All Grass Isn't Green

10

The road from Mexicali to San Felipe runs for some distance through a territory where there are occasional roadside restaurants selling ice-cold beer to the thirsty traveler together with a few of the more simple Mexican dishes.

There are some houses along this section of road before it crosses a barren stretch of desert to climb through a mountain pass. The Gulf of California is on the left, the barren desert on the right, and to the south the heat-twisted volcanic mountains where the hot desert winds have blown the sand high up on the rocky slopes.

I had settled for a long run and we had gone some distance in silence. Then Nanncie said to me, “I don’t want you to get me wrong. I don’t play my boyfriends against the other. I am gregarious. I’m fond of people. I’m a writer. I don’t want to give up my career so I can be a housewife and raise squalling babies. I’m not cut for that kind of work. I’m ambitious.”

“You’re living your own life,” I told her.

“And,” she went on, “I want you to know that I didn’t have anything to do with breaking up Milt’s home. He his wife had separated before I ever met him, and I never did furnish a shoulder for him to cry on about how she didn’t understand him or how cold she was... But I admit I gave him a taste of the sort of life he had never seen. A taste of bohemian life, a taste of associating with people who were living by making their minds work. A rather precarious living, I’ll admit. But that’s not because of any lack of talent on the part of the people who are doing the writing. It’s on account of edit policies.”

“What’s wrong with editorial policies?” I asked.

“Everything,” she said. “The good magazines have tendency to close the doors against free-lance writers. They have more and more adopted a policy of staff-written written contributions.

“And then the bigger magazines cater to the big name the people who are well established.”

“And how do you get to be well established in literary world?” I asked.

“By having your stuff published.”

“And how do you get your stuff published?”

She smiled and said, “By getting to be a big name. You can’t... Donald! Donald, there’s Cole’s car!”

“Where?”

“Over at that roadhouse restaurant parked right by open-air kitchen. See that fender?”

I swung my car off the road and we came to a stop a somewhat battered old-model car that was parked against the rail of an open-air dining room.

There was no one in this dining room, but I opened door which led to a rather cramped interior and suddenly Nanncie was flying past me with outstretched “Cole! Oh, Cole, oh my God, how glad I am to see you! Tell me, are you all right?”

The man who had been sitting at the table drinking beer got stiffly to his feet.

He and Nanncie embraced, completely oblivious me.

“I made it,” he told Nanncie, “but it was touch go.”

“Cole, you’ve got a black eye and there’s blood on your shirt!”

“And my ribs are sore and I’ve taken a beating,” he said.

She remembered me then. “Cole, I want you to meet Donald Lam. Donald, this is Colburn Hale.”

Hale backed away suspiciously, ignoring my outstretched hand. “Who’s Lam?” he asked.

“A detective,” she said. “A...”

Hale started to turn his back.

“A private detective,” she said. “A private detective who has been looking for you.”

Hale turned back. He regarded me with suspicious eyes, one of which was badly swollen and had turned purple, the eye being bloodshot underneath the discoloration.

“All right,” Hale said, “start talking.”

I said, “I know just about everything there is to know. When Nanncie told me that you were going to meet her at the Monte Carlo Café at seven o’clock last night and didn’t turn up and when I knew that the shipment of dope you had been tailing had crossed the border, I thought it might be a good idea for us to drive down the road toward San Felipe and see if we could find some trace of you.”

“Well, you waited long enough,” Hale complained.

“There were other matters claiming attention,” I told him. “Why don’t we go outside where we can talk? Bring your beer along and perhaps you can give me some information and perhaps I can give you some information.”

“Perhaps,” Hale said, but he picked up the bottle and glass of beer and carried them along with him.

He was a suspicious individual. He didn’t wear a hat and had a shock of wavy, dark hair. I estimated him at about a hundred and eighty pounds, about five foot eleven or so.

The guy had surely been in trouble. In addition to his black eye he had evidently had a bloody nose and some of the blood was still on his shirt.

He hadn’t shaved for a couple of days and his skin had that oily look which comes from extreme fatigue.

We sat down at a table in the outdoor dining room.” There was no one else ill the place. I ordered a couple of bottles of ice-cold beer.

“You seem to have had a beating.” I told Hale.

He said, ruefully, “I thought I was smart, but I was dealing with people who were smarter than I was.”

“Who gave you the beating?”

“Puggy.”

“Who’s Puggy?”

