Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 127, No. 6. Whole No. 778, June 2006

by Albert Cornelis Baantjer

  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.

  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.”

  “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.