They couldn’t stop him. Hale was long gone.
I looked at the judge and said, “He recovered from all that stiffness and soreness pretty fast, didn’t he, Your Honor?”
Judge Polk looked down at me, started to rebuke me, then suddenly smiled and said, “He did for a fact.
“I would suggest that the Sheriff’s Office put out an all-points bulletin for this man. His black eye should make it very easy to pick him up.”
“But this Donald Lam doesn’t have any right to ask questions in this case,” Roberts objected.
Polk smiled at him and said, “Quite right, Mr. Roberts, but this Court does have the right to ask questions and this Court intends to ask some very searching questions.”
The officers caught Hale at the courthouse door and returned him to court.
Judge Polk said, “Young man, you are on the witness stand. Now, you get right back there in that witness chair and you listen to me.
“It appears that you may have committed a crime. The Court warns you that you don’t have to make any statement whatever. If you feel it may incriminate you, you don’t have to talk. Or, if you just want to keep quiet, you have that privilege. You are entitled to have an attorney represent you at all stages of the proceeding and if you don’t have money enough to get an attorney, the Court will appoint one. But you aren’t going to get up off that witness stand and run out of the courtroom the way you did a moment ago.
“Now then, do you care to answer questions?”
Hale shifted his position and said nothing.
“Do you want an attorney to advise you? The Court is going to call a doctor to examine you.”
Hale said, “I may as well come clean. I haven’t got any way out, and, after all, I acted in self-defense. If I keep on being as foolish as I have been, I’ll wind up facing a murder rap.”
“You can either talk or not talk, just as you want,” Judge Polk said, “but you’re going to be examined.”
Hale started talking, the words just pouring out of his mouth. He said, “I knew that dope shipment was coming across the border. I knew that they intended to make a rendezvous with the driver of a scout car at the Carlo Café at seven o’clock. I told my girl friend that I would meet her there at seven o’clock.
“It started to rain. The shipment was delayed. I followed it across the border. There were two men in a car. One of the men picked up the scout car and went ahead. The pickup with the houseboat trailer parked the side of the road.
“I had the story I wanted. It was one whale of a story, but I didn’t have it all. I wanted to see where they placed this houseboat. I sensed the scout car had found a road block or something that caused a delay.
“I stayed where I could keep the houseboat under surveillance. It was a rainy night. I waited and waited. The driver of the pickup had gone back into the house-boat. I had an idea he’d gone to sleep.
“I was overly confident. I was a plain fool. I couldn’t, resist trying to get one detail I hadn’t been able to get and that was the license number of the pickup. Because of the houseboat that number was hard to see. I felt man who was driving the pickup had gone to sleep in houseboat. I sneaked up, hoping I could get the number I wanted — and I walked right into a trap. This man had spotted me and he suddenly opened the door, held a on me and ordered me to get into the houseboat.
“I knew it was either him or me. He wasn’t sure what I was doing there. I could tell from the way he acted he didn’t think I was an officer. He wanted to know what I wanted and what I was doing snooping around. Well, he got just a little careless. I suddenly jerked out my gun and said, ‘Stick ’em up.’ I was nervous. I waited maybe a tenth of a second to see what he was going do. I waited too long. He fired. If the officers will look in that houseboat, they’ll find a bullet hole somewhere near the front of the boat.
“I fired at about the same time he did. He missed. I didn’t.
“I got in a panic. I took his gun, put it in my pocket and threw it away a couple of hours later. I took the Calhoun gun and ran down toward the place where I had parked my car and then threw the gun across the ditch as far as I could throw it.
“Then instead of going to the police the way I should have done I drove down across the border and tried to think of some way out of the mess. I stayed in the car all night. Finally, when one of the stores opened up, I bought some fishline and tied myself up at a place where I felt certain I’d be discovered. If I went too long without being discovered I could untie myself, but I felt certain I could get away with my story.
“I hit myself a good punch in the eye, bloodied my nose, and I made up that story about having been beaten up and kicked. It hadn’t occurred to me that people would be looking for black-and-blue marks on my body.”
“Donald Lam kept trying to get me in the swimming pool at the hotel, and that was when I realized how vulnerable I was. My story wouldn’t stand up if— Well, I don’t want to get blamed for murder. I acted in self-defense.”
Judge Polk looked down at Sergeant Sellers. “Did the officers” he asked, “make a careful examination of the front of that houseboat to see if there was a bullet hole in the boat?”
“There was no hole in the boat, Your Honor,” Sellers said, “but there was a sofa pillow on the davenport that had a very small hole in it. We didn’t take the pillow to pieces to see if there was ‘a bullet on the inside of it.”
“You’d better do that,” Judge Polk said, and then added gratuitously, “It seems to me that the police work in this case had been slightly below par.
“The sheriff will take this man into custody. The case against Milton Carling Calhoun is dismissed.
“Court’s adjourned.”
Judge Polk left the bench and there was pandemonium in the courtroom. A couple of newspaper reporters jammed in the door as they ran simultaneously for nearest telephone.
I looked over at Calhoun and said, “Congratulations!”
The guy grabbed me in an embrace. I was afraid might try to kiss me.
It took us nearly half an hour to get past the newspaper reporters and out to my car. I managed to Calhoun to say “No comment” often enough to make newspapermen give up, but the television men kept hounding us with portable cameras.
Finally we got free.
I gave Calhoun a road map. “What’s this?” asked.
“A map of the road to El Golfo.”
“What’s at El Golfo?”
“Nanncie Beaver,” I said.
“Why at El Golfo?”
“That’s so you can go down and get her without newspaper reporters tailing you — that is, if you’re smart. Then you can come into our office the first of next week and settle up.”
He looked at me with dawning comprehension, then gripped my hand, hard.
16
Bertha Cool was in rare form. She teetered back and forth in her squeaky swivel chair; her eyes were as hard as the diamonds on her hands.
“Now, you listen to me, Mr. Milton Carling Calhoun,” she said. “You’re supposed to be a big businessman. You’re supposed to know your way around.
“What the hell was the idea of coming in here and getting us to go on a wild-goose chase, looking for Colburn Hale when what you really wanted was to find his girlfriend?”
Calhoun squirmed uneasily.
“I had heard that private detective agencies sometimes blackmailed their clients,” he said. “So I tried to conceal my background. I simply couldn’t afford to have my name associated with that of Nanncie Beaver. If I had told you what I really wanted... Well, I would have left myself wide open.”
“So,” Bertha Cool said, “you led with your chin. And what makes me sore is that fact that you came in here trying to put us on the defensive, pretending that you didn’t know anything about the agency, pretending that Donald was too slight to do the work, and that I wasn’t any good because I was a woman.