Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine 02/01/11

by Dell Magazines

  Unfortunately, no one provided any answers or even theories. A lot flew through my mind. Maybe Bonnie was having an affair with someone at the show, and Mick took exception to it? Problem: Why risk bringing her back here? Maybe Mick didn’t know the Cord was stolen? Problem: He and Bonnie were close enough for him to have murdered her, so he must have known that. Maybe it wasn’t Mick who drove it here but her murderer, who then made his escape on foot? Problem: Why bring it here when it could have been left anywhere? Conclusion: there was a connection with this show in particular. Which still didn’t answer the final question: Why paint the car those disgusting shades of clashing red, which would devalue the car and make it stand out?

  Possible answers to that? Firstly, to make the owner hopping mad—but why add that to the insult of having stolen it? Secondly, to disguise it for onward transmission to the Continent. Disfiguring, certainly, but anyone who would pay six figures to buy it could afford a repaint job. Thirdly, a falling out among thieves. Had Bonnie decided to annoy Mick, or vice versa? If Bonnie had an affection for the car, it could be Mick wanting to ruin it for her. Or—a brainwave this—suppose Mick either wasn’t her partner or not her only partner in crime. These thefts hadn’t been from shows, but it was highly possible that they had all been at shows. Which meant Bonnie could have seen them. Which meant someone might have tipped her off in advance as to what to look for. Someone like Johnnie Darling. . . .

  As in any emergency, everything was rapidly being organised to fit the new circumstances, and even given the grim situation, tea, coffee, and biscuits were proving popular. A smartly dressed middle-aged woman seemed to be in charge of transporting them from the main tent, now under police control, of course. First, I managed to insult this lady by assuming she owned the coffee stall now operating inside the police tent. She didn’t. Nor was she the major’s wife, my next try at being friendly. It transpired she was much more important than that. She was his secretary, and was only demeaning herself by serving refreshments as his wife was away. The lady’s name was Hilda, and from the body language, Johnnie Darling was busy chatting her up. I’ve never quite got the hang of Johnnie, but seeing him in action gave me a whole new view of him. I could see him fancying his chances with Bonnie.

  Once Hilda had returned to the main tent, it was time for my go. “Sitting in the hot seat?” I asked him.

  I didn’t warrant the same attention as Hilda. “What are you on about?”

  “You were first in here this morning. You let the Cord in.”

  “So what? He had the registration badge on the screen, plus,” he added meaningfully, “he had goggles, cap, and whatever on. It shot straight past and I never got a close look at him.”

  “Easy enough.” It was with that car. He’d have been dazzled by the paint job.

  “Yeah.” He gave me an inimical glare. “So if you’re asking me whether registrant number two-twenty-four had a corpse in the back, I didn’t look. I’m not a bloody customs officer. He’d got the badge, he was in. Anyway, I was looking at the car. Not often you see a Cord, and especially not one painted like that.”

  “Too right,” I agreed again, and he began to look more friendly. “How well did you know Bonnie?”

  Friendliness vanished. “Not that way. I fancied her, but when she found out I’d no money, she dumped me and moved on.”

  No money? Pull the other one, I thought. Johnnie was comfortably off, and he drove an impeccably restored Porsche 356 Cabriolet.

  “Who did she fancy?”

  A laugh. “Went home with a different chap each time. That brother of hers brought her to the events, but she left under somebody else’s steam. Bloody pimp, he was.”

  Pimp left an unwelcome taste in my mouth. “Was Mick Clyde her brother?”

  “No idea. Assumed so. If they were an item, he’d have kept her in check. And he’d have taken her home with him. No, she was on the make and so was he. Always asking me who was booked up for the shows. So I told her flat, I run a car-show company, not a knocking shop.”

  “Be charitable,” I said, nettled. “Maybe it was the cars interested her.”

  “Yeah. But rich owners are good, too.”

  Bonnie’s ghost stirred indignantly inside my mind. Johnnie seemed at great pains to separate himself from her. And having Hilda as a friend at court could be useful for Johnnie too. The more one knows about the local bigwigs, the better, especially the ones who own classics.

