He was in the clear.
What had Junkins seen behind him on that country road outside of Blairsville? A red and white car, I thought. Maybe empty, maybe driven by a corpse.
A goose ran squawking over my grave and my arms broke in cold bumps.
Seven people dead.
It had to end. If for no other reason than because maybe killing gets to be a habit. If Michael and Regina wouldn’t go along with Arnie’s crazy California plans, either of them or both of them might be next. Suppose he walked up to Leigh in study hall period three next Tuesday and asked her to marry him and Leigh simply said no? What might she see idling at the kerb when she got home that afternoon?
Jesus Christ, I was scared.
My mother poked her head in. “Dennis, you’re not eating.”
I looked up. “I got reading the paper. Guess I’m not that hungry, Mom.”
“You have to eat right or you’re not going to get well. Want me to make you oatmeal?”
My stomach churned at the thought, but I smiled as I shook my head. “No—but I’ll eat a big lunch.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
“Denny, do you feel okay? You’ve looked so tired and peaked lately.”
“I’m fine, Mom.” I widened my smile to show her how fine I was, and then I thought of her getting out of her blue Reliant-K at the Monroeville Mall, and two rows back was a white-over-red car, idling. In my mind’s eye I saw her walk in front of it, purse over her arm, saw Christine’s transmission lever suddenly drop into DRIVE—
“Are you sure? It’s not your leg bothering you, is it?”
“No.”
“Have you taken your vitamins?”
“Yes.”
“And your rosehips?”
I burst out laughing. She looked irritated for a moment, then smiled. “Ye’re a sassbox, Dennis Guilder,” she said in her best Irish accent (which is pretty good, since her mom came from the auld sod), “and there’s no kivver to ye.” She went back to the sewing room, and in a moment the irregular bursts of her typewriter began again.
I picked up the newspaper and looked at the photo of Junkins’s twisted auto. DEATH CAR, the caption beneath read.
Try this, I thought: Junkins is interested in a lot more than finding out who sold illegal fireworks and cigarettes to Will Darnell. Junkins is a state detective, and state detectives work on more than one case at a time. He could have been trying to find out who killed Moochie Welch. Or he could have been—
I crutched over to the sewing room and knocked.
“Yes?”
“Sorry to bother you, Mom—”
“Don’t be silly, Dennis.”
“Are you going downtown today?”
“I might be. Why?”
“I’d like to go to the library.”
By three o’clock that Saturday afternoon it had begun to snow again. I had a slight headache from staring into the microfilm reader, but I had what I wanted. My hunch had been on the money— not that it had been any great intuitive leap.
Junkins had been in charge of the hit-and-run that had killed Moochie Welch, all right… and he had also been in charge of investigating what had happened to Repperton, Trelawney, and Bobby Stanton. He’d have to be one dumb cop not to read Arnie’s name between the lines of what was happening.
I leaned back in the chair, snapped off the reader, and closed my eyes. I tried to make myself be Junkins for a minute. He suspects Arnie of being involved with the murders. Not doing them, but involved somehow. Does he suspect Christine? Maybe he does. On the TV detective shows, they’re always great at identifying guns, typewriters used to write ransom notes, and cars involved in hit-and-runs. Flakes and scrapes of paint, maybe…
Then the Darnell bust looms up. For Junkins, that’s nothing but great. The garage will be closed and everything in it impounded. Maybe Junkins suspects…
What?
I worked harder at imagining. I’m a cop. I believe in legitimate answers, sane answers, routine answers. So what do I suspect? After a moment, it came.
An accomplice, of course. I suspect an accomplice. It has to be an accomplice. Nobody in his right mind would suspect that the car was doing it herself. So…?
So after the garage is closed, Junkins brings in the best technicians and lab men he can lay his hands on. They go over Christine from stem to stern, looking for evidence of what has happened. Reasoning as Junkins would reason trying to, anyway—I think that there has to be some evidence. Hitting a human body is not like hitting a feather pillow. Hitting the crash barrier out at Squantic Hills is not like hitting a feather pillow, either.
So what do they find, these experts in vehicular homicide?
Nothing.
They find no dents, no touch-up repainting, no blood stains. They find no embedded brown paint-flakes from the Squantic Hills road barrier that was broken off. In short, Junkins finds absolutely no evidence that Christine was used in either crime. Now jump ahead to Darnell’s murder. Does Junkins hustle over to the garage the next day to check on Christine? I would, if it was me. The side of a house isn’t a feather pillow either, and a car that has just crashed through one must have sustained major damage, damage that simply couldn’t have been repaired overnight. And when he gets there, what does he find?
Only Christine, without so much as a ding in her fender.
That led to another deduction, one that explained why Junkins had never put a stakeout on the car, I hadn’t been able to understand that, because he must have suspected that Christine was involved. But in the end, logic had ruled him—and perhaps it had killed him, as well. Junkins hadn’t put a stakeout on her because Christine’s alibi, while mute, was every bit as iron-clad as those of her owner. If he had inspected Christine immediately following the murder of Will Darnell, Junkins must have concluded that the car could not have been involved, no matter how persuasive the evidence to the contrary seemed.
Not a scratch on her. And why not? It was just that Junkins hadn’t had all the facts. I thought about the milometer that ran backward, and Arnie saying, Just a glitch. I thought of the nest of cracks in the windscreen that had seemed to grow smaller and draw inward—as if they were running backward too. I thought of the haphazard replacement of parts that seemed totally without rhyme or reason. Last of all, I thought of my nightmare ride home on Sunday night—old cars that looked new clumped up at the kerb outside houses where parties were going on, the Strand Theatre intact again in all of its yellow brick solidity, the half-built development that had been completed and occupied by Libertyville suburbanites twenty years ago.
Just a glitch.
I thought that not knowing about that glitch was what had really killed Rudolph Junkins.
Because, look: if you own a car long enough, things wear out no matter how well You take care of it, and they usually go randomly. A car comes off the assembly line like a newborn baby, and just like a newborn, it starts rolling down an Indian gauntlet of years. The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune crack a battery here, bust a tie-rod there, freeze a bearing somewhere else. The carburettor float sticks, a tyre blows, there’s an electrical short, the upholstery starts getting ratty.
It’s like a movie. And if you could run the film backward—
“Will there be anything else, sir?” the Records Clerk asked from behind me, and I nearly screamed.
Mom was waiting for me in the main lobby, and she chattered most of the way home about her writing and her new class, which was disco dancing. I nodded and replied in most of the right places. And I thought that if Junkins had brought in his technicians, his high-powered auto specialists from Harrisburg, they had probably overlooked an elephant while looking for a needle. I couldn’t blame them, either. Cars just don’t run backward, like a movie in reverse. And there are no such things as ghosts or revenants or demons preserved in Quaker State motor oil.
Believe in one, believe in all, I thought, and shuddered.