The Case of the Drowsy Mosquito

Chapter 22

Mason found Della Street parked in his automobile in front of the courthouse.

“How did you come out?” she asked anxiously.

“I squeezed out,” Mason said, “through the front door, and it was a close squeak.”

“The legal wolf is chained?” she asked.

“Not chained — roped. Because the sheriff thought he had a cinch case against me on taking that will, he went after me on that. I made him so mad he forgot all about the stock certificate. But it won’t take long for him to start off on that as a new angle of approach. Hang it, at the time endorsing that stock certificate so that Moffgat couldn’t trap my client seemed the only logical thing to do. Now it seems a terrible blunder to have made.”

“How long a period of grace do you suppose we have, Chief?”

“Half an hour perhaps.”

“Then let’s start for Salty’s camp.”

“Not right away,” Mason said. “You see, Della, in that half hour we’ve got to find out who killed Banning Clarke, all about the poison and who was prowling around in the grounds the night Velma heard the drowsy mosquito. When the sheriff finally starts looking for us, we’ll be in the one place he’ll least expect to find us.”

“Banning Clarke’s house?” she asked.

Mason nodded.

“Hop in,” she said, “and hang on.”

Mrs. Sims answered the bell. “Oh, hello,” she chirped. “You’re back just in time. Long Distance is trying to get you from Castaic. I didn’t think they’d hold you long.”

Mason flashed Della Street a significant glance, entered the house and went at once to the telephone. A few moments later, he heard Paul Drake’s voice on the wire. “Hello, Perry. Are you sober?”

“Yes,” Mason said shortly.

“All right,” Drake said. “Remember, I asked you first. Now listen, Perry, I’m a little foggy, but I think a fish is nibbling at your bait.”

“Go ahead.”

“Man by the name of Hayward Small, a spindly chap with a gift of gab. Has a way of trying to look right through you. Know him?”

“Yes.”

“Is he the fish you want?”

“If he’s taking the bait, he is.”

“Someone,” Drake said, “has leaned on him.”

“What do you mean?”

“Against his left eye. It’s a beauty.”

“A shiner?”

“A mouse, a shanty.”

“What’s his proposition?”

“Says he knows that the mine I’ve discovered is on the property of the Come-Back Mining Syndicate, that he has a pull with the company; if I’ll take him into partnership on a fifty-fifty basis he’ll guarantee to get us a thirty-three percent interest as our share, and I’ll cut with him.”

“If you accept the proposition, what does he want to do?”

“I don’t know, but he’s taking me to San Roberto with him if it’s a deal. I’m on my road to Los Angeles with Harvey Brady. What do I do?”

“Does he know you’re telephoning?”

“Thinks I’m telephoning a girl in Los Angeles. It’s a booth in a restaurant. I’ve ridden this far with him.”

“Okay,” Mason said. “Accept the proposition and come on down.”

“What do I do when he wants the information?”

Mason said, “Tell him you’ll draw him a map and give him the exact location when you get to San Roberto.”

“And not before?” Drake asked.

“Not unless you want to get poisoned,” Mason said and hung up.

Mrs. Sims said, “Mr. Moffgat telephoned. Seems like the company wants to settle that case. He says he can’t make a proposition directly to me because it wouldn’t be ethical, but he says we can settle.”

“Yes,” Mason announced, smiling, “I feel quite certain he wants to settle it. Where’s your husband?”

“He’s in the kitchen.”

Mason went out to where Pete Sims was sitting slumped dejectedly in a kitchen chair.

“Oh, it’s you,” Pete said.

Mason nodded. “I want to talk with you, Pete.”

“What about?”

“About Bob.”

Pete squirmed. “Bob don’t ever cause me nothing but trouble.”

Mason said, “Come with me. You haven’t seen anything yet. Bring your typewriter and brief case, Della.”

And Mason led the worried, sheepish man up the back stairs and into the room Banning Clarke had used in his lifetime.

“Sit down, Pete.”

Pete sat down. “What do you want?”

“I want to know something about claim salting.”

“What about it? I ain’t ever done any, but I know how it’s done.”

“You load a shotgun shell with little nuggets of gold?” Mason asked, “and then fire it into a ledge of quartz, and...”

Pete Sims shuddered.

“What’s the matter?” Mason asked.

“That’s crude, Mr. Mason. You don’t do it that way at all.”

“How do you do it, Pete?”

