“Sittin’ there right in front of your eyes is the one easy, sure way of findin’ out if all this simple disarmin’ story is a made-up soap opera, or not!”
He climbed into the beachwagon and examined the tire, and then he hoisted it into his roadster and roared away down the driveway toward the village.
Twenty minutes later, Benny, the garage man, shifted his plug of tobacco from his right cheek to his left, and gave it as his opinion that Asey was right.
“Only thing the matter with this tire is,” he said, “somebody just let the air out of it, that’s all!”
7
“You SURE?” Asey said. “Nothin’ wrong with the tube? Or the valve?”
“Like I told you, I know that tire an’ I know that tube—both brand-new, an’ I sold ’em to Harold Douglass two days ago, an’ they’re okay! Didn’t you just see the tube for yourself when I had it in the tub? Didn’t we paw over that tire twice? Didn’t I just show you how the valve’s okay? Nothin’ the trouble here but someone let out the air, that’s all! An’, Asey, I tell you what I think—”
Asey waited until Benny’s plug of tobacco made its tour back from the left cheek to the right.
“I think somebody took—oh, like a ladies’ nail file, say, an’ stuck it in to hold the valve down—remember them little marks, like, that I showed you? Now maybe not a nail file, but what I’m aimin’ at is somebody didn’t just use their finger, like a man—say, Asey, what do you look so glum about this for? After all, it ain’t your tire! What you so bothered about?”
Asey sighed. “It just means a yarn was too simple, that’s all! I thought as much, but—”
He broke off as Jennie’s coupe bounced into the yard of the garage and up to one of the gas pumps.
“Hello,” she said, and leaned her head out of the window. “Your friend Mrs. Douglass lost any more guests lately? Fill it up, Benny, and charge it—I left my purse at home. Asey, for goodness sakes, what is the matter with that crazy coot of a woman?”
“That,” Asey said as he strolled over and stood by the car door, “is exactly what I’m tryin’ to figure out. Maybe you—yessir, I bet you would! Now—move over those bundles, Jennie. I want to get in an’ tell you a story, an’ you listen careful!”
Pausing only while Jennie bounced the coupe out of the way of another customer, Asey told her what had taken place at Pochet Point that afternoon. His only elimination was any reference to soap operas or to Mother Gaston.
“So there you are,” he concluded. “No Mrs. Boone, no Cummings. There’s everybody’s stories, an’ there’s the tire yonder in the garage—Benny swears someone just let the air out. What does it all sound like to you?”
“Well,” Jennie said reflectively, “I know how you hate the things, always turning ’em off every chance you get, and leaving the house when I have my favorites on, but that’s certainly what it sounds like, Asey! It sounds just like one of my serials. Mostly Mother Gaston.”
“That’s what I was afraid of,” Asey said as he got out of the coupe. “Thanks a lot, Jennie. The Douglasses hate her for somethin’ she did to ’em, an’ that aunt doesn’t sound like a woman who’d stop at much—”
“Wait!” Jennie got out and followed him to his roadster. “Where d’you suppose Mrs. Boone is?”
“What’s your guess?” Asey returned.
“Not far. Far from the Pullman, I mean. You know perfectly well how hard it is to carry bodies—well, maybe you don’t, but I’m sure I’ll never forget trying to cart people around in Red Cross, back in First Aid!”
“How would you feel about the mud hole, or the swamp?”
Jennie shook her head and made a face. “Too nasty! It’s something smarter. Like a secret room—that’s what happened in Mother Gaston about a month ago, you know. They found this body in a secret room of an old farmhouse nobody had ever suspected!”
“An’ what d’you suppose happened to the doc?” Asey inquired drily. “You think he’s in a farmhouse nobody suspects, too?”
“I know one sure thing,” Jennie said. “He certainly never walked far! You know how his wife always claims she has to watch him to see he doesn’t take his car from the house across the driveway to his office! And certainly nobody would take him unawares—remember back in the early days of the war, that Women’s Volunteer Defense League and Rifle Corps that we had?”
