“Didn’t her dad have anything to say about that?”
Julie smiled one of her “for Steve only” smiles and rested her hand on his shirt collar. “We got lucky. A little while ago Dad was called down to the store for some reason and I sneaked out the back door when I heard Steve’s car drive past. I’m sure Mom’s called Dad by now, but I don’t care. They’ve already grounded me till I’m forty, so what else are they going to do?”
I gave her a thumbs-up. “Very slick, chick. That’s flyin’ with Doolittle.”
I dig hanging around with fighters.
I’d just started to think about my friends’ problems when one of my own showed up. Gravel crunched out in the parking strip and a black Plymouth sedan with a police badge on the door stopped in front of the diner. A few moments later, the massive slope-shouldered silhouette of Officer Hyram Dooley loomed in the doorway.
Dooley was Fairmont’s night marshal and he’d been playing Elmer Fudd to my Bugs Bunny ever since the A-Bomb and I had started to develop our rapid reputation on the local back roads. He’d never caught us, of course, but hey, he was always in there pitching.
I didn’t pack a grudge about it. In a way, having somebody like the old Dewlap hanging on your tailpipes wasn’t such a bad thing. It kept a guy from getting sloppy.
Dooley’s assistant marshal followed him into the diner and the two cops eyed us balefully, trying to look ominous.
I sighed and snubbed out my smoke before they could tell me to and rotated my stool to face our local justice merchants. “Top o’ the evenin’, Officer Dooley, and what can I be doin’ for ye this foin night?”
My natural suspicion was that this had to do with my little acceleration contest out by the airport. However, I was wrong.
“Nothing, for once, Pulaski,” Dooley growled back, “beyond keeping your smart mouth shut and staying out of our way. I’ve got business with Roccardi here.”
Steve’s brows came together. “With me? What’s the problem?”
“No problem, Roccardi. We just want to talk to you.”
When a cop tells you there’s “no problem” in that tone of voice, then, yeah, there is a problem.
Julie, Eddie, and I looked on as they leaned Steve against the counter for a pat-down. “All right, Roccardi. Where were you at about ten-thirty tonight?” the Dewlap demanded.
“Uh, I was just around.” Even to Julie and me it sounded lame, and we knew what he was talking about.
“What do you mean by ‘around’?” Dooley snapped.
“I mean that I was in my car just cruising around. I couldn’t say exactly where I was at ten-thirty. Somewhere east of town, I think.”
“Or maybe you were down around Main Street at about that time?” Dooley’s sidekick chimed in, double-teaming Steve.
“No, I was clear out of town.” Steve started getting a little hot under the collar. “Will somebody tell me what’s going on around here? Why all the questions?”
Dooley answered with another one. “You mind if we have a look at your car, son?”
“Why?”
“Do you have a reason you don’t want anyone looking at your car?” This time it was an accusation, not a question.
Steve shook his head. “No! But I wish somebody would tell me what you’re looking for first.”
“Don’t worry,” Dooley replied flat-voiced. “You’ll know if we find it.” He gave his assistant constable a curt nod and the second officer headed out to shake down Steve’s rod.
It got real quiet in the diner. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Steve’s fingers start to curl into fists. “Be cool, man,” I murmured. “Be cool.”
“Listen to your friend,” Dooley growled. “For once, Pulaski is making sense.”
It didn’t take them long to score.
Dooley’s partner came back inside, holding up a plastic-handled screwdriver. “I found this under the front seat,” he announced. “It’s the same make as the screwdriver we found in the store, maybe part of a set. I found these, too.”
He held out his other hand. Gold gleamed in his palm.
Dooley dug a sheet of paper out of his shirt pocket. Flipping it open, he methodically consulted it. “One opal ring in a gold setting... one gold chain necklace... two ladies’ wrist watches... Yeah, this is some of the stuff on the list Kennedy gave us.”
He turned to Steve and unhooked the handcuffs from his belt. “Okay, Roccardi. You’re under arrest. Don’t make any more trouble for yourself by making more trouble for us.”
It was a hard call to make on who was the more shook, Steve, me, or Julie.
“Under arrest!” she cried, her voice rising as she came to her feet. “What for? What for!”
Dooley finished slapping the cuffs on my bewildered buddy. “Somebody broke into your father’s store earlier tonight and cleaned the place out. And we’ve just found some of the stolen jewelry in your boyfriend’s car.”
In a way, I was kind of glad Dooley had moved so fast in making with the bracelets. Otherwise, for sure Steve would have started swinging. “I don’t know what you’re talking about!” Steve yelled back over his shoulder. “I don’t know where that stuff came from!”
“You should, kid,” Dooley said with a heavy, wet-concrete kind of satisfaction. “You were hatching it in that jalopy of yours. You must have got careless when you cleaned your take out from under your seat. But that sums up punks like you and Pulaski here, real careless.”
Things got kind of crazy after that. I called a friend of Steve’s and mine to come out and pick up his car. Then, leaving the T-bolt’s keys with Eddie, I drove a halfways-hysterical Julie Kennedy back to her house. After that, I set out to get the straight skinny on what was going on with Steve.
I was strictly nowhere with the Fairmont law, but the night deputy at the Grant County Sheriff’s Office up in Marion was a big circle-track fan. He got the dope for me.
Late in the evening, Ben Schyler, the night watchman hired by the Fairmont Merchants’ Association, had been making his rounds along Main when he had spotted what looked like a light inside of Kennedy’s Quality Watch & Jewelry. He’d crossed the street to have a closer look and, just as he was starting to check the front door, he heard what he said was a hot rod blasting away from behind the building.
Mr. Schyler is kind of stove up, so it took him a minute to get around to the alley in back. By that time, the car was long gone but the busted rear door of Kennedy’s store was standing wide open.
Mr. Schyler next yelled for Dooley. When the night marshal had shown up, they’d gone into the store to find that several of the display cases had been cleaned out. They also found an eighteen-inch screwdriver that had been used as a jimmy and a two-cell flashlight, apparently dropped when the burglar had fled the scene.
Steve Roccardi’s name had been scratched on both.
Steve had admitted that the flash and the screwdriver were his, but he had no idea of how they could have gotten into Kennedy’s store. The last time he’d seen them, they’d been rattling around under the seats of the T-bolt.
Likewise, he had no explanation of how those bits and pieces of stolen loot had ended up in his car. He also couldn’t provide the name of anyone who could prove his whereabouts between his gassing up at Payne’s service station at eight o’clock and his arrival at Julie’s house shortly before midnight. Between those hours he’d just been a set of headlights on a back road.
The Grant County Sheriff’s fingerprint man was going to check out Kennedy’s store in the morning. Too bad I already knew what he was going to find.
It looked rank. Steve would have had more than enough loose time to bust in the store and hide the loot before picking up Julie.