“Well, it’s what Hayward Small would call a psychological proposition. You’ve got to make the sucker try to slip something over on you!”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand,” Mason said, glancing out of the corner of his eye to make certain Della Street was taking down the questions and answers.

“Well, it’s like this, Mr. Mason. People are pretty well educated nowadays. They’re getting smart. You try to sell them a gold brick, or try to shoot gold into a ledge of quartz, and chances are like as not they’ll have read about it or seen it in a movie somewhere and just give you the horselaugh. In fact, you try to sell anybody a mining claim and he gets suspicious right away. If he knows mines, what you tell him don’t make any difference, and if he don’t know mines, he’s suspicious of everything.”

Quite obviously, Pete Sims was vastly relieved that Mason was asking for information rather than making direct accusations or demanding explanations. That relief made him talkative.

“I’m afraid I don’t understand,” Mason said.

“Well, Mr. Mason, you work it this way. You get the sucker all lined up, then you fix it so the sucker is the one that’s trying to sell you.”

Mason said, “You didn’t work it that way with Jim Bradisson, Pete.”

Pete shifted his position in the chair. “You don’t know that whole story, Mr. Mason.”

“What is the story, Pete?”

Pete shook his head doggedly.

“Aren’t you going to tell me?”

“I’ve told you all I know,” Pete said, his manner changing from glib friendliness to surly reticence.

“All right, Pete. No offense. Let’s go back to discussing generalities. How can you make the sucker try to slip something over on you?”

“There’s lots of ways.”

“Can you tell me one?”

“I’ll give you the basic idea back of the whole thing,” Pete said. “You pretend to be the innocent guy and let the sucker be the smart guy. You’re just an innocent, ignorant son of the desert, and the city slicker decides you’re so dumb it would be a shame to cut you in on any profits.”

“I don’t see how you could work that, Pete.”

Sims once more warmed to his subject. “You’ve got to be ingenious, Mr. Mason. You’ve got to do a lot of thinking, and you’ve got to have imagination. That’s why lots of people think I’m lazy. When I’m sitting around doing nothing is when I’m thinking, when I’m... I guess I’m doin’ a lot of talking, Mr. Mason.”

“That’s all right, Pete. You’re among friends,” Mason said. “I’m interested in how you can get the city slicker to try to take advantage of you.”

“They’ll do it every time. You be simple and take them out and show them some property that you want them to buy. You get enthusiastic about that property and show them all the good points. They keep drawing back into their shell. Then about lunch time you take ’em around to some property that you tell ’em belongs to you, or belongs to a friend of yours, and sit down there to eat lunch. Then you make an excuse to wander away, and you’ve planted something that the sucker can find for himself, something that makes it look like the claim is lousy with gold. You get me, Mr. Mason? He finds it while you’re gone. When you come back, he never says to you, ‘Look, Pete, we’ve struck it rich right on your own claim.’ — I’ll tell you the truth, Mr. Mason. I’ve been salting claims for twenty years and I’ve never had one of these birds pull that line on me yet.”

“How do you get the customer looking around?” Mason asked.

“Shucks, they’ll all do it. Tell ’em a claim’s rich and they’d ought to buy it, and they take only a halfway interest in it. But take ’em down to some place that looks sort of promising with nice colored rock on it and tell ’em it’s no good — and then walk away and leave ’em, and they start prowling. They’ll do it every time. That’s one thing about a sucker in the desert — he always thinks he knows more than the old-time mining men.”

Mason nodded.

“Well,” Pete went on, “that’s the way it’s put across. He begins looking around. You’ve got some rocks that’s so rich the gold is just stuck in them in chunks. You’ve blasted away a section of rock outcropping and grafted these little pieces of rock into place. If you’re good with dynamite and mixing up a little rock cement, there’s nothing to it. You can put those pieces in place so they look as though they’d been there since the Year One.

“The sucker sticks the sample of rock in his pocket and when you come back he starts asking you a lot of casual questions about the title to the property, when your option expires, and all that. Then, next thing you know, he’s sneaking around behind your back, trying to double-cross you and get the property. Or if you’ve told him you own it outright, he starts telling you about how this is such a swell place for a desert cabin; he’s never been in a place that seemed more restful to him, and all that sort of stuff. Since the thing doesn’t amount to so much as a mine, he’d like to buy it for a cabin site — or he says he has a friend who has bad sinus trouble, and he would like to get this place for his friend.