  Which reminded me of the major, who I could see was still steaming, whether over his car or at the shock of finding Bonnie in it. He was stomping around the perimeter of the crime scene, talking to anyone inside it who came near him. I decided he could talk to me too, so I went over to him. He stopped stomping and took up a military “at ease” pose.

  “Bad business,” I began casually.

  He cast me a scathing look and didn’t bother to reply. “Why bring the poor girl’s body here?” I asked.

  He did deign to reply to this. “Obvious, isn’t it?”

  To me it wasn’t, so I just waited, guessing he’d be keen to tell me.

  “That car’s rare. I’d reported the theft, so it would be recognised whatever colour some nincompoop had painted it. The VIN number would be checked right away. Whoever stole it couldn’t get rid of it and decided to dump it back here for me. Sheer spite.”

  “And the body? Do you think Bonnie was the thief?”

  “Can’t have been. She’s dead. Ghastly business.”

  “That doesn’t rule out her being the thief,” I pressed on chattily. “They say her name’s Eva Crowley. She was probably working with an accomplice.”

  “There you are, then. He dumped it back here, and her too.”

  It was possible. But who was it? Mick? Johnnie? Or the major himself, although I couldn’t see his bad temper going as far as murder. As motives go, a desecrated car wouldn’t be worth risking that, however mad he was. Once he’d seen the car at the show, he would simply have called the police and forked out for the repaint with a lot of teeth-gnashing.

  When I got back to the tent again, a newcomer had joined the company—someone I recognised. It was Mick Clyde himself, straight from a grilling by Dave, from all accounts. It turned out he’d checked in at the new site half an hour ago and immediately been whisked off courtesy of Dave, first to suffer Mulligan’s tender mercies, and then back to Dave’s. He was a good-looking young man of about thirty, but he had a sullen look about him as though life hadn’t been treating him fairly. It hadn’t, given that Bonnie must have been close to him, whatever their relationship had been. The sullenness had more to do with temperament, I thought, than with the shock he must be going through. Unless, of course, he was Bonnie’s killer.

  “Bad time?” I asked sympathetically, as one interviewee to another. “That Mulligan makes you feel guilty even if you’re not.”

  He looked at me suspiciously. “Johnnie Darling says you work with the cops.”

  “I do, but that doesn’t make me a cop myself. Stolen cars are my line, not murder.”

  He gave me a long hard look. “That why you’re here? Car stolen, was it?” He was making an effort to be casual.

  “Yes. Certainly looks in need of restoration.” Mistake.

  “So will you be if you don’t lay off me. Get it?”

  I did, although this response seemed over the top. “Most amusing. Look, I’m really sorry about Bonnie.”

  The sullenness lifted slightly. “Yeah. Only found out when I got here. The Old Bill pounced on me.”

  “I’ve seen you arriving with Bonnie at shows.”

  “If it’s anything to do with you, mate, which it isn’t, she was supposed to come with me today. Never turned up, so I thought she’d changed the plan. Bloody mobile was on voicemail so I waited awhile and then came along. I don’t trust her with that Johnnie Darling. Slimy bastard.”

  Was this a case of the pot calling the kettle black, as the saying goes? Interesting, given Mick’s reactions to my fairly innoc
uous comments.

  When we were finally released I drove home to Frogs Hill Farm in pensive mood. There’s nothing like a Gordon-Keeble for gliding peacefully along the road letting one’s blood pressure settle down. All sorts of ideas float through my mind, storing themselves up in a garage in my brain, until I’m ready to drive them out and examine them more closely. Today was no exception.

  I live at Frogs Hill Farm on my own, but next morning the Frogs Hill Classic Car Restorations team would turn up for work. I wouldn’t dare refer to them as staff. Zoë Grant and Len Vickers are far too superior for that. To them I’m merely the apprentice in the workshop. Len and Zoë make a good partnership. Len’s been a car mechanic since the year dot and Zoë is a dedicated young worker bee. She has orange spiky hair, wears tattered old jeans and T-shirts, and thinks the inside of a car is paradise. She and Len operate with medical precision: Len the surgeon, Zoë his backup. Their diagnostic powers stretch to more than cars, as they are pumped full of knowledge about the automobile world.

