The Case of the Drowsy Mosquito

Chapter 2

At thirty miles an hour, Perry Mason turned right at the city limits of San Roberto, trailing along behind the battered, unpainted 1930 pickup in which Salty Bowers was leading the way.

The car ahead turned sharply and began to climb.

“It looks as though he’s going to give us a whirl through the exclusive residential district,” Della Street said.

Mason nodded, took his eyes from the road long enough to glance at the ocean far below — a blue, limpid ocean with a fringe of lazy surf, a border of dazzling white sand outlining the fronds of palm trees.

The driveway skirted the crest of sun-drenched hills, spotted with country estates of the wealthy. In a small amphitheater below, less than a mile away, Mason could see the dazzling white of the little city of San Roberto.

“Why do you suppose he’s taking us up here?” Della Street asked. “He certainly can’t—” She broke of! as the dilapidated car ahead, wheezing and knocking, rattling and banging, yet covering the ground with dogged efficiency, swung abruptly to a halt by the side of a white stucco wall.

Mason grinned. “By George, he lives here. He’s opening the gate.”

Della Street watched as Salty’s key clicked back the lock on a big gate of ornamental grillwork.

Salty Bowers returned to his automobile and wheezed it through the gates, and Mason followed.

There were a good six acres in the place, a location where real estate was valued by the inch.

The spacious Spanish-style house with white stucco and red tile had been designed to fit into its surroundings. It sat back high up on the sloping ground, as if it had simply settled itself to enjoy the view. The terraced grounds had been so skillfully landscaped that it seemed as if Nature herself had done most of the work, and man had only added an occasional path, a few stone benches and a fish pond.

The high stucco wall wrapped an air of privacy about the estate, and, at the far corner, outlined sharply the weird forms of desert growth, cacti, creosote and even the gawky arms of a cactus palm.

Della Street all but gasped at the view which swept out before them in a vista of blues, dazzling whites and restful greens.

“Is this Banning Clarke’s house?” Mason asked Salty when the latter had moved up to his running board.

“Yep. This is her.”

“A beautiful house.”

“He don’t live there.”

“I thought you said he did.”

“He don’t.”

“Pardon me. I misunderstood you. I asked if this was his place.”

“It’s his place. He don’t live in the house. I pulled him out of that. We’re camped out down there in the cactus. See that little column of smoke going up? Looks like he’s cooking up a bite to eat. It’s just like I told you. He housed-up. That put his pump on the blink. So I sort of took over. He’s too weak to go gallivantin’ around the desert yet. The doc says he can’t even climb stairs. I’m gettin’ him back in shape. He’s better now than he was last week — better last week than he was last month.”

“You’re eating and sleeping out there in the grounds?”

“Uh-huh. That’s right.”

“Then who’s living in the house?”

“People.”

“Who?”

“I’ll let Banning tell you about that. Come on. Let’s go see him.”

They walked down a trail into the sandy corner devoted to a cactus garden. Here prickly pear grew in ominous clumps. Cholla cactus seemed delicate and lace-like. Only those who were acquainted with the desert would realize the wicked strength of those barbed points or the danger that lurked in the little balls of spine-covered growth which dropped to the ground from the parent plant. Here also were spineless cacti growing to a height of some ten feet, furnishing a protective screen as well as a windbreak for the rest of the garden.

A six-foot wall built of varicolored rocks skirted the cactus garden. “All rocks from desert mines,” Salty explained. “Banning built that wall in his spare time before his heart went bad. I hauled in the rocks.”

Mason let his eye run over the highly colored rocks. “You kept the rocks from each mine separate?” he asked.

“Nope. Just hauled ’em in and dumped ’em. They’re just color rocks. Banning arranged ’em.”

The little trail twisted and turned, detouring the cactus patches, making it seem as if they were walking through the desert itself.

In a little cove in the cacti, a very small fire was burning in a rock fireplace on top of which had been placed a couple of strips of iron. Straddling these iron strips, a fire-blackened agateware stewpan emitted little puffs of steam as the boiling contents elevated the lid in spasmodic jerks.

