“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.”
I forked up another bite of cake. “But what he didn’t figure on was that his car had been built into a hot rod.”
“So?” the Dewlap grunted.
“So what Kane didn’t understand and what you don’t either, Dooley, is that a hot rod isn’t just one car, it’s a whole lot of cars. It’s a big pile of different parts that have been pieced together to make an all-new and unique set of wheels. And as you swap the new parts in, you trade off or junk the old ones.
“After Lee got done gowing his A up, pretty much the only part of the original vehicle that was left was the body, and that wasn’t where Kane stashed the loot. When Kane discovered that the really important part was missing, he had to come back here to find out what Lee had done with it.”
“Okay! Fine! Fantastic!” Dooley roared. “Where’s the money now!”
My grin widened. “I have it.”
“Whaaaaaaat?!”
“I’ve had it all along. I just didn’t know it. When Lee and I were building our beasts, Lee decided he wanted to build an A-V8, a Model A with a V-8 engine. The easiest way to work that particular conversion is to swap in the frame from a later-model 1932 Ford. The Deuce was set up to accept a bent eight.
“But I was gonna run a Model B engine in my rod, a straight-four, so I could still use the original Model A frame. The one from Lee’s car was in good shape, so I traded him a front axle and a spring pack for it. Lee’s old frame is out there under the A-Bomb right now.
“Now, when I was working on that frame I noticed there was something kind of funny about it. It had already been partially boxed in.”
“Boxed in?” Dooley questioned.
“Yeah, it’s something you do when you build a serious racing rod. You weld side plates onto all of the frame member’s girders to make the car stronger and stiffer and improve the handling. You just don’t see a boxing job done on a stock car. But a partial box job had been done on the frame of Albert Kane’s Model A. Beyond it saving me some work, I didn’t think much about it at the time.
“But I got to thinking about it again this evening, so I got under and drilled through those old side plates.”
I dug a greasy envelope out of my jacket pocket and dumped its contents in the middle of the table. “This stuff came out with the drill bit. The fibers are from some kind of asbestos wrapping and the shreds of paper are—”
“Money!” Dooley exclaimed, poking at the little green fragments with a stumpy finger.
“Exactamundo! From a tight, flattened roll of bills. Kane was a machinist and a shop man and he was the aces with an acetylene torch, either cutting or welding. He welded the stolen money into the frame of his car, behind those side plates, figuring it would be the last place anyone would ever think to look. And it was.”
“I’m impounding that car until we can get that money!” the Dewlap roared.
“Ah, put it in the fridge, Dooley!” I snorted back. “I’m not going anywhere. Tomorrow morning I’ll take the Bomb over to Payne’s Shell station and pop those side plates off. You and a rep from the wire mill can stand around and count as I dig the dough out for you.”
“I guess that’ll be all right,” Dooley grumbled. “I suppose if you intended to keep it for yourself, you wouldn’t have told anyone about it.”
“Hey, Dooley, what can I say? I considered it. Who wouldn’t? But it would have meant leaving Lee’s neck on the chopping block. Besides, it would have killed all the kicks around here.”
“Kicks? Whaddaya mean?” Dooley asked suspiciously.
“I mean, with that twenty grand I could build me the hottest soup job the state of Indiana has ever seen! Dirt-track competition would be a walkover, nobody would ever want to drag race with me anymore, and you, the sheriff, and the Indiana State Police combined wouldn’t have a chance of catching me out on the roads.”
I shook my head. “Where’s the sport, man? Where’s the sport?”
The Jury Box
by Jon L. Breen
Copyright © 2006 Jon L. Breen
How broadly can the crime-mystery-suspense genre be defined? Consider two new novels, one written for an audience of adults, the other for teenagers, but both able to cross those boundaries and find receptive readers. Whether they are truly crime novels is arguable, but they are certainly structured as mysteries. Both have apparent supernatural overtones, the extent uncertain to the end, and include some unconventional detection. Pigeonholes aside, both are highly recommended.
**** Sally Beauman: The Sisters Mortland, Warner, $24.95. In a complexly constructed, beautifully written novel that is just as unconventional a family saga as it is a mystery, multiple narrators cover three decades in the life of the titular sisters, whose summer of 1967 ended in gradually revealed tragedy at the family home, a medieval Suffolk abbey. The book is longer than it needs to be — few 432-page novels aren’t — but the characters and their relationships are enthralling, believable, and constantly surprising. Most of the questions posed are answered, but the reader is left wondering about the motivation for the central act and how much of the supernatural element is real and how much purely psychological.
**** Brent Hartinger: Grand & Humble, HarperTempest, $15.99. Two high school students — one a popular athlete and Senator’s son, the other a geeky outsider — are troubled, by premonitions and nightmares respectively. In alternate chapters, they are brought to an astonishing surprise ending, unlikely to be anticipated but fairly clued for the reader detective. The immensely talented author is a master of structure, but even without the stunt conclusion, the well-realized characters would grip readers of all ages.