“The Girl Regulars? That’s one item in your past that I can’t never forget!” Asey said. “Bullets whizzin’ past my head, an’ you goin’ around swingin’ people off their feet with a lot of jujitsu, an’—”
“And just you remember,” Jennie interrupted, “it was Cummings taught us those holds! He may look short and bulky, and as if he couldn’t move quick, but he’s scrappy! You go back over there and look around some more for both of ’em, Asey—I’m sure if someone took the doc away by force, he’d have left something somewhere as a clue for you to follow—hurry back there before it gets dark!”
They separated in getting out of the way of a sedan that drew up at one of the gas pumps, and Asey went inside the garage, got the Douglass’s tire, and put it back in his roadster.
“I just thought to tell you,” Jennie walked over to him as the sedan departed, “Mrs. Douglass and that aunt were just coming back in the beachwagon when I got there with your lunch—”
“Where’d you get that?” Asey interrupted, pointing to the green scarf she was holding in her hand. “Where’d that come from?”
“This scarf? I was just going to ask Benny if he wanted it,” she said. “The man in that sedan that just left dropped it when he got out to pay for his gas, I think—he must have, it wasn’t lying here before he came!”
“Was it someone from the Larrabee project? One of the college bunch?” Asey demanded.
“Oh, no, it was a man—I mean, an older man. Dressed in clothes that matched, you know. Dark grey suit with a pin-stripe, and a Homburg, and a plain dark tie. I really,” Jennie said casually, “didn’t notice him particularly—Asey Mayo, what’re you doing? Where are you going?”
Her voice rose as he sprinted for the roadster.
“You wait here for me,” Asey said, “an’ mind you don’t go tellin’ anyone about Mrs. Boone!”
Jennie clucked her tongue and shook her head as the roadster shot out of the yard and up the highway.
“Tch, tch, tch, if that man doesn’t kill himself one of these days!”
“He won’t,” Benny assured her. “If he’d been goin’ to land up in a crash, he’d’ve piled up years ago. But he most probably’ll get himself pinched—why, I bet he’s already in Brewster now, at that rate!”
“That’s just the trouble, nobody ever pinches him!” Jennie said sadly. “He’s got his glove compartments full of Honorary Chief of Police badges, and Honorary Constable badges, and Honorary Sheriff badges, and all such, and whenever he gets stuck, he yanks out one of ’em and pins it onto his shirt, and kids his way right out of trouble!”
Asey, speeding along, remembered that the sedan was light grey, almost white, and that it was a sufficiently new model to be sparkling with chrome.
But it wasn’t anything that a Porter couldn’t overtake!
After ten miles, he began to slow down. He couldn’t believe that the grey sedan could have gone any further—it hadn’t left the garage at any break-neck pace. The driver, he decided, simply must have turned off the main road.
He wouldn’t have bothered to chase after one of the project, he thought as he turned the roadster around and headed back. But one of Mrs. Boone’s green scarves in the possession of an older man, someone who didn’t belong to the project, was something which had seemed well worth taking a look into.
“Next time,” he admonished himself, “keep your eyes open for—ooop!”
He braked the car to a stop, fumbled around in the glove compartment, drew out a badge, pinned it on his shirt, and was standing in the middle of the road with his hand held up when the grey sedan, which he’d spotted
at the top of the long hill ahead, arrived on the scene.
The car was still rocking from the force of the driver’s quick braking when Asey walked up to it.
“Emergency inspection!” he said briskly, and pointed to his badge.
This was the right man—pin-striped suit, Homburg hat, plain tie.
“Oh? Emergency inspection of what?”
The fellow was thirty-odd, Asey guessed, he was blonde and good-looking, and he was smiling the forced smile of someone in a hurry who has decided to make the best of little, irritating delays.
“Quohaugs,” Asey said.
“Er—I beg your pardon? I didn’t quite catch that!”
“Quohaugs,” Asey drawled the word out. “What you New Yorkers call clams.”
“I’m not a New Yorker,” the man said seriously, “and I assure you that I haven’t any clams—really, I don’t even like clams!”
“To tell you the truth,” Asey leaned his arm on the car door and peered interestedly into the empty back seat, “I don’t much myself, either. But we had what you might call an out-of-town raid on our quohaug beds here today, sort of a high-jackin’, as you might say, an’ I have to stop all cars an’ inspect ’em for quohaugs. You mind very much openin’ your rear trunk?”
