All Grass Isn't Green

4

Sometime in the night, when my senses were still drugged with sleep, I was half awakened by the sound of voices raised in what seemed to be an argument.

I rolled over, punched the pillow, went back to sleep again, then suddenly wakened to a realization that those voices might have been coming from Unit 12.

It took me a few moments to get my senses together, to jump out of bed and get to the window.

There was no light on in Unit 12.

The voices had ceased.

The motel lay silent under the stars, the night light cast shimmering reflections in the swimming pool in the patio.

I stood by the window until I began to feel chilled. Then I went back to bed, but it was a long while before I could get to sleep. I was lying there listening for the sound of voices, and listening in vain.

I arose at seven o’clock, showered, shaved, and started out to breakfast.

I had a desire for the Mexican dish of huevos rancheros, in which fried eggs, swimming in a sauce of onions, peppers and spices, are placed on top of a thin tortilla.

There is no place that makes huevos rancheros any better than the kitchen of the De Anza Hotel.

The rain had ceased. The sky was blue, the air clear. It was only a four-block walk to the hotel and I decided to make it, swinging along with, shoulders back, inhaling the pure desert air in great, long pulls.

I entered the dining room at the De Anza Hotel, found an inconspicuous table, seated myself, gave my order and sipped delicious coffee while I waited for the eggs arrive.

The waiter brought the huevos rancheros. I put do my coffee cup and looked up into the startled eyes of our client, Milton Carling Calhoun, who was seated tables away, facing me.

He hadn’t expected to see me. His facial expression was a dead giveaway.

I waved to him casually, as though seeing him the was the most natural thing in the world, and went on with my eggs, keeping an eye on him, however, to make he didn’t sneak out.

He finished before I did and had the grace to come over to my table.

“Well, well, Lam,” he said, “good morning. How you this morning?”

“Fine, thanks. How are you?”

“A little sleepy but very well.”

“I hardly expected to see you here this morning.”

“As a matter of fact,” he said, “I hardly expected to be here, but after talking with you over the phone last night I decided to come down so I could... could... have a chat with you personally. Talking over the telephone is s unsatisfactory.”

“Isn’t it?” I said.

“Indeed it is.”

“Where,” I asked, “are you staying?”

“Here in the hotel. It’s a very nice place, conditioned and all that, and the food is very good.”

“You get down here often?” I asked.

“Not often. Now, tell me, Lam, just what have you discovered?”

“Not very much more than when I talked with you on the telephone last night.”

“But you must have some additional facts. You were so secretive last night. I knew I had to talk with you. You held out on mean the telephone. You know something else, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“What?”

I said, “The young woman is waiting for someone to join her. I think it may be Hale.”

“Now, this young woman,” Calhoun went on, “you didn’t want to mention names over the telephone — that’s one reason I wanted to talk with you — just who is this young woman?”

“Her name,” I said, “is Nanncie Beaver. She’s registered here as Nanncie Armstrong, There’s a trick spelling on her name. It’s N-a-n-n-c-i-e.”

“How in the world did you ever get a lead that brought you to her?” he asked.

I said, “I tried to find out all I could about Colburn Hale. I found out that Nanncie was his girl friend, and when I went to look for her I found that she’d mysteriously disappeared at about the same time Colburn Hale had disappeared. It was, therefore, a strong possibility that they were together.”

“But how in the world did you ever find her down here?” he asked. “I couldn’t—” He broke off suddenly.

“Couldn’t what?” I asked.

“Couldn’t imagine,” he said.

“It was routine detective work,” I said, “but quite a bit of work at that. What time did you get in here?”

“Around two-thirty or so this morning. It was a mean drive over wet roads.”

I said, “Expenses are running up. We make a charge of fifteen cents a mile for the agency car.”

“That’s all right,” he said hastily.

“So,” I went on, “the question arises whether you want us to quit when the deposit is used up or whether you want to put up some more money to have us go ahead.”

“Go ahead with what?”

“To find Hale, of course.”

He took a pencil from his pocket and started playing with it, putting the point on the table, sliding his thumb and forefinger from the eraser down to the point, upending the pencil and sliding his thumb and fore back again. He was thinking of what to tell me, or how tell me.

