Steve’s dad showed up at the sheriff’s office, looking kind of blasted, like someone you might see wandering around in the road after a bad car crash. Because of Steve’s otherwise clean record, and because he was still three months short of being eighteen, they released him to his parents. At ten the next morning, a hearing would be held in Juvenile Court there in Marion.
I had a hunch this would only be a formality. The way things were sounding around the sheriff’s office, they were already reserving a bunk for Steve at the County Youth Farm. I could only give Steve a thumbs-up as he and his dad took off. Then I headed for home feeling lower than a snake’s navel.
It was almost three in the morning by the time I got back to Fairmont and the lights were glowing in the kitchen as I wheeled the A-Bomb into the alley behind our house. I was running way past due and the folks were waiting up for me. For once I was glad.
Dad was a big, old, raw-boned, pan-faced Polack with dark hair and eyes and the only beard in town worn by anyone under the age of sixty. Some folks thought his beard gave him sort of a sinister air, kind of like the classic Bolshevik bomb thrower. (In fact, during one kind of heated election down at the Railroad Workers Brotherhood, Big Jed Sullivan actually accused Dad of being a Bolshevik. However, Jed apologized after Dad threw him down two flights of stairs, so there weren’t any hard feelings about it.)
Mom was a lot more like me, brown-haired and blue-eyed and on the short and quick side. She could do smiles as well as Dad did scowls, but even she was frowning as I came through the back door.
Dad gave me one of those looks from his seat at the kitchen table. “Three o’clock,” he said.
“Yeah, Dad, I know,” I replied, hanging my ponyhide jacket up by the back door. “But for a change I got a good reason.”
I pulled a chair up to the table and laid out the whole story. By the time I had finished, Mom had materialized a piece of cherry pie and a glass of milk at my elbow, so I knew all had been forgiven.
Dad shook his head. “That doesn’t sound like the Steve Roccardi I know. Leon Roccardi is a good man, and I haven’t heard anything different about his son. A little bit hotheaded maybe, but no kind of thief.”
“I know his mother, and I can’t see it, either,” Mom added, “but people can surprise you at times.”
“Ah, come on, Mom! Ain’t no way! Somebody must be setting Steve up on this thing!”
“That’s a pretty melodramatic claim, son,” she replied. “Most people will prefer the simpler explanation that your friend did commit the burglary.”
“But there isn’t a single soul in town who can say they actually saw Steve bust into Kennedy’s store. Even the night watchman only saw a light in the window. All the evidence is — what d’you call...”
“Circumstantial,” Mom finished. “That’s true, but a lot of people have been convicted on circumstantial evidence alone. All the prosecuting attorney needs is enough of it. And the fact that some of the stolen items were found in his car without a valid explanation is going to be very powerful.”
Mom worked as a legal secretary before she married Dad, so she was hep to all of this courtroom jazz.
“It could have been planted on him, Mom,” I protested.
“By Steve’s own admission, he and Julie were the only people in or around his car from the time of the burglary on. You also have to remember that the boy had a powerful motive beyond mere theft. Retaliation against Mr. Kennedy over the matter of his daughter. And as your father said, Steve apparently does have a reputation as a hothead.”
“He also has the reputation of running with a pretty wild crowd,” Dad added, throwing in another of his patented pointed looks.
“Jeez, Dad! Come on! There’s all the difference in the world between, uh, engine testing out on the Alsbury Pike and knocking off a jewelry store!”
“You know that and I know that, Kevin. But a lot of people around here aren’t going to see it that way. Young people these days seem to have a knack for making older people nervous.”
“Yeah, well, that’s their tough luck!” I shot back. “I don’t give a damn — sorry, Mom — about what the people around this town think. Somehow Steve’s being sold up the river for something he didn’t do! And if nobody else is going to do anything about it, then I am!”
“Good enough.” Dad stole my last forkful of cherry pie. “You’d better get at it, then. It looks to be a job of work.”
Man, that left me with my jaw hanging.
“If you genuinely believe that your friend is innocent,” Dad continued, “then probably you’re the best man to go about proving it. You know how he thinks, what he does, where he goes. You know the situation and the people involved. If anyone can prove that Steve Roccardi is, in fact, being railroaded for this burglary, likely it will be you.”
That’s my father. Go to him and say that you’re setting out to do just about any damn fool stunt you can name and he’ll probably say, “Have fun.”
But once you’ve made your brag, he expects you to deliver on it. A thirteen-year-old kid found that out when he announced at the dinner table that he was going to build himself a soup job.
“Yeah, I guess so.” I got up from the table and took my pie plate and glass to the sink. “I guess I’d better turn in. I’ve got some thinking to do.”
“I imagine so, son. Good night and good luck.”
As I climbed the stairs to my room, I heard my mom say quietly, “Joe, are you sure it was such a good idea to encourage Kevin to get involved in this thing? It could cause trouble.”
Dad gave a short laugh. “I never worry about my sons causing trouble, Mary. Most of the great men of history have been troublemakers. My concern is that our boys always do what’s right. And by God, standing up for a friend can’t be wrong.”
It was easy to spot the dividing line between my brother’s half of our room and mine; the pictures of the football and baseball players stopped and the cars started. You could also get a clue from the pinups. Frank liked Vargas while I was an Elvgren man.
Frank halfway woke up while I was getting ready for bed and grumbled at me and I told him, in a brotherly fashion, to kiss my ass. Switching our radio on low, I dialed in to the colored music station in Indianapolis. With a whisper of rhythm and blues for background I flopped on my bed to do that heavy thinking.
I wasn’t a big whodunit fan, so I wasn’t really up on the whole detective deal. Cars took up most of my free time. (Girls, too, but that’s another deal altogether.) But one thing I had learned from putting the A-Bomb together is that you have to be methodical. If you aren’t working to a plan, you’re in trouble from the start.
Another thing that I’d learned is that you have to have a starting point to work from. With the A-Bomb, it had been a Riley four-port racing head for a Ford Model B engine that I picked up for five bucks at a junk sale. The whole rest of the car sort of grew outward from that one component as I mixed and matched parts and figured out what worked and what didn’t.
I wondered if I could apply the same technique here? And what kind of starting part did I have to work from?
All I had at the moment was this sense that there was no way my buddy Steve could be guilty of the crime he was being charged with.
And you know something funny? That was enough.
Oh, it took awhile to figure out how Steve had been set up and by who. And it took even longer to figure out what to do about it. The sky beyond our bedroom window had gone from black to gray to blue and the birds were yelling about how neat the new day was going to be by the time I had it put together.
I rolled out of bed then and got dressed. I was running empty on sleep but that didn’t matter. Steve’s Juvenile Court hearing was set for ten o’clock and there was a lot to get organized before then.