“If I have to, I suppose that I have to!”
A moment later, Asey helped him slam down and lock the cover of the empty trunk.
“Thanks, mister,” he said. “I’ll admit you didn’t look to me like the quohaug-stealin’ kind, but I had to stop you. That’s my job.”
Taking a pencil and a small notebook from his pocket, he wrote down the car’s license plate number on one of the pages, then turned to another page, wrote “Pass”, and then hesitated, pencil in air.
“Who’ll I say to pass, mister?” he inquired. “What’s the name?”
“I don’t see why my name—oh, I suppose it’s quicker. It’s Manderson. Eric Manderson. Anderson, with an ‘M’!”
Asey wrote down “Pass Eric Manderson,” and tore out the notebook page.
“Now just you show this if you’re stopped anywhere in the next two towns—I can’t begin to handle everyone here, of course,” he felt that he had to proffer some explanation for the cars which had gone merrily past during his examination of the trunk, “but we manage to cover all the outgoin’ vehicles, one place or another. Thanks.”
“You’re welcome, I’m sure.” Mr. Manderson summoned up another of his forced smiles, and then drove off in the grey sedan.
Back at Benny’s garage, Jennie listened to Asey’s brief recital of the quohaug inspection episode, and announced that in her opinion, he’d been a fool.
“You say that Gerty said that Mrs. Boone’s secretary was named Eric, and you say this fellow you just stopped was named Eric, and this scarf I found certainly came out of his car! Now why,” she said disgustedly, “why for goodness sakes didn’t you corral the fellow? You didn’t pass him—or overtake him! That must mean that be drove off of the main road after he left here! And for all you know, or bothered to find out, he dumped Mrs. Boone’s body somewheres before he drove back on to the main road again!”
“Uh-huh, I realize that.”
“If I must say so, Asey Mayo, you’re a fool! Why on earth didn’t you grab him?”
“Wa-el,” Asey said, “it’s just a mite difficult to grab or corral anybody in connection with a murder that to all intents an’ purposes hasn’t happened.”
“But it has happened!” Jennie said impatiently. “You know perfectly well it has!”
“Uh-huh, an’ I got a lot of proof, haven’t I? A green ticket with a diamond-shaped punch.” He took it from his pocket and showed it to her. “See?”
“Why, that’s nothing special!” Jennie looked at it. “I got one of those—one day, oh, just after they got that railroad set up, Mr. Douglass asked the Men’s Club at the church to all come up and have a ride, and before he got through, he had the Sewing Circle and the Women’s Club and the Girl Scouts and the Boy Scouts and the Board of Trade, and I don’t know who all else besides. We all got tickets like that. Mr. Douglass, he gets a great kick out of that railroad. Puts on a visored cap—”
“An’ sells tickets,” Asey said. “An’ then a conductor’s cap, an’ conducts, an’ so on an’ so forth. I know. The doc told me.”
“Did you go inside of the station?” Jennie asked. “It’s not much bigger than a pint of cider, and it has a little pot-bellied stove in the middle, and benches to sit on, and a lot of old-time excursion posters and timetables hung around the walls. It somehow even smells like an old station, if you know what I mean—why didn’t you?”
“Grab Eric? I thought I’d gone into that up to the hilt!” Asey said. “After all, if Eric Manderson is his real name, an’ if he bothered to give it to me, he can’t be so very scared of bein’ identified. We got his license plate number, an’ the cops can always track him—”
“Who’s talking about that Eric? I mean, the station!” Jennie said. “Why in the world didn’t you go inside of it? Why didn’t you even look inside of it? I must say it’s the first place I’d have gone to myself, to hunt for Mrs. Boone’s body after it disappeared! It’s so near!”
“An’ it’s just the one place,” Asey said a little ruefully, “that I somehow missed! Probably because it ‘was so near, maybe because the engine hid it an’ I didn’t think of it—oh, I glanced at the place when I swung up into the engine cab, durin’ one of my hunts while I was all alone over there, but I never went in—”
“For goodness sakes, look!” Jennie interrupted, pointing in amazement at the car swinging into the garage yard. “Look, will you!”