I beat him to the punch. “Just why did you want find Colburn Hale?” I asked.

He hesitated for two or three seconds, then said, “Somehow, Lam I doubt if that’s particularly important.”

“It might help if I knew.”

“And it might not.”

I shrugged my shoulders. “It’s your money,” I pointed out.

He took out his wallet and extracted two new fifty-dollar bills.

“I’m going to add another hundred dollars to the deposit,” he said. “That will take care of things for more days.”

“Not with traveling expenses,” I said.

“Well, then, for one more day after the three fifty used up.”

“Okay,” I told him, “you’re the boss. When this is us up you want me to pack up and go home?”

“If you haven’t found him by that time, yes. And make every effort to keep expenses down.”

I started to say something, then paused as I regarded the door from the hotel.

The surprise must have shown on my face.

Calhoun, whose back was toward the door, whirled to see what I was looking at.

Sergeant Frank Sellers of the Metropolitan Police saw me at just about that time. His own face registered surprise, although he fought to control the expression. Then he was coming over toward us.

“Well, well, well,” he said, “look who’s here!”

“Hello, Sergeant, how are you?”

“What are you doing down here, Pint Size?” he asked roe. “And who’s your friend?”

I said, quickly so that Calhoun would get the idea, “Mr. Calhoun, shake hands with Sergeant Frank Sellers of the Metropolitan Police. Sellers is sort of a liaison man who gets around on cases where outside jurisdictions telephone in for help. Are you down here on official business, Sergeant?”

Sellers grinned and said, “Very neatly done, Donald.”

Calhoun extended his hand. Sellers grabbed it, crushed it in his big paw and said, “Pleased to meet you.”

“What was neatly done?” I asked.

“Telling Calhoun who I was and warning him that I might be on official business. The way you’re acting Calhoun might be a client of yours.”

I didn’t say anything.

“I am,” Calhoun said.

Sellers turned to me. “What’s the pitch?” he asked. “What are you doing down here, Pint Size? What does Calhoun want down here?”

“Information,” I said.

Sellers pulled up a chair and sat down. “Think I’ll join you for a while. You two have had breakfast?”

I nodded. “The huevos rancheros here are very good, Sergeant.”

“Can’t eat ’em,” he said. “Have to go pretty easy on spicy food. Now then, let’s go back to where we were. You say Calhoun hired you to get information?”

“That’s right.”

“What sort of information?”

I smiled and said, “You’re asking the wrong person. I can’t betray the confidences of a client.”

Sellers turned to Calhoun. “What sort of information?” he asked.

Calhoun was plainly flabbergasted. “Is this official?” asked.

“It could be made official,” Sellers told him.

Calhoun gave him a long look, then said somewhat coldly, “I fail to see how any stretch of the imagination would make my business with Mr. Lam of any possible interest to you, Sergeant.”

Sellers didn’t back up an inch, “Then you’d be stretch your imagination some more.”

“I’ve already stretched it to the limit,” Calhoun said.

“The name Colburn Hale mean anything to you?” Sellers asked.

Calhoun couldn’t resist the slight start.

Sergeant Sellers grinned a triumphant grin.

“I see it does,” he said. “Suppose you start talking.”

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to talk about,” Calhoun said.

Sergeant Sellers said, “Now, Pint Size here is a fast worker and you can’t underestimate the guy. If you do you get into trouble. Now, take for instance the case of Marge Fulton who lives at Apartment Forty-two at Eight-seventeen Billinger Street. This man, Colburn Hale, Cole Hale, as his friends call him, had the apartment next door, Apartment Forty-three.

“Now, what do you think happened? Donald shows up and knocks on the door of Colburn Hale’s apartment. He gets no answer. So then he knocks again until finally Marge Fulton comes to the door of her apartment to see what the noise is all about and to tell Donald Lam that she doesn’t think Hale is home.

“Now, that’s where you can’t underestimate this guy. He’s ingenious. He leads Marge Fulton to think he Colburn Hale’s agent. He pumps her for all she knows — which is that Hale moved out in the middle of the night. Then Pint Size shows up down here.”

Calhoun looked from Sergeant Sellers to me, then back to Sellers.

