As we walked slowly along the streets, I tried to make the most of the time — tried to probe a little into the mind of the man accused of murder. As a mystery author, who had been brought for the first time into contact with the real thing, I thought that innocent or guilty, Curley Guy’s reactions would be story material. But he had little to say. He disposed of Wanderwell in a few well-chosen if unprintable phrases. The man had been only a twenty-one-carat phony, who had made his living out of taking bows for adventures he had never had — and of taking money from little people who were seduced by his talk. The bullet through the back of his neck had been too good for him, but Curley laughed at the suggestion that he himself had put it there.
My impression of Guy at the time was that he was a right little, tight little Welshman, who knew planes and the navigation of ships, who would — for all his slight stature and boyish profile — have been a bad man to push around. But I also felt that he would, under any pressure, be the sort of person who would only hit above the belt. I realized that he despised Captain Walter Wanderwell — but I could not believe that he would have shot Wanderwell or anyone else in the back, under any circumstances whatever.
I tried to turn the conversation toward the topic of the lovely lost Vera, the wife from whom he had separated in the Canal Zone some months ago, and whose loss was supposed — according to the findings of the grand jury, the Times, and the prosecution — to have inspired his murder of Wanderwell. Guy shrugged that off. They were stranded in the Canal Zone. Vera had a chance to become an entertainer in a cafe, a B-girl, maybe worse. So, she chose to remain there and eat regularly, while he worked his way north.
“Water over the bridge — or do Americans say ‘dam’?” queried Guy. More important to him at the moment was the question of whether or not, after the trial was over, he would be deported. He was determined to secure American citizenship, somehow or other.
I tried to explain to him that his situation was precarious, since he had been born in Wales and later had become a citizen of Australia. The only way he could legally enter the U.S.A. was on a quota, and this particular police record certainly would not help him with any of the immigration authorities.
About the trial and the Wanderwell murder itself, he would say very little. But I did discover the fact — which no detective had yet bothered to elicit — that Guy did not know that on the day of the murder the yacht Carma had been moved to new moorings at the P. and O. docks.
Which response could, of course, have been faked. Perhaps, as the prosecution argued on the first day of that memorable trial, Curley Guy had hated Captain Wanderwell so violently as a result of the failure of the South American expedition and the ensuing humiliation of himself and his wife, that he had first tried to get his money back and then had resorted to murder.
It made sense on paper, it made sense to the grand jury, and it sounded very likely as presented to the jury by Mr. Brayton and Mr. Hunt. Things looked not too good for Curley Guy during the first days of the trial, but he remained confident and unruffled.
Prominent in the courtroom during the trial was Aloha Wanderwell — and her sister, Margaret B. Hall — each done up in picturesque uniforms consisting of open silk shirts with loose Russian sleeves, dark, tight vests, breeches and shiny boots. The sister had never been on any of the expeditions, but she certainly went along with a gag. They were a striking couple. Aloha had her fair hair done up in tight ringlets under a tam-o-shanter cap and added considerably to the tone of the affair. Her innocent, little-girlish face, topping an Amazonic six-foot form, made a policeman next to me whisper that she looked like a .22 on a .45 frame. Everyone waited hopefully for the day when she would be called to testify, but the trial dragged on and on with interminable medical evidence that “proved” that Wanderwell had been shot at close range — that he had been shot from a distance outside the porthole — that the bullet had ranged here, there and everywhere...!
The course of the trial was then brightened by the announcement of Curley Guy to a lady reporter from still another Los Angeles newspaper that if freed he would gladly volunteer for a trip into the stratosphere with the famous Professor Auguste Picard, who was then out in Hollywood raising money for another of his balloon ascensions. There was no immediate comment from the Professor. It was the only statement Guy had to make to the press after my interview with him en route from the jail.
Still the trial dragged on, with days spent on the testimony of Guy’s friend Eddie DeLarm (owner of a plane which had been making mysterious trips to Mexico), of Eddie’s wife and of his two teen-age daughters — all of whom swore that Guy was in his room in their Glendale house at the time of the crime. Considerable time was spent on the boy-friends of the cute little DeLarm girls, who had or had not been sitting around in the living room playing jazz records on the fatal evening, and had or hadn’t seen Guy about the house. The jury had a field day, making trips to look at the schooner Carma (where one juror shocked the court and panicked the newspapermen by making Rabelaisian suggestions concerning the way in which fifteen crew members and four Wanderwells must have utilized the limited sleeping arrangements of the ship) and to the original slip where the Carma had been tied, and even to the shack where Curley Guy had gone into hiding the morning after the murder.
DeLarm, not the most co-operative of witnesses, testified that most of his original statements to the police had been obtained under duress. He cited a night when he and his wife had had their home invaded by Lieutenant Filkas and reporter Williams — without warrant — during which time they had taken it for granted that Williams was an officer and not just a Times reporter on a field day. The DeLarms had been bounced around a bit and felt reasonably annoyed. Some of the witnesses who had testified to seeing Curley Guy’s face in the porthole just before the murder — after having been prompted by glimpses of his photograph or looks at his raincoat — hedged on their testimony. It was also brought out that DeLarm’s car, the only vehicle to which Guy had ready access, had stood in DeLarm’s driveway all the time during the evening of the murder.
Although the case for the prosecution began to go all to pieces, it had a momentary life when a trimotored plane registered in the name of DeLarm was nabbed at Corona Airport, near San Diego, and found to hold 500 gallons of alcohol illegally imported from below the border. DeLarm insisted that he had sold the plane to somebody else a few days ago, but he was undoubtedly making a living running a shoe-string air transport and Curley Guy — a pilot and navigator — worked for him and lived with him. Perhaps we here have an indication of the one basic secret which Guy was really anxious to hide. The serious student of the case could certainly keep that fact in mind. All this happened in the days of prohibition, when an enterprising man with an airplane could make $4,- or $5,000 by importing a load of schnapps from south of the border. There were also numerous Chinese who waited in Mexican cities, ready to pay almost anything for an entree into the U.S.A. All this is not to speak of the traffic in drugs which went on and still goes on between Tijuana and points north. At any rate, DeLarm and his friend and associate, Curley Guy, had been making twice-weekly flights across the border for some months. The record does not show that they delivered any cargoes of Mexican serapes or huarachos.