And You Will Find Love

California, Winter 1936 - Fall 1937

In the days that followed the airport and lumberyard fires, arson investigators from Bakersfield questioned both Barbara and Moose. Though reluctant to tell them about her encounter with Chet Armstrong the night before the fire, she did not want to withhold the truth from them. She told her whole story about Chet, then Moose told his.

"Your statements make a strong case against Armstrong as the arsonist, because of revenge," the chief investigator said afterward. "But so far, it is only circumstantial. He definitely had a motive, and you as witnesses place him at the airport the night before the fires. But there is no evidence he was at either the airport or the lumberyard the night of the fires. Nor any evidence he set them. We'll be looking into it, be assured."

"I'll look into it, too!" Moose put in. "Be assured of that!"

"How badly did you hit him?" a policeman asked.

"I didn't actually hit him. I just tossed him against some trash cans."

"He then got up and walked away?"

"Yeah, but I guess it was more like a limp, than a walk."

Moose was cautioned not to take matters into his own hands by going after Chet Armstrong. Barbara also asked him not to, but feared he would anyway.

Meanwhile, police were on the trail of hard evidence to tie Chet to the fires. It was learned that a rancher near Lancaster who had heard about the search for an arsonist reported an incident to investigators. He had seen an expensive foreign-made red sports car speeding off the highway and onto his property after midnight on the night of the fires. A naked young man had stopped the car, gotten out, and stole his bibbed overalls off a clothes line where they had been drying. The thief had been limping, then got back into the car and sped off again.

Mohave police, with the cooperation of area authorities, checked with used car dealers near major airports as far away as Los Angeles and San Diego. They learned that on the afternoon of the fire, a dealer in San Diego had rented a red 1934 Alfa Romero to Chester Armstrong, Jr. of Chicago. It was never returned, but found abandoned two days later in a ravine near Glendale. Police auto theft and arson investigators in Chicago had been notified to question Armstrong.

Police also circulated requests for information on a man with a disfigured face who might have been seen in the area. A freight yard worker on the Atcheson, Topeka, and Santa Fe railroad near Mohave reported that he had seen such a man. A strongly built but poorly dressed man with no right ear and half a left nose had jumped down from a Phoebe Snow boxcar just south of Mohave. If his memory served him right, the gandydancer said, it happened the night before the airport fire.