Up for Grabs

Chapter 10

I took my camera, some films, and drove up to Tehachapi.

It wasn’t too difficult to locate the scene of the accident. The police had winched the wrecked car up the hill, and since the tires had been burned off the car, the operation had left quite a furrow. Finding any clues to indicate what had originally happened wasn’t so easy. Tracks had been obliterated.

I followed the detour and picked the place where I thought Mrs. Chester’s car had been crowded off the road. There were tracks indicating that the car had gone end over end down the steep slope for about two hundred yards, then had come to a stop against a big rock. There were bits of broken glass around this rock and places where the paint had scraped off the car.

Studying the tracks, it became evident that someone had wanted the car a lot farther down the hill than it was and had apparently taken a jack and pushed the rear end of the car around so that it cleared the rock and started on down the hill again.

This time the car took a long, erratic journey.

The hill was a good forty-five-degree slope and it went down and down and down, until finally it hit a place where the bottom of the hill terminated in virtually a straight drop of fifty or sixty feet down into a sandy canyon.

Police had been all over the place and had evidently taken lots of pictures. There were burnt-out flashbulbs lying on the ground as well as cigarette stubs and all sorts of shoe tracks, both at the place where the car had crashed against the rock and then farther down the hill at the bottom of the canyon.

It took me five or ten minutes to find the tortuous path do the rocky wall so that I could get down to the place where car had finally come to rest.

Police apparently had winched the car right straight up the side of the rocky wall, letting the car scrape against the rocks, and then had hoisted it completely up the hill to the highway where they must have loaded it on a truck and taken it down to the county sea

Apparently there must have been evidence in the car that the police thought it would be wise to perpetuate.

Raising that car up must have taken a lot of cable, a lot power and been rather an expensive operation — the police really wanted that car, or what was left of it.

The place where the car had been crowded off the road was way up at the top of a high, steep mountain that was studded here and there with rocks but for the most part, covered with a smooth dried grass and stunted sagebrush which is so characteristic of certain hills in Southern California.

After that high place, the road wound on down the mountains at places winding way back from the canyon, then circling around ridge and coming back until, looking down the bottom of the sand wash, I could see where the road came to within a few yards of the termination of the canyon — a distance of perhaps a mile or so.

I studied the terrain carefully, then started walking down the sandy bottom toward the mouth of the wash.

The sides became less precipitous and after a while I ran out of tracks. Police hadn’t gone down the canyon this far.

There were still steep rocky sides, not quite so high, but covered here and there with sagebrush and it was difficult working my way along, but I stayed with it for a few hundred yards.

At length I came to a place where there were tracks still visible in the sand.

It had been some time since those tracks were made, but there they were.

They were a man’s tracks, a man who wore shoes but in that dry, coarse sand there wasn’t enough shape to them for me to find any marks of identification.

About half a mile down the sandy wash, I came to a place where someone had tossed away the stub of a half-smoked cigarette.

I picked it up with the point of my knife, put it in a little cardboard box I had brought along just in case, and was following the tracks on down the wash when a rock rolled down from above me.

I looked up.

Frank Sellers and another man were working their way down the steep slope.

“Hold it, Pint Size,” Sellers said.

I stopped.

The men came on down. The man with Sellers had a badge showing he was a Kern County deputy sheriff. He was fifty and heavy.

Sellers jerked his thumb, said, “This officer is Jim Dawson, a deputy of the Kern County Sheriff’s office. Now what the hell are you doing up here?”

“Looking over the scene of the crime,” I said.

“Why?”

”I’m checking.”

“Checking what?”

“Checking your conclusions.”

“I told you to keep the hell out of this,” Sellers said. “We don’t need any of your help.”

“I’m not so certain,” I told him.

“What do you mean by that crack?”

I said, “You notice these tracks going down the wash way below the place where the car was burned?”

“What about them?”

I said, “Somebody walked down along the side of the barranca until he reached a point where he felt sure no one would be looking for tracks, then he came on down the sandy wash here.”

“You’re nuts!” Sellers said. “Foley Chester pushed his wife off the road up there at the dirt detour. He left his car right up there within a hundred feet of where she went off the road, then he climbed back up, got in his car and drove away. We’ve got the deadwood on him. We’ve got the tracks and we’ve got photographs to prove it.”

