A. Fair - The Bigger They Come

‘Sure.’

‘I don’t want to go across that strip of desert while it’s hot.’

‘I don’t blame you. They’ll probably make it at night.’

‘How about getting a lawyer?’ I asked.

‘What good would a lawyer do you?’

‘I don’t know. I’d like to talk with one.’

The sheriff said, ‘I tell you what, Donald. I think you’d better sign a waiver of extradition and go back to California and face the music. It will look better that way.’

I shook my head. ‘I sign nothing,’ I said.

‘All right, Donald. It’s your funeral. I’ll have to lock you up. This is a big thing, you know.’

The bed in the jail was hard. The mattress was thin. The night had turned bitterly cold, as so frequently happens in the desert during the early spring. I lay shivering and waiting.

Somewhere a drunk was talking to himself, a thick-tongued soliloquy which ran on and on and on aimlessly, monotonously, and unintelligibly. An automobile thief in the next cell was snoring peacefully. I figured it must be midnight. I tried to think of how hot it had been coming across the desert. My thoughts couldn’t keep me warm. I thought of Alma.

I heard bolts in the jail door slide back, then I heard the sound of low voices and shuffling feet. Down in the office room, there was the scraping of chair legs along the cement floor. I could hear the scratching of matches and the hum of low-voiced conversation. A door closed and shut out all the noise.

Four or five minutes later, I heard steps coming down the long corridor. The jailer said, ‘Wake up, Lam. They want you downstairs.’

‘I want to sleep.’

‘Well, come on downstairs just the same.’

I got up out of bed. It had been too cold to take my clothes off. The jailer said, ‘Come on. Don’t keep them waiting. Shake a leg.’

I followed him down to the office. The district attorney, the sheriff, the deputy district attorney, a shorthand reporter, and two Los Angeles policemen were waiting in the room. A chair had been reserved for me facing a bright light. The sheriff said, ‘Sit down over in that chair, Donald.’

‘The light hurts my eyes.’

‘You’ll get accustomed to it after a minute. We want to be where we can see you.’

‘Well, you don’t need to put my eyes out looking at me.’

The sheriff said, ‘If you tell the truth, Donald, we won’t have to study your facial expressions to find out when you’re lying. If you keep on lying, we’re going to have to watch you more closely.’

‘What makes you think I haven’t told the truth?’

He laughed and said, ‘You’ve told just enough of the truth, Donald, to convince us that you know what we want to know; but you’ve stopped a long ways short of telling the truth.’

He moved the light a little so that the glare wasn’t directly in my eyes.

‘Now, Donald,’ the sheriff said. ‘These gentlemen are from Los Angeles. They’ve come all the way across the desert to hear your story. They know enough to know that you’ve been lying, but some of what you said is true. Now we want the rest of it.’

He talked with the fatherly tone one uses in dealing with a half idiot. Cops usually use that approach in talking with crooks — and the crooks usually fall for it.

I pretended to fall for it, too.

‘That’s all I know,’ I said sullenly. ‘What I told you today.’

The light switched up so that the glare struck me full in my aching eyes. The sheriff said, ‘I’m afraid, Donald, I’m going to have to go over this with you bit by bit, and watch your facial expressions.’

‘To hell with that stuff!’ I said. ‘That’s the old hooey. You’re giving me the third degree.’

‘No, we’re not giving you any third degree, Donald — that is, I’m not. But this is a serious matter, and we want to get the truth.’

‘What’s wrong with my story?’ I asked.

‘Everything,’ he said. ‘In the first place, you weren’t there in that room, Donald. Some of the things you said about Cunweather are true but not all of them. You didn’t shoot Morgan. The girl shot Morgan. You gave her the gun. She dropped the gun and ran out. She called you from the telephone booth downstairs. A tenant in the building gave her a dime with which to put through the call. Your landlady had to get you up out of bed― Now then, Donald, we want the truth.’

I said, ‘Oh, all right. Turn that damn light out of my eyes and I’ll tell you everything.’

The district attorney cleared his throat. ‘Take this,’ he said to the shorthand reporter. ‘Now, Donald, as I understand it, you’re going to make a voluntary statement or confession. This is the result of pour own volition. No promises or inducements have been made to you; nor have any threats been made. You’re going to make a statement simply because you want to tell the truth and make a clean breast of the entire situation. Is that right?’

‘Have it your own way,’ I said.

‘That doesn’t answer my question, Donald.’

‘Oh, hell,’ I said, ‘you’ve got me. What’s the use?’

He turned to the shorthand reporter. ‘The answer is yes,’ he said. ‘Take it down. That’s right, isn’t it, Donald?’

‘Yes.’

‘Go ahead,’ the sheriff said. ‘Let’s hear the truth, Donald. But remember, we don’t want any more lying.’

He deflected the light so that my tortured eyeballs had a rest. ‘Go ahead, Donald.’

‘I killed him,’ I said, ‘but Alma Hunter doesn’t know it. And I didn’t do it because I was guarding Alma Hunter. I did it because I was told to.’

‘Who told you to?’

‘Bill Cunweather.’

The sheriff said, ‘Now, Donald, we don’t want any more’ lies.’

‘You’re getting the real low-down now.’

‘All right. Go ahead.’

‘Do you want it from the beginning?’ I asked.

‘Yes, from the beginning.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘I used to know the Cunweather outfit in Kansas City. I’m not going to tell you a thing about who I really am because my father and mother are living, and I’m not going to break their hearts. But you can take it from me that I’ve batted around. But I didn’t have nothing to do with that Kansas City job. I was in California when that job was pulled, and I can prove it.

‘Well, here’s the low-down. Cunweather was the head of the slot-machine racket. Naturally, there was a pay-off. I don’t know all the dope on that, but it ran into quite a wad of dough. Morgan Birks was the pay-off man.

‘Well, things ran along pretty smooth until the grand jury started investigating. A citizens’ vice committee had some undercover men out and they uncovered the whole racket. They knew the names of some of the guys who were getting the dough. They didn’t know the higher-ups, but they knew some of the contact men and they knew how much those men were getting.

‘Well, that was where things began to get interesting, because there was a leak from the grand jury; and we found that the undercover men for the citizens’ committee reported that the pay-off was just about half of what Cunweather thought it was. In other words, every time Morgan Birks would collect ten thousand dollars to pay off to the big shots, he’d salt five grand and pass on only half of what he’d collected as the real pay-off.

‘Los Angeles is a tough city to do business in, and Morgan Birks had specified that if anything was going to be done, he had to have the exclusive handling of the whole business. Morgan Birks had been with Cunweather for some time, and the chief — that’s figured he was absolutely on the up-and-up.

‘Well, when this blow-off came, Morgan Birks took it on the lam, the idea being that he was hiding out from the grand jury. He wasn’t. He was hiding out from the chief because he was afraid the chief was going to rub him out.