“And,” Sellers went on, “Donald Lam somehow got information that put him on the track of coming down here to the border. So we’d like to know a little bit more about Hale and just what your interest is in the guy.”

“Is he hot?” I asked.

Sellers measured his words carefully. “He may be hot and he may be cold — very cold.”

I said, “The Calexico Police Department didn’t telephone for help just because someone in Los Angeles is missing.”

“That’s logical,” Sellers agreed affably.

“And,” I said, “if you were looking for Hale and you knew I’d been looking for him, you must have uncovered a lead which brought you down here without knowing you were on my back trail because you were surprised when you walked into the dining room here this morning and saw me.”

“Who says so?” Sellers asked.

“Your face said so.”

Sellers said, “We’re getting our roles mixed. I’m doing the questioning.”

“Has any crime been committed?” I asked.

“Could be,” Sellers said. “Hale is mixed up in a dope-running case. We don’t know how deep.”

I said to Calhoun, “In that case, if any crime has been committed and if there’s any reason to suspect you of any connection with the crime, you don’t have to say a word. Sellers has to warn you that anything you say can be used against you and that you’re entitled to the advice of an attorney.”

“But there can’t be any crime involved,” Calhoun said.

“Oh, sure,” I said sarcastically. “Frank Sellers just came down here to sell tickets to the Policemen’s Ball.”

Sellers grinned.

After a few moments of silence, Sellers said, “Now I’ll start telling both of you jokers something. I flew down here in a police plane. I didn’t get in until after five o’clock this morning, but I had some pretty good leads. I went right to work.

“Hale was a writer. He did all sorts of things, little short articles, fiction, and, occasionally, he’d run on some article that he could sell to the wire services.

“Now, somewhere along the line he found out something about the marijuana traffic. He had been investigating that quietly and under cover for some little time. He evidently stumbled onto something big because the night he disappeared he was pounding like mad on typewriter.

“Then something happened. Some man came to see him. We want to know more about that. Who was that man, a friend or an enemy?

“Hale packed up and got out. He evidently didn’t have too much junk, but what he had he threw into an automobile, and the guy vanished.

“Now, that could have meant either one of two things. Either he had a lot of red-hot information that he was going to spill in an article on marijuana smuggling, the word got around and some friend of his came to tip him off that the situation was hot and he’d better get out, so he got out, or he knew a shipment was coming across, and he came to the border.

“The fact that he took all of his things with him makes me think that it was a friend that gave him the tip.

“On the other hand, it could have been that it was an enemy, some member of the dope ring.

“Hale was busily engaged in typing out a story that was red-hot and there was a knock at the door. He went to open the door and found himself looking down the barrel of a gun.

“The man behind that gun just took Hale with him and wanted to be awfully careful that he didn’t leave anything behind in the way of notes, so he and a couple of buddies cleaned out the apartment.

“Right now,” Seller said, “we’re acting on the theory that Hale’s move was voluntary, that he hadn’t all of his article finished, that he suddenly realized he was hot, that some friend came and helped him and they moved in a hurry.

“Now then, we’d like...”

The door opened and a man who had police officer stamped all over him came into the dining room, looked around, saw Sellers, pounded over to him and touched him on the shoulder. “Can I speak with you a minute, Sergeant?” he asked.

Sellers looked up. “Why, sure,” he said.

The two officers walked over to a comer of the dining room where they were out of earshot. The local officer poured stuff into Sellers’ ears and Sellers was jolted — there was no question about that.

Whatever the local guy told him was important enough so that Sellers never came back. The two men walked out of the room and Sellers didn’t even so much as give us a backward glance over his shoulder.

Calhoun said, “Gosh, that was close!”

I watched the door through which the officers had disappeared. After a few thoughtful seconds, I turned back to Calhoun. “That brief interlude,” I said, “gives you a chance to start talking.”

“To whom about what?”

“To me about you.”

“I don’t think you need to know any more than you know already.”

“Think again,” I told him.

He hesitated for a moment, then said, “Colburn Hale really is nothing to me.”

“Sure,” I said sarcastically. “You toss three hundred and fifty dollars onto Bertha Cool’s desk to try to find him and then you put another hundred into the kitty down here, but he’s less than nothing to you.”

Calhoun looked at me thoughtfully, then said, “I’m going to tell you the truth.”