“Hell, I don’t know his last name. All they called him was Puggy.”

“And how did Puggy happen to meet you?”

“I was following a dope shipment.”

“We know an about that,” I said.

“No, you don’t,” he said. “Nanncie may have told you, what she knows, but she doesn’t know all the details. The—”

“She does now,” I said. “The little houseboat on pontoons that makes regular trips up and down from San Felipe on a trailer drawn by a Ford pickup. The pontoons are made with a removable cap on the rear, so cunningly fitted that it looks like a welded job. But the cap slides off and the interior of the pontoon is filled with dried marijuana.”

“And how do you know all this?” Hale asked.

“The authorities know it now,” I said.

“The hell they do! Then my story has gone out the window.”

“Perhaps not,” I said. “There are other angles which may make your story newsworthy, provided it’s drama enough.”

“Well, it’s dramatic enough,” he said.

“What happened?”

He said, “Nanncie got, wind of what was happening. She tipped me off to the dope smuggling and the people who were doing it, but I needed to have some firsthand information. I couldn’t do it all on hearsay. I had to know just how the stuff came across.

“Anyhow, I got pretty much of the first part of the story together and was typing’ it like mad when Nanncie got in touch with me late at night and told me we had to run for cover fast.”

“Why?”

“The beauty operator who had told her had let the cat out of the bag and Nanncie was in danger, and if she was in danger, I would be, too. They had followed me when I was tailing them.”

“So what did you do?”

“I didn’t want to have a bunch of dope runners on my trail. These men are desperate. I decided to move and not leave any back trail. I also decided to bust that gang of dope runners and not disclose my identity until after they had been captured and were serving a term in prison.

“So I packed up everything in my apartment. I got a friend of mine to help me and we moved out, stored my stuff, and I drove to Mexicali where I knew that these dope runners made their rendezvous.”

“Go on,” I said.

“I knew who was doing the dope running and I knew they were smuggling it in at Calexico, but I didn’t know all of the details and I wanted to get a story based on firsthand observation.

“Anyhow, I picked up this dope runner, a man they called Eddie. If he’s got another name I don’t know what it is. He was driving a Ford pickup. I thought at first the stuff came up in that pickup, but I followed him down to San Felipe and saw that he hitched onto a houseboat that was mounted on a trailer, a small houseboat on pontoons.

“I knew that the shipment was due to cross the border at seven o’clock last night. I knew that much because I heard Eddie talking about the second car that was to pick him up at Calexico.”

“The second car?” I asked.

“The second car,” he said, “equipped with Citizen’s Band radio. That’s the way they work. After the stuff gets across the border at Calexico, they send a scout car on ahead. The scout car is absolutely clean. Anybody could search it all day and couldn’t find even a cigarette stub that had any pot in it.

“That car goes on ahead, quite a ways ahead. If there’s a roadblock of any kind, or if the border patrol has a station where they watch the road, this scout car sends a message back to the car with the dope by Citizen’s Band radio. So they the dope car turns off or may turn clean around and go back.

“You understand, Lam, I’m telling you this in confidence. I want the exclusive story rights to it. You also understand that we’re dealing with something big here. This isn’t any little two-bit dope-smuggling outfit that brings in a few pounds at a time. This is big stuff. They’re dealing with many thousands of dollars.”

“Go ahead,” I told him.

“Well,” Hale said, “I knew that the scout car with the Citizen’s Band radio was to be waiting just north of the border so that it could pick up the dope car, but I didn’t know it was being followed by a muscle car that was to come along behind. I suppose I should have. I guess I was dumb.”

“What happened?”

“I started trailing that Ford pickup with the houseboat on the trailer from San Felipe. I didn’t have any trouble until we got almost up here, then suddenly the muscle car closed in on me.”

“What happened?”

“Some fellow wanted to know who I was following the hell I thought I was. He was abusive and the first thing I knew he’d slugged me.”

“What did you do?”

“I slugged him back, and that was the mistake of my life. This guy was evidently an ex-pugilist. I think that’s where he got the name of Puggy. The driver of the car called him Puggy, anyway.”

“And what did they do?”

“I took a shellacking,” Hale said, “and then I had a gun and I made up my mind. I wasn’t going to take any more. I jumped back and pulled the gun, and that’s where I made my second mistake, I found myself looking down the barrel of a sawed-off shotgun that the driver of the pickup had produced out of nowhere.”

