She went over to the row of old wooden filing cabinets and removed a big expandable folder full of paperwork. “Mr. Everts was Albert Kane’s defense attorney, not that the defense proved very successful.”
Mom went over the case with me. The Fairmont wire mill was the town’s biggest employer, and back in 1938, on a night before a payday, someone had busted into the mill’s office and used a cutting torch on the company safe. Better than twenty thousand dollars had been lifted, long bread for a town just digging out of the depression.
The Grant County sheriff and the state police had worked the case, but after three weeks of investigation, nothing had turned up. Then the wife of Albert Kane, one of the machinists at the mill, had blown the horn on her old man.
She recanted on the alibi she had originally given for her husband, saying he’d threatened her into lying to the police. Then she’d nailed the lid down on the coffin by handing over a number of bills with serial numbers matching those stolen from the factory safe.
Apparently the lady didn’t fancy taking the fall on an accessory charge. Apparently she didn’t fancy her husband very much, either, because when the opportunity presented itself to send him on a long voyage up the creek, she took advantage of it.
Kane was already under suspicion, thanks to his being a dab hand with a torch, and the case against him came together pretty rapidly. He was found holding some of the hot bills as well, and the state crime lab matched some of the marks made on the safe with tools in Kane’s crib at the mill.
Kane got sent over the hill to the big house, but the wire mill never got its money back.
“Kane refused to reveal where he’d hidden the bulk of the payroll,” Mom finished, closing the file. “That’s probably why he was given ten years without parole. Mrs. Kane was granted a divorce shortly after her husband was sent to prison and I gather she moved away to start over again somewhere else.”
“After selling off everything around the old homestead, including the family wheels,” I mused.
“I gather you think this has something to do with the theft of the Curtis boy’s car?”
“I dunno, Mom. But there are a couple of interesting tens showing up here: a burglary ten years back and a thief who took a ten-year fall for it. And that big wad of dough is still drifting around loose.”
I shoved out of my chair. “See you at dinner tonight, Mom.”
She lifted an eyebrow at me in that special, loving, long-suffering-mother way of hers. “Are you getting yourself into trouble again, Kevin?”
I leaned over the desk and kissed her on the forehead. “I dunno yet. I’ll keep you posted.”
My next stop was on the second floor of the Jefferson Street boardinghouse.
“Hey, Dooley! Make the scene, man!” I yelled, hammering on the door. “Time to fight the forces of evil!”
The door hurled open to reveal the Dewlap in all his glory and his washday-dingy skivvies. I won’t say our night marshal was actually breathing fire, but it was close.
“Pulaski, what in the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“I don’t like it either, but I need your help.”
It could have been worse. He didn’t try to strangle me as I laid out what I’d learned about Lee Curtis, his car, and its notorious former owner.
“So you figure it’s Kane coming back for his car?”
“Not for the car, man, but the boodle!” I replied. “Somehow there has got to be some kind of connection between Kane’s old heap and where he stashed the payroll from the wire mill.”
“You mean like a map or something hidden in the car?”
“Like, I dunno, Dooley! It’s the only thing that makes any sense as to why anyone would want that particular set of wheels that bad. What we need to know is if Kane’s been sprung recently. You can find that out. You’re a cop... sort of.”
It must have hurt like passing a kidney stone, but I could see my story leaking through all that ivory to whatever Dooley used for a brain.
“All right... lemme get my pants on. But I’m warning you, Pulaski, if this is some kind of stunt...”
We went down the hall to the rooming-house pay phone and Dooley started spending nickels. A few minutes later he hung up the receiver, a peculiar expression on his face. “Albert Kane was released two weeks ago upon completion of his sentence.”
“I heard you asking about a description. Did they say what he looks like now?
“Age fifty-five, five eight, hundred and sixty pounds. Gray hair, brown eyes.”
Dooley and I just looked at each other. A little gray-haired guy with mean eyes and a blue prison-issue suit.
“I’m going to get dressed and go out to the Curtis place,” Dooley said, suddenly looking a lot more like a lawman.
“I’ll follow you out.”
We were a little bit too late. As we wheeled up the shale driveway, Lee and his dad came tearing out of the Curtis’s white frame farmhouse, his father running to Dooley’s Plymouth and Lee running to the A-Bomb.
“How’d you guys get here so fast?” Lee panted. “We only called in a couple of minutes ago.”
“What do you mean, Lee? Who’d you call?”
“The sheriff! He came back again, Kevin! And this time he got my car!”
That afternoon, Lee’s dad had gone down to his south pasture to set his irrigation water and his mom had been washing the cream separator on the back porch. Lee still wasn’t worth much so he’d been lying down in his room when he’d heard the familiar roar of his hot rod firing up.
He and his mom had made the front yard just in time to see the A-V8 tearing out of the barn lot and taking off down the road.
“Did you put the rotor back in?” I asked.
“Heck no!” Lee replied vehemently. “But you know I’m running a standard Lucas distributor. He could have picked up a replacement rotor at just about any garage or parts store.”
The Curtises and I were sitting around their kitchen table. Dooley was off with the sheriff, chasing after Lee’s stolen car, and it had been left to me to bring the family up to date on what was going on.
Like any good farm wife, Mrs. Curtis had parked a big slab of her homemade caramel cake and a glass of milk in front of me, but I didn’t have much of an appetite.
“If it’ll make you feel any better, Lee, you’ll probably get your rod back,” I said, poking a fork at the cake. “Kane will probably ditch it on a back road somewhere after he gets whatever he wants out of it.”
“And he’s welcome to,” Mr. Curtis said, “just as long as he leaves us alone afterwards.”
“Still,” Lee’s mom mused, “I wonder what it could be?”
Lee shook his bandaged head, wincing a little. “I don’t know, Mom. I had that car as knocked down as you could get. It was nothing but a pile of parts. Kevin worked on it with me. He can tell you.”
I could only agree. “I can’t see how we could have missed anything. At least anything that looked like twenty thousand bucks.”
“Could there have been something... oh, like a bank book or a map stitched into the upholstery?” Mrs. Curtis asked. She subscribed to both Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and True Detective magazine and I suspect she was thinking that all this was actually kinda cool.
“If there was, it’s long gone now,” Lee replied glumly. “We pulled all the rotten old rugs and seat covers and stuff out of the coupe and burned them on the trash heap.”
“That couldn’t have been it, anyway,” I added. “All Kane would have had to do was look inside the car to see it’d been stripped. Why steal it, then?”
“Maybe—” Mrs. Curtis was really trying now — “there was a map drawn or etched somewhere on Lee’s car, one that was painted over somehow...”
“Ma, that ol’ Model A had more rust on it than paint when I bought it,” Lee said patiently. “And if there was anything like that it’s long gone, too. Kevin and I sanded that body down to bare metal before we primered it.”