Beside the fire, squatting on his heels, watching the flame with an intensity of concentration, was a man of perhaps fifty-five. And despite the fact that he was thin, he seemed to have gone soft. The flesh had sagged under his eyes, dropped down on cheeks and chin. In repose, the lips seemed flabby and a little blue. Only when he looked up and his visitors caught the steel-gray impact of his eyes was it apparent that while the body had gone soft the soul within the man was hard as nails.

He straightened up. A smile lighted his face, his pearl-gray cowboy hat came off in a sweeping bow.

Salty Bowers said succinctly, “This is him,” and then after a moment. “The girl’s the secretary... I’ll watch the beans.”

Salty moved over to the fire and assumed a squatting position, sitting on the heels of his boots looking as though he could be comfortable in that position for hours. His attitude was that of a man whose duty has been done.

Mason shook hands.

“You’re just in time for a little bite of lunch — in case you can eat plain prospector’s grub,” Banning announced, glancing surreptitiously at Della Street.

“I’d love it,” she said.

“There aren’t any chairs, but you don’t need to scrape away the sand to make certain there isn’t a sidewinder in the place where you’re going to sit. Just sit down.”

“You seem to have quite a little desert of your own here,” Mason said by way of making conversation.

Clarke grinned. “You haven’t seen it all, yet. How about taking a look around my little domain before you sit down?”

Mason nodded.

Clarke led them around a large clump of cactus into another little cactus-enclosed alcove. Here, two burros stood with heads lowered, long ears drooping forward. A couple of worn packsaddles were on the ground, together with a litter of pack boxes, ropes, a tarpaulin, a pick, shovel and gold pan.

“Surely,” Mason said, “you don’t use these here?”

“Well,” Clarke said, “we do and we don’t. The outfit belongs to Salty. He couldn’t be happy away from his burros and I don’t think they’d be happy away from him. And somehow you wake up feeling better if a burro bugles you awake than when you just sleep yourself out. Now, over here — right over around this trail, if you will, please. Now over here we have—”

Banning Clarke abruptly ceased talking, whirled to face Mason and Della Street, lowered his voice almost to a whisper, spoke with swift rapidity. “Don’t ever mention this in front of Salty. They’ve set a trap for him — a woman. Once this woman marries him, she’ll live with him a couple of months, sue him for a divorce, and either grab his stock or tie it up in litigation. He’s absolutely loyal. He’ll do anything I ask him. I’ve told him I want him to pool his stock in a certain mining company with mine. The minute that woman finds out she can’t get control of the stock, she’ll never marry him. He doesn’t know this — why I’m doing it. He doesn’t understand what’s back of all this, but once this woman realizes that stock has been tied up so she can t get her hands on it she’d no more think of marrying him than she would of jumping into a hot furnace. Don’t say anything about this.”

Almost immediately Clarke raised his voice and said, “And this is our bedroom.”

He indicated another little sanded alcove. Two bedrolls were neatly spread out in the shade of a big cactus.

“Some day I’m going to move out of here and back into the real desert. It won’t be today, tomorrow, or the next day, but I’m starved for the desert. I don’t suppose I can explain it so you’ll understand.”

“Salty gave us a pretty good explanation,” Mason said.

“Salty isn’t much on using words.”

“He’s pretty good at conveying ideas, though,” Mason observed.

“Ever hear of the Louie-Legs Mine?” Clarke asked abruptly.

“I don’t believe I have. Rather an unusual name, isn’t it?”

“It’s the name of that burro over there. We named the mine after him. It was a good strike. Salty sold out his interest to a syndicate, got fifty thousand and blew it all in. A few months later he woke up one morning stony broke.”

“Oh,” Della Street exclaimed sympathetically.

There was a twinkle in Banning Clarke’s gray eyes as he shifted them to Della. “That,” he announced, “was the sensible thing to do. That’s what I should have done.”

Mason chuckled.

“You see,” Clarke went on, “we get a warped perspective on money. Money isn’t worth a thing except to use in buying something. And money can’t buy anything better than the life of a prospector. There’s something back in a prospector’s subconscious mind that realizes this. That’s why so many of them try to get rid of money as quickly as possible. I hung onto my money. It was a mistake.”

“Go on,” Mason said, “you’re beginning to say something.”