“Then who is the man who walked down the barranca here?”

“I don’t know and I don’t care,” Sellers said. “All I know is that we’ve been setting traps all over, stakeouts waiting for Chester to come walking in and you keep going around springing those traps. We can’t afford to have you do it. We’re going to clip your wings. What’ve you got in that box?”

“A cigarette I picked up a hundred yards from here. It’s a half-smoked cigarette, and you can make a classification test on the saliva. There may even be a fingerprint or—”

Sellers grabbed the box, opened it, took a look at the cigarette stub, said, “Baloney! You and your damn theories!”

He threw the stub away.

I said, “You’ll wish you hadn’t done that, Sellers.”

The Kern County deputy wasn’t a bad egg. “Look here, Lam,” he said, “you’ve got an interest in this case. Now, why not put your cards on the table?”

“I’ll put them on the table,” I said. “Foley Chester had an automobile accident. It was his fault. The guy who was injured will hold up the insurance company for an exorbitant settlement once he gets the idea Chester is wanted for murder.

“If Chester killed his wife, that’s one thing. If he didn’t, it’s another, I want to find out which it is before I have to make a settlement.

“So far you’ve got circumstantial evidence. It points to Chester I want to find out if you’ve got all the evidence.

“The only way to evaluate circumstantial evidence is to be sure you have all the circumstantial evidence.”

The deputy was nodding his head.

Sellers said, “Oh, forget it, Jim. You listen to that guy talk and he’ll make you think there never was any corpse, never was any burnt car never was any scraped paint, never was any evidence.”

I said, “Foley Chester goes out on business trips. While he’s gone he leaves no forwarding address. There’s nothing to indicate this isn’t one of his regular business trips. You have some scraped paint on a car that he rented, and a chip from a headlight by way of evidence and that’s just about all.”

“Go on,” the deputy said. “If you have any theories we’d like to hear them.”

I said “All right, you folks went down there in the canyon to look at that burnt automobile.”

“Right.”

“But,” I said, “according to the tracks, you didn’t walk down this sandy wash.”

“Right again.”

“Therefore, you must have climbed back up to the highway.”

“Right the third time.”

“How long did it take you?”

Dawson grinned and ran his hand over his forehead. “I’m not as good at that stuff as I used to be,” he admitted. “I damned near passed out before we got there. I was huffing and puffing up that slope. It seemed like hours.”

“Did it take a half an hour?” I asked.

“It took all of that,” he admitted.

“All right,” I told him, “where that car went off the road it’s on a curve and the road is relatively narrow.”

“Sure,” the deputy said, “it had to be that kind of a place where he elected to push her off, because if there hadn’t been a curve and the road hadn’t been narrow, she could have dodged, put on her brakes, gone ahead or something and kept from getting pushed off right at that particular place where the car would go all the way on down.”

I said “Your theory is that the car was pushed off there. That it rolled down part way and came to a stop against a big boulder. That Chester stopped his car, went on down with a jack handle, clubbed his wife to death, took a jack, presumably out of his own car, jacked the rear end around so that it was clear of that rock It was resting against, then sent the car rolling down to the bottom of the canyon, a long, long, long ways down.”

“That’s right.”

“Then he climbed back to his car and went someplace waiting for it to get daylight. When it got daylight, he came back, parked his car climbed on down to the wreck, soaked rags with gasoline, left the cap off the gasoline tank and set fire to the wreckage.”

“Anything wrong with that?” the deputy asked.

“Then,” I said, “he must have climbed back up to his car.”

“That’s the way we figure it,” the deputy said.

Sellers spat on the ground.

“Then” I said “he must have left his car parked up there on that narrow curve in the detour for something like an hour and a half. You notice those signs that say, NO STOPPING. PARKING FOR EMERGENCY ONLY and all that. How long do you think you could leave a car parked up there on that curve without somebody reporting it to the traffic officers, or some traffic officer coming along and giving you a tag?”

Dawson said, “Say, you just may have something there.”

He turned to Sellers. “Let’s take a look at the traffic citations. There’s just a chance we’ve been overlooking a bet here.”