**** Max Allan Collins: Road to Paradise, Morrow, $24.95. It is now 1973, and Michael Satariano (Michael O’Sullivan) has the relatively legit job of managing a Lake Tahoe gambling resort when holdovers from his criminal past necessitate his killing once again. This remarkable piece of sustained storytel
ling is the best of the trilogy that began with the graphic novel (later great film) Road to Perdition. (Collins is so generally good on period detail, it’s a shame one of his characters misuses the phrase “begs the question” in the currently trendy and abominable fashion.)
**** Lisa Scottoline: Dirty Blonde, HarperCollins, $25.95. Federal Judge Cate Fante’s compulsion to pick up men in sleazy bars threatens her career when murder and blackmail follow her reluctant decision in a case charging theft of a TV series concept. Of the many legal thriller writers in current practice, Scottoline ranks in the top handful by virtue of her people, plot, humor, and vivid Philadelphia background. This is among her best.
*** William Bernhardt: Capitol Murder, Ballantine, $25.95. In a Washington, D.C., federal court, Ben Kincaid defends Senator Todd Glancy, Democrat of Oklahoma, on charges of murdering intern Veronica Cooper, with whom he had a video-documented sexual relationship. Bernhardt’s trial action is so excellent, some buffs may resent leaving it so often for the investigation of a vampire cult. The main clue is admirably fair, but experienced readers will already have guessed the killer, unless they think the least-suspected-person gimmick is too ancient for contemporary recycling.
*** Kerry Greenwood: Cocaine Blues, Poisoned Pen, $23.95. The first novel about roaring-’twenties amateur detective Phryne Fisher, published in Australia in 1989, concerns Melbourne’s drug and abortion industries. The tricky plot, lively writing, likable flapper sleuth, and superb sense of period will delight readers who have already read (or will be motivated to seek) later books in the series already issued by Poisoned Pen.
*** Stuart M. Kaminsky: Terror Town, Forge, $23.95. Chicago cop Abe Lieberman works on cases involving a troubled former Chicago Cub, a murdered single mother with un-explained sudden wealth, a street-preaching son of a rabbi who may be madman or conman or both, and an inner-city savior with political aspirations but a closet full of skeletons. Though this one lacks the resonance of some other books in a distinguished series, Lieberman is always stimulating company.
*** Linda Fairstein: Death Dance, Scribner, $26. In a case with acknowledged similarities to a real-life 1980 murder, the Metropolitan Opera House again becomes a crime scene, as a prima ballerina first disappears and later is found dead, with a multiplicity of possible suspects for D.A. Alex Cooper and her police colleagues. Part of the plot involves a proposed musical based on the early-20th-century Harry K. Thaw-Stanford White-Evelyn Nesbit case. Always determined to give her readers their money’s worth, Fairstein provides a wealth of detail about New York theater history along with the crime problem.
The spirit of Ellery Queen lives on in a new character from Jim French Productions, that prolific provider of radio mysteries. The sleuth in Hilary Caine Mysteries ($9.95 for a CD of three shows), as written by M. J. Elliott and played by Karen Heaven, is an engaging and original character. The resident “girl detective” for a 1930s English tabloid will amuse some listeners, irritate others, and have both effects on many, in the mode of Golden Age sleuths like Lord Peter Wimsey, Philo Vance, Roger Sheringham, Reggie Fortune, and the early EQ. (The similarity of name, as made clear in the first episode, is a deliberate homage.) The plots are ingenious and fairly clued, though amenable to nitpicking; the tone humorous and ironic.
Among the reprints is one of the best formal detective novels of the past twenty years, Aaron Elkins’s 1987 Edgar best-novel winner Old Bones (Berkley, $6.99), about Skeleton Detective Gideon Oliver. One of the top paperback characters of the 1950s, Stephen Marlowe’s Washington, D.C., private eye Chester Drum, is revisited in the un-usual and suspenseful Violence Is My Business (1958), paired with the earlier non-series Turn Left for Murder (1955) in a new omnibus (Stark House, $19.95) introduced by Marlowe.
The fifteenth edition of the loose-leaf Edward D. Hoch Bibliography (Moffatt House, P.O. Box 4456, Downey, CA 90241-1456; $10 plus $5 postage and handling), compiled by June M. Moffatt and Francis M. Nevins with several essays by Marvin Lachman, covers 1955 to early 2006 in an exhaustive 161 pages. For the statistically minded: Captain Leopold leads all Hoch series characters in appearances with 106 since March 1957, while Simon Ark is unchallenged in longevity with 59 cases since December 1955. Other long-lived and busy characters: Ben Snow (41 since 1961), Jeffery Rand (83 since 1965), Nick Velvet (84 since 1966), and Dr. Sam Hawthorne (68 since 1974).
