“Besides, Mrs. Curtis,” I added, “what would Kane need a map for? If he’d hidden the money somewhere, he’d just go get it. We’re still missing something.”
“Whatever it is, we’re out of it now,” Mr. Curtis said. “It’s somebody else’s problem.”
I wasn’t so sure.
My mom had whipped up a real good dinner that night — pork chops, mashed potatoes, and applesauce, with strawberry ice cream for dessert. I still wasn’t all that hungry. I told my folks about what had been going on with Lee and his family and told my older brother Frank to shove it when he started calling me Sam Spade.
After dinner, I went out back to our garage, where the A-Bomb lives. Parking myself on a shop stool, I hunched over and did some thinking.
I’d found out some time back that working out a problem is like fixing an engine. You have to take it apart and check out each individual component till you find that one specific part that’s gone west on you.
Once upon a time Albert Kane had owned Lee’s car. Then Kane had stolen a big bunch of money and had gone to prison for it. Kane’s wife had sold the car while he was in the pen and now that he was out again he wanted that particular car back in the worst way. It couldn’t be for the car itself. I mean, I could see a guy getting totally gone over something like a boat-tailed Auburn or a Lincoln Zephyr but not a beat-up Model A.
It had to be something hidden in the car that Kane figured was still there. It also couldn’t be anything obvious or something you could just reach in and grab. You had to have some time alone with the car to get at whatever it was.
What could you hide where?
In a tire? Lee had junked the old wire wheels for a set of steel rims and the old rubber was scattered all over the county as tree swings and slingshots.
In the gas tank? Lee and I had torn out the coupe’s old cowl mount and had replaced it with a rear-mounted tank we’d lifted out of a wrecked ’38 Dodge.
How about the crankcase? Lee had traded the a’s original engine to Abel Kirby for a banjo rear end. The old four-banger powered Abel’s firewood saw now and I knew for a fact that he’d torn it down to stick in a new set of bearings. If he’d found any buried treasure, he hadn’t mentioned it down at the pool hall.
I studied the A-Bomb in the twilight leaking through the garage windows, trying to visualize where something could be hidden in it. My little black roadster was a whole lot different from Lee’s coupe, but they’d both started out as Model-A Fords. They still had a lot in common.
Come to think about it, the two hot rods did have a lot in common.
I turned that thought over for a while longer, and then I broke out a jack and slid it under the A-Bomb’s rear axle. I chocked the front wheels, lifted her, and wedged a couple of stands under the frame. Tightening my biggest Carborundum-tipped bit into a hand drill, I creepered under my car.
Five minutes later I tore in through the back door of the house. “Hey, Mom, Dad, I gotta go out to the Curtis place! I might be spending the night out there. See ya later.”
I tore right back out again before anybody could ask any questions.
I had to use my headlights as I roared out 11A. But I didn’t drive straight to the Curtis farm. I turned off on the irrigation canal access and went in across their back pasture on foot, keeping low. Kane might already be spying on the farm again.
Mr. Curtis answered my knock on the back door. “Kevin, what in creation...”
I cut him off. “He’s coming back!”
“Who?”
“Albert Kane, the guy who stole Lee’s car! He’s gonna be back, he’s gonna be sore, and he’s gonna be coming after Lee!”
The gray-haired man in the cheap blue suit hid in the night beside the haystack. He was mad. In fact, he was furious. But he was also patient. He’d learned that in his decade in a jail cell.
He’d been watching the Curtis family over the past few days and he knew there were only the three of them: the father, the mother, and the son.
A little while ago, the long, lean father and the shorter, rounder mother had gotten into the family pickup truck and had driven off. He’d made out the outline of the father’s inevitable felt hat silhouetted against the porch light.
Now there was just the son, alone in the farmhouse, and as he watched, the light in his bedroom went out...
I heard a soft tapping sound, then the tinkle of falling glass. This was it. The back door window was being busted.
I lay in the dark under the hot covers of Lee’s bed, trying to keep my breathing slow and steady, like a guy asleep. Lee’s bedroom was on the ground floor. He wouldn’t have far to come.
Faint footsteps on the linoleum, a kitchen chair scraped, a pause, then he was moving again. The bedroom door swung open and the room light blazed on.
“All right, you little...”
There was a hollow clonk and the sound of a body falling. I rolled out of the bed to find Albert Kane sprawled on the floor with Mr. Curtis standing over him. The ex-con didn’t even twitch. Generally you don’t after a big, rawboned dirt farmer lets you have it with the butt of a .30–30.
For the second time that week, Doc Jorgenson sent somebody down to Indianapolis to get his head X-rayed. Only this patient went handcuffed in the backseat of a state police car. Afterwards, Lee, his folks, Marshal Dooley, and I sat for a while around the Curtises’ kitchen table. Mrs. Curtis made coffee and broke out more of her caramel cake. This time I could do it justice.
“You should have called the law, Curtis,” the Dewlap grumped.
“We weren’t certain if anything would come of it,” the farmer replied evenly. “Besides, it was my boy and my house so I figured it was my problem.”
“I still don’t understand how you knew Kane was coming back here.”
“Kevin figured it out.” Mr. Curtis nodded toward me. “He set up the trap, too. He figured that Lee and me look enough alike so that in poor light we could be mistaken for each other. We sent Lee and Ruth up the road to my brother’s place to make Kane think Lee’d been left alone. Then Kevin and I waited for him to come on in.”
Dooley shot me a sour look. “Okay, Pulaski, what made you think Kane was coming back?”
“He had to, Dooley. When he finally got his hands on Lee’s hot rod and found that the payroll money he’d hidden in it wasn’t there anymore, shaking Lee down would be his only chance of ever getting it back.”
“Wait a minute. I thought you kids said that you’d taken that car apart and there wasn’t any money hidden in it.”
“There wasn’t,” I replied. “By then it was gone.”
“Well then, what the he—” Dooley heroically strangled himself off in honor of Mrs. Curtis. “What happened to it?”
“That’s kinda complicated.”
The Dewlap started to turn purple. Mrs. Curtis’s presence wasn’t going to hold him back much longer.
“Here’s the deal,” I went on. “Ten years ago, when Kane burned the safe at the wire mill, he figured, rightly, that as an employee and a good hand with a cutting torch he’d be under suspicion. So he hid most of the loot in his car in a way and a place he figured no one would ever find it, planning to sit on it until the heat was off.
“What he didn’t figure on was getting caught and sent up the river anyway. Or that his old lady would take off, selling his car for running money. So, when Kane was sprung at the end of his sentence, he returned to Fairmont looking for his loaded Model A.
“He tracked the car through several different owners until he came to Lee over there. Then, once he’d found it, he stole it so he could get the payroll out of it.”