  “Ever met Mick Clyde?”

  “Yup,” was their joint answer.

  “Know what he does for a living?”

  “Nope.”

  Now that was odd. If Mick was in the car business—and I regret to say that dealing in stolen cars comes under that category—they should know everything about him except maybe his bank balance.

  “What about Bonnie—Eva Crowley?”

  “Heard about her, not met her,” Zoë replied.

  “You won’t now,” I said soberly. “Someone murdered her and stuffed her in the back of a Cord 812 yesterday morning.”

  That stopped them both in their tracks. “Sorry to hear that,” Len said at last. “I met her, too. Nice girl.”

  “Yes.” Zoë looked at me enquiringly. “One of your conquests, Jack?”

  “Wrong way round. Bonnie had an eye for the crème de la crème, both in cars and their owners. And the gruesome detail is that the Cord had been badly painted in red, three shades of it.”

  “Black would have been safer, if they were selling it on,” Zoë remarked after Len had nearly fainted on the spot at such horror. “Doesn’t sound much of a business to me.”

  I was interrupted by a call from Dave, so I didn’t get back to Zoë on this, but for some reason her words stuck in my mind, I suppose because of my last conversation with Dave. If Mick and Bonnie’s job was dealing in classic stolen cars then they were making a poor fist of it. And Bonnie didn’t seem to me the kind of woman to make a poor fist of anything.

  Dave had rung to tell me that they’d arrested Mick Clyde and brought him in for formal questioning. “That’s the good news,” he said.

  “And the bad?”

  “Probably have to let him go again uncharged. We’re holding him for twenty-four hours, because his tenprints are all over the car.”

  “Then you’ll have him on a theft charge at least.”

  “Maybe. But they’re inside the car, not outside. Hard to see how he could avoid touching the outside if he’d driven the car to the castle.”

  “Does he admit to painting it?”

  “No. Says he’s a craftsman, he’d never ruin a Cord like that.”

  I liked Mick’s attitude. “Is that all Mulligan has on him?”

  “More or less. Incidentally, he lives in a semidetached with his mum and dad, with a single garage and forecourt. Not much room to run a stolen-car racket. Mulligan’s team has been all over that semi—not a sign of anything save that he’s a car enthusiast. No false number plates, nothing.”

  “Maybe he rents somewhere. Anyway, these days you don’t need premises—only a computer for stolen cars. What about Bonnie’s place?”

  Dave sounded pleased. “Glad you asked that. She lived in a terrace house, but each one has its own garage round the back reached by a communal side alley. And guess what we found in hers?”

  “Red paint in three colours and a kiddie’s paintbrush.”

  “Right, except that there were more than enough paintbrushes for two of them to work on it.”

  “Without Mick touching it thereafter?”

  “No through road there, Jack. The stolen-car charge isn’t going to stick. There just wasn’t enough stuff around in that garage for ongoing traffic—too much under the eye of neighbours. The occasional one, maybe, but not a whole string of them. I’m beginning to think there’s no connection between the cars that were later found abandoned and the cars that were pinched and have since vanished. Looks like more than one lot of villains at work. Mulligan will have to look elsewhere for his motives—and his evidence.”

  Bonnie really did seem to be gazing at me reproachfully now. With those large pleading eyes on me, I felt as if I were letting her down. The reason for her death must surely have had some connection to the car thefts, for why else should she have been killed and left in the Cord? The answer had to be Mick Clyde, and the motive personal not professional.

  Dave rang off and I turned my attention back to Zoë, Len, and the Triumph TR2 on which they were placidly working. Zoë’s orange spikes of hair were bobbing up and down with each movement. It was then that I remembered her “doesn’t sound much of a business to me.”

  I didn’t like Mick Clyde. Come to that, I didn’t like Johnnie Darling, either. My brain had already clicked into gear over how they could have dumped the Cord at the show. There must indeed have been two arrivals, as I’d earlier fantasised. The Cord had been driven in, flaunting its registration badge and complete with poor Bonnie’s body hidden under a blanket. The driver then vanished on foot to pick up another car and make a second entrance. The other cars present when I arrived had been ruled out by the police, I had gathered, and so only Johnnie Darling was left in the frame, unless he and Mick were in cahoots. Someone had said that the driver had been tallish and thinnish. So was Mick, so was the major, but I’d already ruled him out, so that brought me back to Johnnie again, also tallish and thinnish. He was best placed to arouse no interest at the gates, simply because he was the one who was in charge of them.