Backroom Boys
by Peter Sellers
Copyright © 2006 Peter Sellers
Art by Mark Evan Walker
A former EQMM Readers Award winner, an esteemed editor of mystery anthologies, and a driving force behind several conventions and banquets for Canadian crime writers, Peter Sellers is one of the best known if least prolific of current writers. His rare short stories are always a treat. Over the past year the author’s energy has gone to restoring his 100-year-old home (not to mention his advertising career) but he plans to begin writing more soon.
❖
At one-thirty, after the Backroom had closed, Kevin served us draft beer in coffee cups. We could have swilled from bottles because no cops ever came, but Kevin had been well brought up and liked to break the law discreetly.
The Backroom was a live music club at the rear of a rib-and-burger joint on Bloor Street, across the road from the Royal Conservatory of Music. I didn’t work there myself. I had a job in a bookstore up at Yonge and St. Clair. But I was drinking a fair amount in those days and the Backroom was as good a place as any to do it. The music was okay most of the time. Occasionally Kevin would slip me free food. And it seemed like a good place to meet chicks.
Sometimes, after hours, the musicians would stick around, try out new tunes and tell stories about life on the road. When they talked about the number of girls they’d had I got to wishing I could play an instrument. Unfortunately, I wasn’t musical. In Grade Four, when every kid had to be in the choir, the teacher took me aside and told me just to mouth the words.
The musicians would describe gigs they played, from yacht-club dances to bars in Northern Ontario with screens in front of the stage to protect them from beer bottles and draft glasses. One balladeer, who sang of peace and romantic love, was booked into such a place by an unhappy accident. When the bottles wouldn’t reach him, the locals pressed their faces against the screen and spat.
“Thank you,” he’d say after each booed song. “I’m so glad you liked that one. Here’s another new tune you might enjoy.”
Kevin had been running the Backroom since spring. He had made the leap from waiter to manager on the strength of one stroke of good fortune. His girlfriend had previously gone out with the piano player in a local bar band. This group, Jerry Spoon and the Tectonic Plates, played three nights a week at the Victoria Hotel, a run-down beer joint at Queen and Soho. The residents of the hotel sat at a round table in front of the stage getting drunk. The rest of the crowd was loud and mostly pissed, and the owner, a former CFL fullback, kept in shape by throwing rowdies out. Jerry and the band wanted a better gig. Kevin saw his opportunity.
The Backroom’s budget for music was four hundred bucks a week. For one guy and a guitar, that wasn’t bad. For a five-piece band, it was laughable, even in 1977. But Jerry and the boys were so anxious to get out of the Victoria that they took the offer with little haggling. The usual working week was Tuesday to Saturday, four sets a night, from nine to one. The Plates wouldn’t play Tuesday and they got all the food and beer they could consume. That was sure to add up to more than four hundred dollars, but Kevin figured it was worth it.
From the first Wednesday night, the Backroom was jammed. Spoon and the Plates drew students from University of Toronto residences and from the frat houses of the Annex, all within easy crawling distance. There was no cover, and the beer prices weren’t bad.
That week the owners made more money than they ever had in one week before. They thanked Kevin by telling him to make sure it continued.
The first thing he did was to offer the Plates two more weeks. Over the previous seven da
ys, Jerry had become a much shrewder businessman. The band agreed, for eight hundred a week.
With the success of the Plates, people started paying attention to the Backroom. Singers phoned looking for gigs. Kevin didn’t have to settle for whoever he could get. He was able to hire some of the brightest lights of the Canadian folk scene. Jackie Washington played the Backroom. So did David Wilcox, Willie P. Bennett, and a fourteen-year-old guitar hotshot who had to be smuggled in the back door and who filled the place by word of mouth.
Kevin would bring in the odd classical player from the Conservatory. There was a wicked lutist named Geordie, some impressive violin players, and the occasional classical guitarist who had chops, but none of them was as good a draw as the folk and blues musicians. The classical players didn’t have loyal fans that would come and drink too much.
Someone who did have fans was Tom Lieberman.
Tom had been front man for a legendary local rock band that almost made it big. An excellent guitar player with a powerful, quirky voice, he wrote songs that were too offbeat for AM radio play. But the group got a lot of local club gigs and for a while was the house band at a local strip joint in the days of G-strings and an emcee between peelers.
When the band came apart, Tom took an acoustic guitar and reinvented himself as a folk club and coffeehouse performer. Like the Plates, Tom had a dedicated cult following. He was also newly back in town after eight months in Vancouver. Kevin reasoned that people who hadn’t heard Tom for a while would jump at the chance.
Tom had surprised Kevin with his phone call. “This is Lieberman.”
Kevin stayed professional. “Uh-huh,” he said.
“I want to play at your establishment,” Tom said. “I understand you pay four hundred dollars. That’s fine. Next week suits me.”
Kevin had a female duo booked for the following week. I was keen on the tambourine player. “I have something lined up,” said Kevin, who was a good friend.
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 127, No. 6. Whole No. 778, June 2006 Page 15