“Did you see anything funny out here, Pulaski?”
I tried to remember. Had there been a set of headlights trailing behind me as I’d driven out to the farm?
I shook my head. “I dunno. Nothing I can really say.”
The driver’s door of Lee’s rod was standing half open. I stepped around it and hunkered down to study the dashboard. Yeah, the ignition wires I’d fixed last night had been torn loose again and a hot-wire installed.
Lee came up behind me. “Whoever he is, he sure wants my car bad.”
“Or something in that car,” the Dewlap said, eyeing us suspiciously.
I shook my head. “Nah. He’s after the car.”
“How do you figure that, Pulaski?”
“By using the common sense God gave a gearshift knob, Dooley. The tools and junk under the seat and the stuff in the glove box are all like I left them. Nothing’s been scattered around. This guy went straight to the hot-wire job. He wasn’t searching, he was stealing.”
“Jeez,” Lee breathed, “I’m sure lucky he wasn’t able to get her started.”
“No luck to it, man.” I stood up, digging into my jacket pocket. “Here are your keys and your distributor rotor.”
“Damn! Thanks, Kev! I owe you! You saved my tail again.”
I shrugged. “So stand me a malt next time we hit the diner. Make it a double and we’ll be evens.”
Lee had to get back to bed — the doc wanted him to take it easy for a few days — and his dad had a sad chore to do. Dooley made all the right noises about notifying the county sheriff and keeping his eyes open and we got out of there. As we headed back to our cars, Dooley gave me that old look again.
“All right, Pulaski. What made you pull the rotor on that car the way you did?”
“Hell, Dooley, I dunno.” I lit up from my soft pack of Luckys and offered the night marshal one. “It just sort of seemed like a good idea.”
As Dooley drove off, I sat in the A-Bomb and smoked my smoke right down to the butt, just thinking.
What the heck was it about Lee’s rod that made it so important to somebody? I mean, car thieves might clip a set of wheels for a joyride or to strip down for parts, but if they botched the first grab, they’d just move on to the next one. They wouldn’t stay after that one specific car unless there was something extra-special about it. And there wasn’t anything extra-special about Lee Curtis’s A-V8.
I was certain of that. Lee and I had swapped tools, parts, and help working on our cars and I knew Lee’s rod as well as I knew my own. There just wasn’t anything there.
That we could see, anyway.
I fired up and headed out, hunting for the guy who had sold Lee his wheels.
Lee had bought his Model A from another of the local farmers. Mr. Wright had been using the coupe for a field car until the rear end had gone out on it and he’d been happy to sell the remains to Lee for five dollars. Luckily for me, Mr. Wright was an adult I was in good with. He didn’t have a teenaged daughter, and I’d resuscitated his old Farmall tractor after every other mechanic in the county had given it up as a lost cause.
He brought the Farmall to a stop and looked on as I vaulted the fence and walked across the field to where he was plowing. “Good mornin’, son,” he called over the deliberate pa-chug of the exhaust. “What can I he’p you with?”
“I just got a question for you, Mr. Wright,” I yelled back. “Remember that old Model A you sold to Lee Curtis?”
“Sure. I see him driving it around all the time. It’s a marvel how you boys ever got that old rust bucket runnin’ again.”
“It wasn’t any big deal, Mr. W. But what I need to know is who did you buy that car from?”
Mr. Wright’s leathery wrinkles deepened as he thought back. “Bought it out’n an ad in the Grant County Herald. Mrs. Dugweiler up in Gas City was sellin’ it. Her son, Lenny, come back from the war and bought her a new Chevi’let, so she didn’t need that old A Model, and she sold it.”
The farmer grinned in horse trader’s triumph. “I remember she was askin’ twenty-five for it and I beat her down to twenty.”
“Yeah, well, thanks, Mr. Wright, I appreciate it.” I started back to the road.
“What’s so important about that ol’ car all of a sudden? Why’s ever’body askin’ about it?”
I turned back instantly. “Why do you say that, Mr. Wright? Has somebody else been asking about Lee’s car?”
The farmer nodded. “Not two days back.”
“Uh, what did this guy look like?”
“Nobody I know. Not too big of a fella. A town man, wearin’ a blue suit. Comin’ on my age, I guess. He had gray hair, anyway. He was askin’ about that old A Model and what I’d done with it. I told him, but I didn’t take to him much. He had a mean eye.”
From the Wright farm it was up to Mrs. Dugweiler’s place in Gas City. After explaining that I wasn’t a Mormon, a Jehovah’s Witness, or other such tool of the Devil and why I was there, she told me her late husband had bought the coupe from Ned Trubman back in Fairmont. After thanking her for the information and her kind invitation to come to Jesus I headed back down Aylsbury Pike.
After standing on Ned Trubman’s front porch for half an hour, listening to how that damn Ford was the biggest mistake he’d ever made and how he’d never drive anything but a Graham-Page again, I found out that he’d bought the car from a Mrs. Kane over on Walnut Street.
And guess what? Everywhere I went that morning, some little guy with a blue suit, gray hair, and mean eyes had gone before.
I hit the dead end on Walnut Street. Mrs. Kane didn’t live there anymore. A neighbor said she’d left town about ten years back and nobody knew where she’d gone.
There was something about the name “Kane,” though. I’d heard it talked up around town for some reason I couldn’t quite remember. And there’d been something funny in the way her former neighbors had looked at me when I’d asked about the lady.
A few minutes later I was parking the A-Bomb on Main Street. I climbed one flight up over the Rexall drugstore to the office of Mr. Nolan Everts, attorney-at-law.
I could hear a typewriter clattering away inside and as I was pushing through the door, the pretty brown-haired, blue-eyed lady seated at the secretary’s desk looked up at me and smiled.
“Hello, son.”
“Hi, Mom.” I flopped down in one of the scarred reception-room chairs.
Mom had been a top-flight legal secretary in Memphis before she’d married Dad, and she kept her hand in working part-time for Fairmont’s best, and, for that matter, only, lawyer. Today was a Saturday, but she’d come in for a couple of hours to take care of some odds and ends.
“Do you know anything about some people named Kane who used to live over on Walnut?”
I was an odd kind of a teenager, I guess. I had this peculiar notion that my parents actually knew about stuff.
My mother gave me the same odd look as the Kanes’ former neighbors. “Why? What about them?”
Over breakfast that morning I’d told my folks about Lee getting clobbered. Now I filled Mom in on what else I’d learned.
“They used to own Lee’s car. And people act kind of weird whenever I ask about them.”
“I’m not at all surprised, Kevin. Albert Kane went to prison for the wire-mill payroll theft.”
Now I knew why that name had sounded familiar. It’d happened a couple of years before we’d moved to Fairmont, but it had been the biggest deal to hit town since they’d brought in the gas wells.
“This Kane guy was the one who robbed the mill?”
“It was a burglary, Kevin. Not a robbery.” Mom likes to be precise about things like that.