“It just might make a welcome change,” I point out.

He said, “I’m not interested in Colburn Hale. I’m interested in Nanncie Beaver.”

He jolted me with that one. “What?” I asked.

“That’s right,” he said. “I’m interested in Nanncie Beaver. She ran away with every evidence of having left in a panic. I tried to trace her. There wasn’t a chance. So I went to see if Colburn Hale had anything to do with her disappearance and I found out that Hale had left very hurriedly. I figured they were both together.

“I didn’t want anyone to know I was interested in Nanncie Beaver. I didn’t even dare to tell you and Bertha Cool, but I felt if you could locate Colburn Hale, that would give me all the information I needed to find Nanncie.”

“Why be so secretive?” I asked.

Calhoun said, “Because I’m married. It’s not a happy marriage. We’re getting a divorce. My wife and I are working out a property settlement right now through our lawyers. I can’t afford to play into her hands. If she knew anything about Nanncie Beaver the fat would be in the fire. Her demands for a settlement would go way up out of any reason.”

I said, “If you had put the cards on the table with us you might have saved yourself a lot of time and a lot of money.”

“Then, by the same token,” he said, “you or Bertha Cool might have made a slip and it could have cost me two or three hundred...”

“Two or three hundred thousand?” I asked, finishing the sentence for him.

He thought for a moment, then said, “Could be.”

I did a lot of thinking. “Look,” I said, “you’ve lied to me about a lot of things. You drove down here and you went directly to Unit Twelve at the Maple Leaf Motel when you arrived. You had to talk with Nanncie. There was an argument. Things didn’t go as smoothly as you expected.”

“What makes you think that?” he asked.

“You forget that I’m in Unit Seven,” I said. “I was awakened by voices last night, voices coming from Unit Twelve.”

“You heard voices?” he asked.

“Voices.”

“A man and a woman?”

“That’s right.”

“Did you hear what was being said?”

I said, “Suppose you quit asking me questions for a while and start telling me the facts. You may be in this thing a little deeper than you anticipate.”

“I’ve told you the facts.”

I shook my head. “No, you haven’t.”

“What do you mean by that?”

I said, “If you had really been anxious to locate Nanncie when I told you last night over the telephone that I’d followed her down here and that she was in Unit Twelve of the Maple Leaf Motel, you’d have said, ‘Well, I’ve gone as far as I want to go with this thing, Lam. I’ve spent all the money I can afford to spend, and if you haven’t located Colburn Hale by this time, you’d better come on home and call it a day.’

“Instead of that you jump in your car and come down here and when you see me this morning you fork over another hundred bucks first thing.”

“Well, what does that prove?” he asked, trying to be belligerent.

I said, “It proves that your actions and your words don’t fit together.”

I pushed back my chair, “Come on,” I said, “let’s, see Nanncie.”

“I... I don’t want to see her now.”

“You’re going to see her now,” I said.

“You’re working for me,” he pointed out.

“You’re damn right I am, and there’s more to this than meets the eye, otherwise Sergeant Sellers wouldn’t be down here. Come on, we’re going to see Nanncie.”

“I don’t want to see her now.”

“I’m going to see her now. You can come along if you want to have it that way, or you can stay here.”

“All right,” he said, “I’ll come along.”

I paid the check and left a tip.

“Where’s your car?” I asked.

“Parked out front.”

“Let’s go in it. Time may be a little more precious than we realize.”

It was a big Cadillac and we purred the four blocks the Maple Leaf Motel, found a parking place, got and approached Unit Twelve.

The key was in the door on the outside.

“What does that mean?” Calhoun asked.

“It probably means that she’s checked out,” I said.

“She couldn’t have.”

“Why not?” I asked.

He was silent at that one.

I walked up-to the door, bold as brass, and knock on it. When I received no answer, I pulled the door open.

The bed had been slept in but hadn’t been made. I went into the bathroom. There was a bathmat on floor, but it was dry. The bath towels were folded on the rack. They were both dry.

We looked the place over. There wasn’t any sign baggage or any article of women’s clothing.

“Okay,” I said to Calhoun, “let’s get out of here. We’ll go to my place. Perhaps you can refresh your memory there and tell me a bit more.”