It was his own new roadster that was pulling up to the gas pump.
“And him!” Jennie sniffed at the sight of the driver and only occupant, a dark-haired young man, hatless, and wearing sun glasses. “That nasty one! Well, unless you lent him the car, just you give him the works. He’s the nastiest—” :
“Hey, you!” The young man made a peremptory gesture in Asey’s direction. “Hey, you—Rube! Service! Get started!”
“Well, for goodness sakes—”
Under his breath, Asey told Jennie to hush. Aloud, he said, “What’s the matter, bub? You want me?”
If anyone ever deserved the nickname of Stinky, he thought to himself, this fellow was it. From his thick black eyebrows to his belligerent chin, he looked like a Stinky. He was sullen-faced, he was arrogant, he was rude—and that foolish little black moustache didn’t add any endearing charm, either.
“Who d’you think I’m calling?” His battle jacket fitted him like a corset, Asey noted, and he wore one of Mrs. Boone’s green scarves, tied Ascot-fashion, around his neck. “What the hell’s the matter with you hicks? I want some service!”
Benny, standing in the doorway of the garage, caught Asey’s warning glance just in time to bite back a comment.
“Okay, bub,” Asey said. “Want me to fill her up?”
“What d’you think I stopped at the gas pump for, a small beer? Of course I want you to fill her up!”
Asey walked slowly around the roadster. “Say, just where is your gas tank, bub?” he inquired. “Can’t seem to see it no place.”
“It’s—” The young man stopped short. “Don’t you hicks know anything about a good car?”
“We never seen one like this before,” Asey said. “Hey, Benny, he wants me to fill this up, but I wouldn’t know where the gas tank was, would you?”
“Nun-no, dunno’s I would.” Benny entered into the spirit of the thing. “Can’t see any tank cap. S’pose it’s controlled by one of them dashboard gadgets, maybe?”
Gravely, they played for several minutes with the dashboard gadgets while the young man fumed.
After a particularly vehement outburst, Benny shook his head reprovingly.
“What I think is,” he observed, “if you don’t know where the gas tank on your own car is, bub, you shouldn’t hardly expect us to!”
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“What I think is,” Asey observed as he idly played with several of the gadgets, “you don’t need any gas anyways, bub!”
“Look here, you, the tank said ‘Empty’! The—”
“Thought you didn’t know where the tank was, bub,” Asey interrupted.
“There!” The young man, now a rich dark purple in color, pointed to one of the dashboard indicators. “That one—it said ‘E’—it’s empty!”
“Look, bub, turn your ignition key,” Asey said gently. “Now watch them needles. What you were pointin’ at is an oil gauge—can’t you tell an oil gauge when you see it? The next dial’s the gas, an’ if you’ll look close, you’ll see it’s three-quarters full, bub—”
He broke off as the young man impatiently lighted a cigarette—with Cummings’s own outsize platinum lighter!
Asey knew that lighter. He’d given it to the doctor himself. And Jennie recognized it. He heard her startled exclamation.
“So, you got enough gas,” Asey went on. “Enough to last until your friend that owns this car can tell you where the gas tank is located. It does belong to some friend, doesn’t it, bub?”
“What of it?” The fellow’s voice was trembling with anger. “And stop calling me bub!” He jammed his finger on the starter button, and then raced the engine until Asey winced.
“Okay, bub!” he said. “Glad to have been of service. Drop in any time!”
Very slowly, the roadster started away from the gas pump, and turned out on to the highway.
“Funny,” Benny remarked, “I’d of sworn he meant to slat away from here hell-bent for election, but he’s still only creepin’ along—did you do somethin’ to the car, Asey, when you played with them gadgets?”
“I’m introducin’ Sonny Boy to one of the prince’s fancier bits of equipment,” Asey said with a grin. “A special speed just for parade work. He can’t go more’n ten miles an hour in that thing right now—an’ I don’t think he’s enough of a mechanic to find his way back to normal through them gadgets in much of a hurry!”
“What was you intendin’ to do to him, exactly?” Benny asked. “Seemed to me you broke off your plans there, didn’t you?”
Punch With Care Page 9