“Kinda independent, ain’t you, buddy?”
I looked him in the eyes and said, “You’re damn right. If you want me to go voluntarily, that’s the way I’ll go. If you want to advertise it in the newspapers that the clerk has made a bum identification, you can take me.”
“Okay,” the man said. “Get in. We’re taking you.”
The special investigator for the district attorney’s office who was waiting at the airport wasn’t entirely easy in his mind. My attitude made him a lot less easy, but he was good and sore at the idea that I was going to stay overnight in a hotel and wouldn’t travel by plane at night. He kept trying to argue with me. I told him simply that I was afraid to travel by air at night.
The officer couldn’t figure it out. “Now, listen, Lam, if you want to get back on the job, this is the way to do it. I’ve got this plane here, and it’s chartered. I can put you under arrest and take you back if I have to and—”
“You can if you put a charge against me.”
“I don’t want to put a charge against you.”
“All right, then, we leave in the morning.”
After a while he said to the officers who had brought me down, “Keep an eye on him. I’m going to put through a telephone call.”
He went into a booth and put through a long-distance call. It took him about twenty minutes. The highway patrol and I sat in the lobby of the hotel. They tried to sell me on the idea of going back and getting it over with.