Within minutes, she and Harry sat at the kitchen table, cold drinks in hand, as Cooper brought up pictures on the screen. Harry had told her about her clean mammogram, which made Cooper happy for her friend.
“Look at these. You’re a motorhead.”
Startled, Harry demurred, “Yeah, but not like that.”
“Bear with me.” Cooper scrolled up photo after photo of naked women in old cars.
The women, quite lovely, might wear a tool belt or have a wrench in their hands. A few bent over engines, their bottoms exposed.
One photo showed a truly beautiful woman leaning over the opened hood, her breasts falling just over an impressive twelve-cylinder engine, which had been chromed.
“Sure hope the engine’s not hot,” Harry quipped. “Why are you showing me naked women?”
“Okay. This was on Walt’s home computer. No hard-core porn or anything like that. A lot of mechanical information showed up—no surprise there; he kept up with his profession. But then we found these pictures. Can you tell me anything about them? Here, I’ll go through them again. Forget the women. Look at the machines.”
Harry, hands folded, tried to block out the naked beauties. Fortunately, easier for her than for a man.
A mint-colored DeSoto, resplendent with white leather interior, passed, then a restored 1939 Buick. Image after image of beautiful women and beautiful cars filled the screen.
“Hmm.” Harry unfolded her hands. “Go back one.” She pointed to a golden Studebaker Avanti, a design way ahead of its time. “Most of these cars are orphan cars.”
“What’s that mean?”
“No longer in production. The companies are dead. Packards. Nashes. Franklins. Well, now Pontiacs and Oldsmobiles, but most of these pictures are of old grand cars. You know, like Packard. The other thing is, all the cars are roadworthy. Also, no trucks, no sports cars, and what I’ve seen runs from after World War One up to the mid-fifties. There was one more-recent car, again good design, and not an orphan car: the Buick Riviera from the early 1960s. But this is quite a collection of marvelous restorations and some awfully good bosoms and bottoms.” She laughed.
“A car is out of production. What happens?”
Harry, picking up on Cooper’s intensity, responded, “At first, nothing. People run them until they become outdated. We’re primed to buy new things in America. So they sell the cars, which often wind up in the hands of kids, who can only afford an aging Hudson as their first car. Then they get wrecked or are sold for scrap, and a lucky few wind up sitting in garages. There are beautiful cars left to rust. Cars that had marvelous engines for the times. Or design, like the Auburn.”
“If you find one, how do you fix it?”
“Oh, gee.” Harry flopped back in the kitchen chair. “Well, you can’t get parts. Although large companies are supposed to always keep in stock the parts for anything they have manufactured, they don’t. A carmaker that no longer exists means spare parts that no longer exist. Think what it takes to bring back a 1959 Edsel Corsair.”
“Wasn’t that a bad car?”
“Not really. The Corsair was a pretty good design, but Ford misread the market. So it only lasted about three years before it tanked.” She leaned forward again. “Murphy, don’t.”
The cat was patting the screen.
“She’s okay.” Cooper petted the cat.
“There are special companies that deal in parts for orphaned cars. There are others that specialize in one brand only—say, Chevy, which of course isn’t orphaned, but just try to get a steering wheel for a 1957 Bel Air.”
“I see. Can these parts be built?”
“Someone would really have to be good. You can build engines, carburetors, the heavy-duty stuff, but one would need access to a … I don’t know, small foundry, plus you’d have to have the specs—another problem.”
“But with computers, surely that has to be easier. I mean, to create images and blueprints.” Cooper could use a computer with the best of them.
“Yeah, but you’d still need the engineering knowledge. You can’t be off more than one one-thousandth of an inch. As for interiors, easier, but it’s all hideously expensive.”
“So if someone like Walt were involved in this, profits could be made?”
“Oh, sure. He’d be moonlighting, but, Coop, it’s a big jump from naked women to a side business restoring old engines. Then again, if you throw in the naked women, big profits.” Harry laughed.
“I can’t imagine making love to anyone wearing a tool belt.” Cooper laughed loudly.
“People have their ways. As long as they don’t hurt anyone.”
“I knew you’d see things I didn’t. Could be the guy was just turned on by the, uh, mechanics. We’re hitting a wall in this investigation. I’m trying to think of all kinds of things. Like I told Rick, I have yet to question anyone who mourns him. Walt was a loner. Not that that’s a bad thing, but clearly he wasn’t a person with highly developed social skills. Everyone says he was a crack mechanic, and Victor Gatzembizi swore he was incredible.”
“Victor’s a drag-racing nut. That can be as expensive as restoration. A top fuel dragster can cost about two hundred thousand dollars. Has to do the quarter mile in 4.9 seconds. Close to two hundred miles per hour.”
“What do you think of Victor?”
Harry shrugged. “I don’t know. Another rich guy with the trophy wife, big cars, big ego. He’s very generous to charities. Gave thirty thousand dollars for our five-K run to raise money for breast-cancer research. He’s always been nice to me, probably because I love cars.”
Cooper turned off her computer. “My job is to not jump to conclusions. To keep an open mind and maybe, just maybe, to always remain a little suspicious.”
“And?”
“My instincts tell me Walt threatened somebody. Yes, the crime was especially violent, so a degree of passion may have been involved, but this guy set off a trip wire.”
The odor of soil reached Harry as she walked down the alleyway behind Fresh! Fresh! Fresh! Ahead of her, three trucks unloaded produce. Vegetables were carefully arranged in sturdy wooden boxes covered by thin balsam tops with air slats—the source of the dirt smell.
Box after box of unshelled peas, early kale, and lettuce that had survived the hard rains was placed on a conveyor belt taking the food straight into the back of the food market.
One backed-up truck carried oranges, their startling color leaping out from the boxes’ slats. Harry couldn’t believe that was the natural color. The distinctive aroma of oranges reached her—not as strong as orange blossoms in the grove, but there was still a hint of that delightful citrus odor.
No way were oranges ready to be plucked from the trees at this time of the year. Watching the boxes roll down the conveyor belt made Harry wonder where Yancy Hampton procured fresh oranges in May. She admitted to herself that just because they were out of season in the United States didn’t mean they weren’t organically grown in South America or wherever they might have been harvested.
Still …
She watched Evan Gruber, a distant acquaintance, back a new refrigerated truck to the second large open door.
Evan waved as he caught sight of her. She waved back, then turned, retracing her steps down the alleyway. Everything she saw pointed to clean produce carefully handled. As to exactly the source of Yancy’s purchases, she had no idea, but watching his operation gave her a sense of how her own sunflower seeds and ginseng might be treated. Of course, she’d be the one unloading her produce. Why waste money having a middleman deliver it when she could do it herself? Now that she no longer ran the post office, Harry had the time.
She missed that regular paycheck. As to the benefits of being a federal employee, she doubted she’d ever see them. Harry believed there was no money in the till. Her generation would be the one to truly find out that sorry fact. Anyway, once upon a time she had known just about everything going on in Crozet.