  The problem was that I couldn’t see just what deal he and Bonnie were running, with or without Mick Clyde, if the buying and selling of stolen classics was eliminated. And anyway, Bonnie seemed too classy a lady to fit into such a mundane business. She was born for the high life. I watched Zoë working away on the black Triumph—and then remembered what else she had said: “Black would have been safer.”

  Of course it would.

  “Blackmail,” I yelled out. “That was the business. No cars have been harmed in the course of this operation.”

  Highly annoyed by my shout, Zoë accidentally smeared grease on the polished bonnet. “What blackmail?” she asked, after cursing me for startling her. “What blackmail?”

  “Mick was the pimp. Bonnie seduced the owners, stole the cars, and then ransomed them back to the poor chumps on pain of telling their sexual secrets to their spouses or partners.”

  Zoë looked interested, as though this could be a line for her to take up. No way, I thought. “How would she steal the cars if she was bouncing around in bed?”

  “Pinched the keys?”

  “And the owners didn’t notice when she said thank you very much for the sex, now I’ll pop down and drive myself home in your car—which, incidentally, I won’t be returning?”

  She’d thrown me, but only for an instant. “That was Mick’s role—or Johnnie’s. Mick’s probably. She’d text him when the fun began, so that he could be sure the victim would be otherwise engaged. It would probably be in a hotel some way away, and maybe Mick tailed them there. Mick would nip over and pinch the car, then Bonnie would do her stuff in demanding cash in return for silence, her taxi fare home, and the safe return of the car.”

  Zoë looked dubious. “Word would spread.”

  “Come off it. How many victims are going to confess they were duped to their mates?”

  “None,” she agreed.

  “So all those who paid up received their cars back
, after they’d been found abandoned unharmed—” I was back to base again. I saw the flaw in this argument.

  So did Zoë. “But the Cord was.”

  “And the owner saw red.” And then, as they say, I saw the vital clue.

  Major Sir Peter Manning was duly arrested. Mulligan’s team found his fingerprints on the red paint—I hadn’t let him near the car, so there was no way he could have touched it before the crime scene was set up, and more conclusively, there was his DNA on, or rather in, the body. Bonnie must have given him one last treat before letting him see the travesty of his beloved Cord. He said later that when she’d called a week earlier to play the blackmail card his answer had first been on the lines of “publish and be damned” and then he’d offered her half of what she’d asked for. But the paint had been the last straw. She’d accepted the ransom offer, but then she had gone home and painted the car herself.

  Bonnie had brought the Cord back on the afternoon before the show, collected her money, had a last sexual romp, and left. Unfortunately, recovering from the afterglow the major had followed her to ensure his car was safe. That did it.

  His story was that he hadn’t meant to kill her, he’d just been overcome with fury at her “damned cheek,” as he put it. Faced with the consequences of his rage, he had registered the car for the show in a false name, left the car hidden in the grounds until the next morning, taken it out through the rear exit to the grounds, and driven it through the main gates as soon as he saw other cars arriving. He’d had to do that, because if he’d left it in place already inside the grounds, he would immediately have been in the frame.

  I’d been wrong about the major earlier, and should have guessed the truth. Only a furious owner would register the car for the show under the name of Phil Stein. Only a philistine could treat a Cord that way.

  Copyright © 2010 by Amy Myers

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  Fiction

  BEER MONEY

  by Shane Nelson

  Shane Nelson’s last short story for EQMM, “That One Small Thing” (February 2009) was selected as a Distinguished Story of 2009 by Best American Mystery Stories 2010. Since then, the Canadian author and sometime teacher has had several more stories published, including one given an honorable mention in Best Horror of the Year, Volume 2, edited by Ellen Datlow. He is currently managing to find time to write while also working as a stay-at-home dad of twins, “the hardest job I’ve ever had,” he says!