“If you’d been the one who discovered the chunk of ore the sucker would have been suspicious. He’d have wanted to call in a couple of mining engineers and had you give him bank references before he’d even listen to you. But when he discovers it, and thinks he’s slipping one over on you, he becomes the salesman and you’re the customer. That’s all there is to it. It’s his own baby and he’s putting it across.”

“A most interesting example of practical and applied psychology,” Mason said. “I think, Sims, I can use that in my business.”

“Well, Mr. Mason, if that’s all you want, I’ll be getting back. But that’s the secret of the whole business. You’ve got to get the sucker trying to sell you.”

“Just a minute,” Mason said. “Before you go, Pete, there’s just one more question I want to ask.”

Pete sat on the extreme edge of the chair. “Go right ahead, Mr. Mason.”

Mason said, “You planted that six-gun on Banning Clarke, didn’t you, Pete?”

“Why, what do you mean?”

Mason said, “You salted that group of your wife’s claims. You sold them to Jim Bradisson. Then, after the corporation commenced its action for fraud, you realized you were in hot water, so you thought you might as well have a second string to your bow. You fixed things so Banning Clarke would think the famous Lost Goler Mine was situated on properties controlled by the Shooting Star Group, didn’t you?”

“Why, Mr. Mason!” Sims exclaimed reproachfully.

“And in order to do that,” Mason went on, “you found this old six-gun somewhere and etched the name Goler on the handle. But what you overlooked, Pete, was the fact that you have a very distinctive method of printing a capital G. And the printing you put on that bag of arsenic — ‘GUARD CAREFULLY’ — had the same capital G as was on the handle of the gun.”

For a moment, Pete looked Mason squarely in the eyes, then his eyes slithered away. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he mumbled.

Mason turned to Della Street, “All right, Della, go get the sheriff. Tell him to bring up that bag of arsenic. We’ll get that gun and compare the printing...”

“No, no, no!” Sims exclaimed. “Don’t do that. Now don’t go off half-cocked like this, Mr. Mason. Don’t bring that sheriff into it again.”

Mason grinned. “Make up your mind, Pete.”

Sims heaved a long sigh. “Give me a cigarette.”

Mason gave him one, and Sims lighted it. All the resistance seemed to have oozed out of him. “All right,” he said. “I did it. That’s what happened.”

“Now tell us about the arsenic,” Mason said.

“It’s just like I told the sheriff. I got that for...”

“For what?” Mason asked as Sims hesitated.

“Just for experimenting.” Sims twisted his position in the chair.

“Perhaps you’d better get the sheriff after all, Della.”

Pete might not have heard. He went on as though he had never balked at the question in the first place. “This lost mines business could be quite a racket, Mr. Mason. I realized that when I saw the way Banning Clarke fell for that six-gun business. I’d been a fool — going around salting claims and juggling samples and all of that kind of business. All you’ve got to do is see that people know about some of these famous lost mines, and then leave just a little clue that will make ’em think they’ve got hold of a lost mine. You pretend that you don’t know a thing in the world about the significance of it or what it is. You get me?”

Mason nodded.

“Now on that Shooting Star claim,” Pete went on, “the time I sold it to Jim Bradisson I certainly went at it crude. I’ll tell you the truth. I was pretty well plastered at the time, and Jim kept shooting off his mouth about what a big mining executive he was — and he was so damned easy I just didn’t take any pains to cover my tracks.

“But when I realized I needed to fix it up so he wouldn’t yell he’d been stuck, I tumbled onto this idea of planting a six-shooter and letting Banning Clarke find it and tell Jim. I’d found this old six-shooter out in the desert quite a while back. I simply etched the name Goler on the handle and rubbed wet tea leaves over it until the printing looked good and old. Then I planted it down by a little spring that’s on the property, leaving just a few inches of the muzzle sticking up, the rest of it buried in the sand. I got Banning Clarke out there with me. That was before his heart got so bad he couldn’t travel at all, but it was bad enough so he had to keep quiet. I told him I wanted to do just a little prospecting around, and I knew he’d go over to the spring and sit down. I’d planted a whole bunch of nuggets in the spring right near the gun. Well, there was nothing to it. As soon as I came back, I saw the gun wasn’t there, and Clarke was so excited he could hardly talk. I pretended I didn’t notice nothing.

“I thought Clarke, being a stockholder in the company, would see that they didn’t make any squawk about the deal I’d handed them, but Clarke got so sold on the idea he’d uncovered the lost Goler Diggings that he actually wanted my wife to get the claims back. He thought she was entitled to them more than the corporation, I guess. Well, there I was, in a devil of a fix, Mr. Mason.

