“Fasten your seat belts,” the pilot said.
The deputy fastened my seat belt. “It would have been a lot better if you’d done it the easy way,” he said.
I didn’t say. anything.
“Now, when we get down there, you’re not going to make a kick about going to the hotel where this clerk can take a look at you, are you?”
I said, “Brother, you’re the one that’s doing it the hard way. I told you I’d go down tomorrow morning, walk into the hotel or any place you wanted, and let the fellow take a look at me. You got hard — I’m not going to any hotel. If you take me down, you put me in jail, and I tell my story to the newspaper boys. If you want anybody to identify me, you put me in a line-up, and have the identification made that way.”
“Oh, it’s like that, is it?”
“It’s like that.”
“Now, I’m damn sure you’re the one who went in the hotel.”
“You’re just knocking your case higher than a kite,” I said. “The newspapers are going to play it up that you charged me with murder, that the hotel clerk made an identification from a photograph—”
“A tentative identification,” the officer corrected.
“Call it whatever you want to,” I said. “When he tries to identify the real man, there’s going to be hell to pay — and you’re going to catch it.”
He got sore then, and I thought he was going to paste me one, but he changed his mind, went over, and sat down. The pilot looked back, made certain our seat belts were fastened, gunned the motors, took the plane down the field, turned, came up into the wind, and took off.
It was smooth flying. I leaned back against the cushions. Occasional air beacons leered up at me with red eyes that blinked ominously. At intervals, clustered lights marked the location of little towns. I’d look down and think how people, snuggled in warm beds, would hear the roaring beat of the motor echoing back from the roof, roll over sleepily, and say, “There goes the mail,” without realizing it was a plane taking a man on a death gamble, with the cards stacked against him.
The pilot turned around and made signs to us when we started over the mountains. I gathered he meant it was going to be rough. He did. We went way up to try and get over it, but instead of going over it, we went through it. I felt like a wet dishrag when we came slanting down to the airport.
The pilot landed at the far end. The D.A.’s man got up, came over, and unfastened one end of the handcuffs. He said ominously, “Now, listen, Lam, you’re going to get into a car, and you’re going to that hotel. There isn’t going to be any fuss about it, and no publicity.”
“You can’t do that,” I said. “If you’re arresting me, go ahead and book me.”
“I’m not arresting you.”
“Then you had no right to bring me down here.”
He grinned, and said, “You’re here, ain’t you?”
The plane turned and taxied up to the hangars. I heard the sound of a siren, and a car came up. A red spotlight blazed its beam to a focus right on the door of the plane.
The man from the D.A.’s office jabbed me in the small of the back. “Don’t act rough now,” he said. “It would be a shame to have an argument. You’ve been a nice little man so far. Just keep on going.”
They turned the spotlight into my eyes so it would blind me. The deputy pushed me out. Hands grabbed me, and shoved me forward, then I heard Bertha Cool’s voice saying, “What are you doing with this man?”
Somebody said, “Beat it, lady. This guy’s under arrest.”
“What’s he charged with?”
“None of your damn business.”
Bertha Cool said, “All right,” to somebody who was just a shadowy figure in the darkness, and the man stepped forward and said, “I’ll make it my business. I’m an attorney. I’m representing this man.”
“Beat it,” the officer told him, “before something happens to your face.”
“All right, I’ll beat it, but first let me give you this nice little folded paper. That’s a writ of habeas corpus issued by a superior judge ordering you to produce this man in court. This other paper is a written demand that you take him immediately and forthwith before the nearest and most accessible magistrate for the purpose of fixing bail. In case you’re interested, the nearest and most accessible magistrate happens to be a justice of the peace in this township. He’s sitting in his office right now, with the lights on and his court open waiting to fix the bail.”
“We don’t have to take him to no magistrate,” the man said.
“Where are you going to take him?”
“To jail.”
“I wouldn’t advise you to go anywhere without stopping to see the nearest and most accessible magistrate,” the lawyer said.
Bertha Cool said, “Now listen, you, this man’s working for me. I’m running a respectable detective agency. He was working. You yanked him off the job and chased him down here. Don’t think for a minute you’re going to pull this stuff and get away with it.”
The man from the district attorney’s office said, “Just a minute, boys. Stick around.” He said to the lawyer Bertha Cool had, “Let’s talk things over a minute.”
Bertha Cool horned in on the conference. Her diamonds caught the rays from the spotlight, and made blood-red scintillations as she moved her hands. “I’m in on this, too,” she said.
“Now listen,” the D.A.’s man said, obviously worried and pretty much on the defensive, “we don’t want to put any charges against this boy. For all we know, he’s just a nice kid that hasn’t done a thing in the world, but we’re trying to find out whether he’s the man who went into Jed Ringold’s room the night he was murdered. If he isn’t, that’s all there is to it. If he is, we’re going to charge him with murder.”
“So what?” Bertha Cool asked truculently.
The D.A. man looked at her and tried to outstare her. Bertha Cool pushed her face toward him, and, with her eyes glittering belligerently, demanded again and in a louder voice, “So what? You heard me, you worm. Go ahead and answer.”
The D.A.’s officer turned to the lawyer. “There isn’t any need for a habeas corpus, and there isn’t any need to take him before a magistrate because we don’t want to charge him.”
“How did you get him down here if he wasn’t arrested?” Bertha asked.
He tried ignoring her question, and said to the lawyer, “Now the clerk at the hotel takes a look at this guy’s picture and says he thinks this is the bird. All we want to do is to take him into the hotel. The clerk takes a look at him. Now that’s reasonable enough, ain’t it?”
For a fraction of a second the lawyer hesitated. Bertha Cool reached out with an arm and shoved him to one side as easily as though he’d been just an empty bag of clothes. She pushed her face up in front of the deputy from the D.A.’s office and said, “Well, it isn’t all right, not by a damn sight.”
A little group had gathered. Passengers from one of the airliners that had come in, a few of the ground crew, and a couple of aviators. The red spotlight was out of my eyes now, and I could look around and see their faces grinning. They were getting a great kick out of Bertha Cool.
Bertha said, “We know our rights. You can’t identify a man that way. If you’re going to charge him with murder, you lock him up. You put him in a line-up, and you be goddam certain there are two or three other men in that line-up who have the same build and physical characteristics as the man you’re looking for. Then you bring the clerk in and let him look at the line-up. If he picks Donald, that’s an identification. If he picks somebody else, that’s different.”
The D.A.’s man was bothered.