don’t get me wrong. I ain’t reformin’ none. I’m scared stiff now, but I know myself well enough to know I’ll keep right on being a claim-salter.

“If you was someone else I’d pull an act about being sorry, and make such a swell job of it I’d even convince myself... I used to be a damn good liar, Mr. Mason. That was before I met Hayward Small and he tried to hypnotize me, and told me a lot about these here secondary personalities. I pretended he’d hypnotized me. I don’t know but what maybe he did, at that. And then I rung in this secondary personality.

“Well, it just ruined me as a liar, Mr. Mason. It was so easy blaming things on Bob, I got all out of practice on real good lying. It came to me with a shock when that lawyer tied me all up in knots the way he did.

“Believe you me, I ain’t going to let anybody do my lying for me from now on. I’m getting rid of Bob, pronto! I’ve got to brush up. You understand?”

“I understand, Pete. But specifically, what did you intend to do with the arsenic?”

“Well, now, this Lost Peg-Leg Mine,” Sims said, “and a couple of other mines that have been lost out in the desert — the reason they get lost is because the gold is black. It’s covered on the outside with some sort of a deposit that turns it black. When you scratch down inside, it’s good yellow gold, but the nuggets look like little black rocks. I heard that it was some kind of arsenic compound, and I decided to get this arsenic and experiment with some gold and see if I could get that black coating on it. If I could, I thought I’d trim the next sucker by letting him think he’d discovered the Lost Peg-Leg Mine. That cattleman and his partner who think they’ve discovered the Lost Goler Mine — that cattleman’s all swelled up with the idea he can go out and locate lost mines by scientific methods. Well, I was going to let him get the Lost Peg-Leg.”

“Did you use this arsenic?” Mason asked.

“No, Mr. Mason, I didn’t have to. To tell you the truth, I’d forgotten all about that arsenic. Shortly after I got it I found where there was some of this black gold — not much of it, but enough so I could salt a claim.”

Mason said, “You’ve had some arrangement with Hayward Small.”

Sims shifted his position. “Now, Mr. Mason, you’re all wet on that. That’s one thing you shouldn’t say. Hayward Small is just as square a shooter as there is in the world. My wife don’t like him because he’s kind of shining up to Dorina, but Dorina’s got to get married some day and she’ll go a long, long ways before she gets a better boy than Hayward Small.”

Mason smiled and shook his head. “Remember the sheriff, Pete.”

Sims sighed wearily. “Oh, all right. What’s the use? Sure, I stood in with Hayward Small, and Small’s got some kind of a club he’s holding over Jim Bradisson.”

“What?”

“I don’t know, but I know it’s a club. I’ve been salting claims for Small, and Small’s been selling them to the corporation.”

“And he was in on this Shooting Star deal?”

“Nope. That was on my own. Understand, I ain’t been partners with Small. He’s just been paying me so much a job to salt mines for him. He’s fooled on that Goler mine, himself.”

“Hayward Small knew that you had this arsenic?” Mason asked.

“He knew about it, yes. He was the one who told me not to use it. He said he knew where we could get some of this black gold.”

“And did you poison Banning Clarke?” Mason asked.

“Who, me!”

Mason nodded.

“Gosh, no. Get that idea out of your head.”

“Or shoot him?”

“Listen, Mr. Mason, Banning Clarke was a square guy. I wouldn’t have touched a hair of his head.”

“And you haven’t any idea who put the poison in that sugar bowl?”

“No, sir, I haven’t.”