“Later on, I managed to see that Jim Bradisson got tipped off that Clarke had discovered the Lost Goler Diggings. Clarke hadn’t been out in the desert for six months before that time he’d been with me. I thought Bradisson would be smart enough to put two and two together and figure the mine must be located on the Shooting Star Group. But Jim wasn’t smart at all. He went ahead with the fraud action, and darned if Banning didn’t get you to fight the lawsuit. By that time, it was all mixed up. I didn’t know just what he was doing. I see it now. He was trying to have ‘Nell put up enough fight in the case so that Jim wouldn’t get suspicious and decide to hang onto that property. — Now, that’s the absolute truth.”

“And this arsenic?” Mason asked.

“Well, if you want to know the real low-down, Mr. Mason, I decided to go into this lost mines as a racket. I guess I’m just a miserable, no-good skunk. But don’t get me wrong. I ain’t reformin’ none. I’m scared stiff now, but I know myself well enough to know I’ll keep right on being a claim-salter.

“If you was someone else I’d pull an act about being sorry, and make such a swell job of it I’d even convince myself... I used to be a damn good liar, Mr. Mason. That was before I met Hayward Small and he tried to hypnotize me, and told me a lot about these here secondary personalities. I pretended he’d hypnotized me. I don’t know but what maybe he did, at that. And then I rung in this secondary personality.

“Well, it just ruined me as a liar, Mr. Mason. It was so easy blaming things on Bob, I got all out of practice on real good lying. It came to me with a shock when that lawyer tied me all up in knots the way he did.

“Believe you me, I ain’t going to let anybody do my lying for me from now on. I’m getting rid of Bob, pronto! I’ve got to brush up. You understand?”

“I understand, Pete. But specifically, what did you intend to do with the arsenic?”

“Well, now, this Lost Peg-Leg Mine,” Sims said, “and a couple of other mines that have been lost out in the desert — the reason they get lost is because the gold is black. It’s covered on the outside with some sort of a deposit that turns it black. When you scratch down inside, it’s good yellow gold, but the nuggets look like little black rocks. I heard that it was some kind of arsenic compound, and I decided to get this arsenic and experiment with some gold and see if I could get that black coating on it. If I could, I thought I’d trim the next sucker by letting him think he’d discovered the Lost Peg-Leg Mine. That cattleman and his partner who think they’ve discovered the Lost Goler Mine — that cattleman’s all swelled up with the idea he can go out and locate lost mines by scientific methods. Well, I was going to let him get the Lost Peg-Leg.”

“Did you use this arsenic?” Mason asked.

“No, Mr. Mason, I didn’t have to. To tell you the truth, I’d forgotten all about that arsenic. Shortly after I got it I found where there was some of this black gold — not much of it, but enough so I could salt a claim.”

Mason said, “You’ve had some arrangement with Hayward Small.”

Sims shifted his position. “Now, Mr. Mason, you’re all wet on that. That’s one thing you shouldn’t say. Hayward Small is just as square a shooter as there is in the world. My wife don’t like him because he’s kind of shining up to Dorina, but Dorina’s got to get married some day and she’ll go a long, long ways before she gets a better boy than Hayward Small.”

Mason smiled and shook his head. “Remember the sheriff, Pete.”

Sims sighed wearily. “Oh, all right. What’s the use? Sure, I stood in with Hayward Small, and Small’s got some kind of a club he’s holding over Jim Bradisson.”

“What?”

“I don’t know, but I know it’s a club. I’ve been salting claims for Small, and Small’s been selling them to the corporation.”

“And he was in on this Shooting Star deal?”

“Nope. That was on my own. Understand, I ain’t been partners with Small. He’s just been paying me so much a job to salt mines for him. He’s fooled on that Goler mine, himself.”

“Hayward Small knew that you had this arsenic?” Mason asked.

“He knew about it, yes. He was the one who told me not to use it. He said he knew where we could get some of this black gold.”

“And did you poison Banning Clarke?” Mason asked.

“Who, me!”

Mason nodded.

“Gosh, no. Get that idea out of your head.”

“Or shoot him?”

“Listen, Mr. Mason, Banning Clarke was a square guy. I wouldn’t have touched a hair of his head.”

“And you haven’t any idea who put the poison in that sugar bowl?”

“No, sir, I haven’t.”

