Somewhere a drunk was talking to himself, a thick-tongued soliloquy which ran on and on and on aimlessly, monotonously and unintelligibly. An automobile thief in the next cell was snoring peacefully. I figured it must be midnight. I tried to think of how hot it had been coming across the desert. My thoughts couldn’t keep me warm. I thought of Alma—

I heard bolts in the jail door slide back, then I heard the sound of low voices and shuffling feet. Down in the office room, there was the scraping of chair legs along the cement floor. I could hear the scratching of matches and the hum of low-voiced conversation. A door closed and shut out all the noise.

Four or five minutes later, I heard steps coming down the long corridor. The jailer said, “Wake up, Lam. They want you downstairs.”

“I want to sleep.”

“Well, come on downstairs just the same.”

I got up out of bed. It had been too cold to take my clothes off. The jailer said, “Come on. Don’t keep them waiting. Shake a leg.”

I followed him down to the office. The district attorney, the sheriff, the deputy district attorney, a shorthand reporter, and two Los Angeles policemen were waiting in the room. A chair had been reserved for me facing a bright light. The sheriff said, “Sit down over in that chair, Donald.”

“The light hurts my eyes.”

“You’ll get accustomed to it after a minute. We want to be where we can see you.”

“Well, you don’t need to put my eyes out looking at me.”

The sheriff said, “If you tell the truth, Donald, we won’t have to study your facial expressions to find out when you’re lying. If you keep on lying, we’re going to have to watch you more closely.”

“What makes you think I haven’t told the truth?”

He laughed and said, “You’ve told just enough of the truth, Donald, to convince us that you know what we want to know; but you’ve stopped a long ways short of telling the truth.”

He moved the light a little so that the glare wasn’t directly in my eyes.

“Now, Donald,” the sheriff said. “These gentlemen are from Los Angeles. They’ve come all the way across the desert to hear your story. They know enough to know that you’ve been lying, but some of what you said is true. Now we want the rest of it.”

He talked with the fatherly tone one uses in dealing with a half idiot. Cops usually use that approach in talking with crooks—and the crooks usually fall for it.

I pretended to fall for it, too.

“That’s all I know,” I said sullenly. “What I told you today.”