“So what?”

“So,” Hale said, “they took my gun away from me. They put me back in my own car which Puggy proceeded to drive. They went down a side road which they knew and they tied me up good and tight, stuck a gag in my face, and warned me that the next time I wouldn’t get off with just a beating. In fact, the driver of the car wanted to kill me, but Puggy said the Mexican drug ring didn’t like murders and they wouldn’t commit one unless they had to.”

“Go on,” I said.

“I stayed trussed up in that confounded car all night,” Hale said. “Then this morning about eight o’clock a fellow driving along the side road from some ranch saw the car parked there, stopped to look it over, and found me, bound and gagged in the rear of the car. By that time my circulation had stopped. I was a stiff as a poker and so sore from the beating I’d taken I could hardly move.”

“Keep talking,” I said.

“Well, he was shocked, of course, but he untied the ropes and...”

“Untied them?”

“That’s right.”

“Go ahead.”

“He untied the ropes and took the gag out of m mouth, put me in his car, took me to a ranch house, he and his wife gave me hot coffee, then some kind of Mexican dish of chile and meat, some tortillas, and native kind of white cheese and some sort of fish.

“They were awfully nice people.”

“How far from here?” I asked.

“Oh, ten, fifteen miles, something like that. I don’t know exactly. Right down where a side road turns off and goes around the head of the Gulf.”

“Can you find the place again?”

“I guess I could, yes.”

“You’d better find it,” I said.

“Why? And who the hell are you to be quizzing me like this?”

“I’m doing it,” I told him, “because you’re going to have to collect all the evidence you can get.”

“Why?”

“Puggy took your gun away from you?”

“Yes.”

“And where did you get that gun?”

He hesitated and looked at Nanncie.

Nanncie nodded her head. He said, “Nanncie gave it to me.”

“Where did Nanncie get it?” I said.

He shook his head. “She didn’t tell me. She said she had it for her protection and she thought I needed it more than she did.”

I said, “For your information, Eddie, whose last name was Sutton, accompanied by another man who was probably Puggy, crossed the border with the load of marijuana about ten o’clock last night. It had started to rain and they were two hours late — and I guess the fact that Puggy had to take care of you threw then off schedule bit.

“Anyway, Sutton pulled off to the side of the road wait for the scout car to go ahead and report a clear road. He and Puggy evidently got in some kind of an argument over the division of the profits or perhaps over the fact that they hadn’t killed you to silence you and—”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” Hale said. “I’ll bet they sent a car back to finish the job.”

“What makes you think so?”

“After I’d been lying in that car what seemed like ages another car came down the road and seemed to be looking for something. It came down the road and went back: two or three times.”

“You were close to the road?”

“I was close enough to the road so I could be seen by daylight, but a man coming down on a dark night, trying to find me by the headlights on a car, could very well have missed the car... I’ll bet that was what it was all about. I’ll bet they came back to take care of me, probably to drive me out someplace where they could load me aboard a boat, take me out in the Gulf and throw me overboard with weights tied to my neck and feet. It had started to rain. The night was as dark as pitch and the guys couldn’t find me.

“I was desperate at the time. I tried to make noises to attract the attention of the driver. I realize now it’s one hell of a good thing that I didn’t.”

“All right,” I said, “that’s probably true.”

“What happened after that?” he asked. “You said Puggy and Eddie got in a fight about something?”

“Puggy and Eddie got in a fight about something,” I said. “I imagine that Puggy started putting pressure to bear on Eddie about the fact that you needed to be taken Care of on a permanent basis. Anyway, they got in a fight and Eddie got killed.”

“Got killed?” Hale said.

“Got killed,” I said.

“How?” Hale asked.

“One shot from a thirty-eight revolver,” I said, “and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the revolver that fired the fatal shot wasn’t the gun Puggy had taken away you, the one that Nanncie had given you so you co protect yourself, and the same gun that had been given to Nanncie so that she could protect herself.”

Hale looked from me to Nanncie, then from Nanncie to me, then back to Nanncie. “Did Milt give it to you?” he asked Nanncie.

She nodded her head.

Hale reached an instant decision. “Don’t tell any about where you got that gun,” he said. “Let Calhoun explain it. He’s got plenty of money, plenty of pull, he’ll get the best lawyers in the country. Don’t let them drag you into it. Let’s let Calhoun shift for himself.”