Mason said, “You don’t know what hold it is that Small has over Jim Bradisson, do you?”

“No, sir, I don’t, but it’s a hold all right. You can take it from me, Jim Bradisson is afraid of Hayward Small. It’s some sort of blackmail.”

“You don’t really think Small is a proper person to be Dorina’s husband, do you?”

“I’ll say he ain’t. If I’d been here, he’d never have had the nerve to go to Nevada with her.”

“But they didn’t get married?”

“The way I get the story,” Sims said with a grin, “that soldier boy that’s been sort of sweet on Dorina got himself a twenty-four-hour leave and was sort of hanging around Las Vegas — and I guess when the soldier got done with him, Hayward Small decided he wasn’t going to marry anybody. He didn’t feel like a bridegroom. He’s still got quite an eye on him.”

Mason said, “Well, I guess that covers it, Pete. Thanks a lot.”

Pete got eagerly to his feet. “Mr. Mason, I can’t begin to tell you how much it means to me to talk right frank with someone that can really understand. If you’ve ever got any desert property you want to get rid of at a fancy price — No, you wouldn’t have; but if there’s ever anything I can do, you just call on me.”

When he had gone, Mason grinned over at Della Street.

“We’re going to use some of Pete’s psychology,” he said. “Feed some stationery in your portable typewriter. Put it up on that desk — right under the light.”

“How many copies?” Della asked.

“One,” Mason said.

“What is it,” she asked, “a document for someone to sign, a letter, or...”

“It’s a piece of claim salting,” Mason announced, “and we’re going to let the sucker discover it. Our interview with Pete Sims is going to be highly productive.”

Della Street ratcheted the paper into the machine, held her fingers poised over the keyboard.

Mason said, “We’ll start this in the middle of a sentence up near the top of the page. Put a page number on it — make it page twenty-two, and then put just below that, ‘Transcript of statements made to Sheriff Greggory!’”

Della Street’s fingers rippled the keyboard into a swift staccato of noise. When she paused, Mason said, “Just down below that, write Continuation of statement of James Bradisson. — All right, now let’s start the top of the page in the middle of a sentence, say, ‘that is, to the best of my knowledge and belief.’ — Now then, make a paragraph and put Question by sheriff: ‘Then you are prepared to swear, Mr. Bradisson, that you saw Hayward Small tampering with the sugar bowl?’ Answer: ‘I did. Yes, sir.’ Paragraph. Question: ‘You not only saw him put the note under the sugar bowl, but you are willing to swear you saw him raise the lid of the sugar bowl?’ Paragraph. Answer: ‘I did. Yes, sir. But T want you to remember that there are certain reasons why I must not be called as a witness until the time of trial. Once you get him before a jury, I’ll be the surprise witness that will get a conviction. I can afford to go on the stand when you’ve already made a case against him, but you’ll have to make up a case against him based on other testimony than mine.’ Paragraph. Statement by Sheriff Greggory: ‘I understand that, Mr. Bradisson. I’ve told you that we would try to respect your confidence. However, I can’t promise definitely. Now, about the arsenic. You say that Pete Sims had told him about having a supply of arsenic on hand?’ Answer: ‘That’s right. Sims wanted to use it in connection with some gold treatment, but Small told him not to use it, that he could get some of the black gold Sims wanted elsewhere.’ Paragraph. Question: ‘Who told you that?’ Paragraph. Answer: ‘Sims.’ Paragraph. Question: ‘Hayward Small never confirmed that?’ Paragraph. Answer: ‘Not in so many words, no.’ ”

“Getting down to the end of the page?” Mason asked Della Street.

“Right at the end,” she said.

“All right,” Mason said. “Leave that in the typewriter. Leave the light on. Take your brief case with you. Now, wait a minute. We’ll want to plant some cigarette stubs around here as though the room had been used for a conference. Tear some cigarettes in two. We’ll light them and leave stubs around.

“It’s touch-and-go, Della. If the sheriff ever thinks to question Dorina about whether she knows anything about the signing of the endorsement on that stock certificate, the fat’s in the fire.”

Della Street looked at him curiously. “Did Hayward Small poison the sugar?” she asked.

Mason smiled. “Ask Mrs. Sims what the proverb is about the goose that lays the golden eggs coming home to roost.”

“Then why are you putting that in the written statement?”

Mason’s face was suddenly serious. “To the best of my ability,” he said, “I am carrying out the wishes of a dead client.”