Sellers said wearily, “Don’t listen to him, just don’t listen to him. You see that road up there?” he asked the deputy.

“Sure,” the deputy said.

“All right, you listen to Lam and pretty quick you’ll be believing that it isn’t a road at all, that it’s just a piece of thread that got stuck to your eyeglass and you’re looking at it with your eyes out of focus and think it’s a road.”

He turned to me and said, “You always have lots of theories, Pint Size. Sometimes they’re okay but this is once we don’t need them. This time we’ve got the deadwood. We know what we’re doing. We’ve got all the evidence we need to convict. What we need now is the defendant. We’re more interested in an arrest than in a dissertation on circumstantial evidence.”

I said, “Circumstantial evidence is not so hot unless you have all the circumstances. The tracks leading down this sandy wash are part of the circumstances you haven’t had. That cigarette is part of the evidence you haven’t had. The murderer couldn’t afford to take a chance on leaving a car parked up at that dangerous section on the detour.”

“He could have gone on down the grade half a mile and left the car there,” Sellers pointed out.

“He could have,” I said, “or he could have had an accomplice who drove the car down the grade. Then all the murderer had to do was to walk down this sandy wash until he came to the place where the grade crosses the wash. It’s a matter of about a mile walk on fairly easy going as opposed to a half hour’s climb in the beating sunlight.”

“Okay, okay,” Sellers said wearily. “He had an accomplice. After we get him, we’ll get a confession and we don’t give a damn whether he had an accomplice or not. What we want is to get him.”

I said. “You go ahead and build up a murder case against Foley Chester in his absence, then Chester shows up and you have a surprise for him, a nice fat murder rap.”

”I’ll say we have a surprise for him,” Sellers said.

“Who knows,” I pointed out, “by the time he gets back you may have distorted the evidence enough so that the guy can’t prove his innocence.”

“What evidence?” Sellers asked sarcastically.

“The evidence of this man walking down the sandy bottom of the barranca, for one thing,” I said. “Figure it out for yourself. The road is coming down a steep ridge. It makes half a dozen loops, but it comes back within a hundred feet of this sandy wash not over a mile and a half down there from where you found the car, and even if you only go half a mile down the wash, the elevation is decreased so that it’s only a couple of hundred yards back to the road.

“If I had gone down to burn up a car. I wouldn’t go climbing back up that steep slope. I wouldn’t leave a car up there where any traffic officer would tag it and question me. I’d set fire to the wrecked car and then I’d walk down the sandy slope of the barranca.”

“And then walk back along the road to the car?” Sellers asked dryly.

“Not if I had an accomplice,” I said.

The deputy turned to Sellers questioningly.

Sellers made a gesture of dismissal, waving his hand at the same time giving a Bronx cheer.

I said, “That cigarette is a brand you don’t hear of very often, and doesn’t do any advertising. It relies on good tobacco. And, if you’re lucky and the evidence hasn’t been handled too much, you can get a blood type from the saliva.”

“Phooey,” Sellers said.

The Kern County deputy walked over to where Sellers. had thrown the cardboard box and the cigarette, looked down at it for a moment, then picked it up and put it back in the cardboard box; put the cardboard box in his pocket.

“Let’s not overlook any bets that the defense could capitalize on,” he said. “Now that Lam has pointed this out, some defense attorney might claim we’d botched up the evidence.”

“Now that Lam has pointed it out, is right,” Sellers said. “Lam, you, get in your automobile and get the hell out of here, and don’t hang around anyplace where Chester is apt to be until we’ve put the cuffs on him. Now, I mean that. That’s a lawful order given you by an officer of the law. You keep the hell away from Chester and from the places where he’s apt to be.

“And now,” he went on with elaborate sarcasm, “since we know how busy you are, there’s no need to detain you. You can just get on about your business... And, if you trigger one of our stakeouts so that Foley Chester gets wise, so help me, I’m going to take a rubber hose and give you a working over that you’ll remember to your dying day. Now, get started!”

I looked in Sellers’ eyes and I got started.

Jim Dawson, the Kern County deputy, was watching me thoughtfully as I climbed up to the road.