“I kept my interest in the mine,” Clarke said. “I should have thrown it away. That mine kept getting richer the more we developed it. The syndicate that had purchased Salty’s share tried to freeze me out. We had litigation. Then one of the members of the syndicate died. I picked up his stock. That gave me control. After that I got the other shares. I called Salty in one day and told him I’d bought his stock back for him. I told him I’d give him some and hold the rest in trust. He almost cried with gratitude. For a month he lived here with me and everything was fine. Then he went on a bat again and came back broke. This time he was so ashamed he couldn’t face me. He disappeared into the desert.

“Then I saw a chance to make some more money. I organized the Come-Back Mining Syndicate, started buying up old mines, developing them and bringing them back. It was a hectic life. My wife had social aspirations. I found myself living in a huge house, attending functions for which I cared nothing, eating heavy meals of rich food — Oh well, there’s no need to go into that.

“I’d been a plunger all my life, but I’d made good on my gambles. My wife disapproved of the wild chances I took, so I put virtually all of my property in her name. Then I wanted to go hunt up Salty and go back into the desert. The fact that I even thought of such a thing shocked and hurt her. She wasn’t well at the time. I stayed on. She died. Her will left all of her separate property to her mother, Lillian Bradisson, and to her brother, James Bradisson. I don’t think she had ever anticipated the effect of that will. Because I was the producer she thought I was rich. She didn’t realize that inasmuch as that stock had been a gift, she had left me broke. I went to court, claiming that the stock was really community property, kept in my wife’s name for her protection.”

“And you want me to represent you in that case?” Mason asked with an obvious lack of enthusiasm.

“No,” Clarke said. “The case was settled. The judge who tried it suggested it would be a good thing if we’d quit fighting and split the stock sixty-forty. We did that. There’d been hard feelings engendered over the litigation. Jim Bradisson, my brother-in-law, thinks he’s a business genius. He’d never amounted to anything, but always claimed it was because he’d been hounded by bad luck. My wife was a lot younger than I. He’s only thirty-five, cocksure of himself, conceited. You know the type.”

Mason nodded.

“My wife’s death, the life I’d been leading, the worries, and then that litigation coming on top of everything else was too much for me. I broke all at once. My heart went bad. My nerves went to pieces. Salty heard I was sick, and showed up. Then a peculiar thing developed. It turned out that the stock I’d set aside for Salty, holding it in trust for him, represented the controlling interest in the company.

“Salty was shocked to find how ill I was. He started to bring me back out of it. I think he’s going to do it. I turned the stock over to him so he could vote it. Between us, we keep Jim Bradisson from going absolutely hog-wild. And then Salty had to go and fall in love. I think Mrs. Bradisson engineered it. He’s going to marry. His wife will get that stock just as sure as I’m standing here. I want you to draw up a pooling agreement and—”

He broke off just as the sound made by beating on the bottom of the frying pan with a big spoon announced that Salty had lunch ready.

“I’m going to have Salty sign a pooling agreement by which he votes his stock with mine,” Clarke went on quickly, as the lunch call subsided. “I wanted you to know why I was doing it so you wouldn’t ask too many embarrassing questions. If Salty thought I doubted the woman he’s going to marry, it would hurt him.”

“I see,” Mason said. “That’s all you wanted?”

“No. There’s one other thing, but I can talk that over with you in front of Salty.”

“What is it?”

“It’s a fraud case. I want to hire you to represent the defendant. You’re going to lose the lawsuit. You haven’t a leg to stand on.”

“Who’s the plaintiff?”

“The corporation.”

Mason said, “Just a minute. Are you trying to retain me so you can control both sides of the litigation and—”

“No, no. Don’t misunderstand,” Clarke said. “Win it if you can, but you can’t. You’re licked before you start.”

“Then why go to court?”

For a moment Clarke seemed on the point of giving Mason his full confidence. Then the beating on the frying pan was resumed and Salty’s voice called out, “Come and get it or I’ll throw it out.”

Clarke said abruptly, “I can’t tell you all of the ramifications.”

“And I don’t think I’ll handle the case,” Mason said.

Clarke grinned. “Well, anyway we can eat some lunch and talk it over. I think you’ll handle it when you know more about it. And after a while there’ll be another matter — a mystery you’ll have to solve. And in the meantime Jim Bradisson is buying mines by the dozen from Hayward Small, and I think it’s a situation that stinks. But by all means let’s eat.”