“Frank?”
“Yeah?”
I could see his coveralls but not his head or hands. They were lost somewhere up under the car he had on the hoist.
“Wondered if I could talk to you. Dick said it’d be all right.”
“You give me a minute?”
“Sure.”
All those great smells. Fresh coffee.
Cigarette smoke. Cold concrete floor.
Oil. Grease. New tires. Hot engines.
Cool engines. Exhaust. And the sounds of glas-paks backing off. And rock-and-roll radio, a little Bill Haley if you please. And jabber jabber jabber. Mechanics with customers. Customers with customers. Mechanics with mechanics. And out the doors a beautiful autumn morning. Azure-blue sky.
Temperature in the high 50’s. The scent of burning leaves. Hawks didn’t soar across the sky on a day like this, they tap-danced.
“Dick said it would be all right,” I said again.
He was about my size, my age. One difference. His left eye was glass and strayed a bit. He was also a Negro. “I’m pretty busy.”
“I won’t take much of your time. It’s about Friday night.”
“Oh. You a cop?”
“No. I work for Judge Whitney.”
He grinned. “I was in Korea, man. We coulda used her over there.”
“She’s pretty nice most of the time.”
“Yeah? Who says so, Stalin?”
Car repairman today, The Ed Sullivan Show tomorrow.
“I told the cops everything I know.”
“Which was?”
He shrugged. He was about to say something when another man in coveralls, this one carrying a clipboard, came over and said, “You handle a tune-up about three this afternoon?”
“Should be able to.”
“Thanks.”
“You were saying,” I said.
He shrugged again. “Dick said he’d pay me double for overtime to make sure everything was working right for Edsel Day. All the electrical stuff, I mean. I’m kind of a half-assed electrician. I guess he figured if there. was anything wrong I could fix it. So I put in four hours. Got done for the day here at four-thirty, drove home and had dinner with the wife and kids, and drove back. Punched in at six and punched out at ten. Everything was in good shape.”
“You know the Edsel they found the body in?”
“You ki. in’?”
“You know where it was?”
“Yup. Right over there in the corner. Along with two others. I put them there myself at the end of the day.”
“While you were here, did you hear the sound of a car slamming into the edge of the building?”
“No. But this is a big place and I was playing the radio pretty loud, or I might have been up front talking to Susan Squires.”
“You tell Sykes all this?”
“I tried. He didn’t seem much interested.
He just wanted to know if I’d seen anybody dump the body in the Edsel. I wanted to say, Hey, man, I seen somebody do somethin’ like that, you don’t think I’d call you right on the spot?”
That sounded like Sykes, all right. Don’t confuse me with the facts. Just let me use my Chief Suspects dartboard and I’ll have this case wrapped up in no time.
“You take a look at something for me?”
“I’m really in kind of a hurry.”
He’d probably been wondering what I had in the lunch sack I carried. I spread the pieces out on his workbench.
“Taillight,” he said.
“Right. Make?”
“Chevrolet.”
“Model?”
“Could be one of three or four. But it’s a ‘fifty-five.”
“Easy to replace?”
“V. At least usually. But Gm’s union has been threatening a strike. They started a slowdown a while back.”
“How long to get a replacement?”
“Couple days.”
“So the driver probably hasn’t replaced it yet.”
“Could have. But probably not. Even if it’s in stock, it’ll probably take till tomorrow before he’d have his car.”
“What if he’s a do-it-yourselfer?”
“Buy his own kit, you mean? Install it himself?
If that were the case, he could have it on by now.”
“If he used a service garage, would it probably be you?”
“Iowa City and Cedar Rapids aren’t very far away.”
“So there’s nothing special about this taillight?”
“Just that it’s broken.”
I thanked him and started to walk out of the garage when I saw the Keyses. They were both nicely dressed, as usual, Keys in a tan two-piece, his wife in a russet-colored suit that hid some of her boxy shape.
“Anything new on the murder?” Dick asked.
“Afraid not.”
“I just wish I hadn’t gone home so early,”
Mrs. Keys said. “If I hadn’t left at seven-thirty, maybe I could have scared him away. You know, with both Susan and me working in the showroom together.”
He slid a commiserative arm around her.
“I’m the one who should have been here. But there was so much last-minute stuff-I don’t think I was here twenty minutes the whole night.” He frowned. “Well, if you hear anything-”
“I’ll call. Don’t worry.” I nodded good-bye to Mrs. Keys.
You can never be sure how Judge Whitney is going to react to a piece of news. One time I told her I’d misplaced a vital piece of evidence in one of her cases, and she poured me a drink of brandy and said we all made mistakes from time to time and why didn’t I just sit down and relax. Another time I told her I was three minutes late for our meeting because my ragtop had had a flat tire, and she threw her brandy glass at me and said it was time I got rid of that “embarrassing juvenile car.” You may get the impression that she likes to start meetings on time.
“How’s her mood?” I asked Pamela
Forrest when I walked into the office that fine fall Monday morning. Pamela was wearing a blue shift with a matching blue ribbon in her baby-blond hair.
“How was Custer’s mood after the Little Big Horn?”
“That bad?”
“She said you didn’t call her.”
“I didn’t have anything to tell her.”
“She said that shouldn’t be any excuse.”
“Just wait till I tell her what David Squires wants. You’ll be hearing her scream.” Then: “Why are you smiling? Do you like seeing me in trouble with her?”
“Oh. Sorry. I was thinking about something else.”
And I got jealous because the only time Pamela ever looked that radiantly happy was when there was good news on the Stu Grant front.
“Something happened with Stu, didn’t it?”
“Not with Stu exactly.”
“Huh?”
“With his wife.”
“Oh.”
“Been called away, poor thing. Needs to spend two months with her ailing gran, poor thing.”
“Here’s your chance,” I said, unable to keep the sadness from my voice.
Her smile got even bigger. “That’s what I was thinking.”
Her intercom buzzed angrily. “Is that who I think it is out there?”
“Yes, Judge.”
“Tell him to get in here right now!”
“Yes, Judge.”
I just kept thinking of how shocked she was going to be when I told her Squires wanted to hire me. I also just kept thinking about Pamela and Stu together for two months.
The intercom clicked off.
I turned and started for the Judge’s chambers.
But before I could take a step, Pamela grabbed my hand. “I say prayers for you and Mary all the time. That you’ll-y know-get together. Would you do that for me? Say prayers that Stu and I get together?
I’m so scared, McCain, I really am. This may be the only real chance I ever have at him.
Two months.”
“I’ll try.”
I didn’t know which I felt more miserable about at that particular moment, Pamela or facing the Judge.
She had her tall executive leather chair turned away from me. All I could see was the thick blue smoke from her Gauloise cigarette curling up toward the vaulted ceiling.
With its mahogany wainscoting, small fireplace, leather furniture, and elegant framed Vermeer prints, the office was seminally intimidating. The Supreme Court couldn’t look a whole lot plusher than this.