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

Framed by James H. Cobb

Copyright © 2006 James H. Cobb

Art by Laurie Harden

James Cobb writes both science fiction and mystery fiction. Science fiction fans know him as the author of the Amanda Garrett techno-thriller series from G.P. Putnam, and more recently for “The First Cup of Coffee War” in the Joe Haldeman anthology Future Weapons. In the crime field, the Tacoma author has one published novel, West on 66 (St.Martin’s), which features the protagonist of this new story, Kevin Pulaski.

The little man in the cheap blue suit crouched in the dark under the sycamore tree, fingering the gun in his pocket. The roadside diner was located on an isolated stretch of Indiana State 22 and the only light he had to fear issued from its glowing strip of windows. It glinted off the chrome and glass of the scattered cars in the graveled parking lot. The little man gathered himself to move...

It had been the 1948 season opener at the Gas City dirt track, and I had killed the universe.

I’d won my four-lap trophy dash, picking up the trophy, the five-buck pot, and a kiss from the cute cheerleader doing duty as trophy girl. I’d nailed a second in my heat race, blowing Nick Tompkins and his lead sled ’34 out of the water. And I’d run solid in the big twenty-lap final.

I never had any real chance in that one. A street rod like mine just couldn’t run against dedicated racing roadsters. The A-bomb and I started in the middle of the pack and we stayed there, but we’d had a lot of fun doing it. I also had the consolation of knowing that everything finishing ahead of me had come in on a trailer or a tow-bar.

Afterwards, our usual crowd descended on the checkerboard-tiled environs of the Route 22 diner. Martin Luther Snustaad and Johnny Roy Tardell were there, and Lee Curtis and his girlfriend Estelle Archer. A station-wagon load of teenaged Fairmont females had shown up as well, running in a pack to avoid trouble while hoping they’d still get into some anyway. Between standing for Cokes and malts and keeping the jukebox primed, my five bucks’ worth of trophy money didn’t last long.

As for me, man, I was a violent collision between Duke Nalon and Juan Fangio with an order of Clark Gable on the side. I was wearing my genuine Navy surplus ponyhide jacket and my genuine Army surplus silk aviator’s scarf and I’d been careful not to smear the oily dust I’d accumulated on my face so you could see the outline of my driving goggles. Given the giggles and glances being cut in my direction from the ponytailed and poodle-skirted gang in the back booth, I, Kevin no-middle-initial Pulaski, was destined for greatness that night.

Then Lee and Estelle said they’d be heading home early.

Yeah, sure, tell me another one, guys. It was one of our first really good springtime parking nights outside — starry, clear, and just cool enough to encourage cuddling.

Lee was a fellow hot rodder, a tall, lanky, slightly homely farm boy who met all of the qualifications for “damn nice guy,” while Estelle was a sweet little pretty-plain brunette who could see the value in the damn nice guys of the world. As they headed for the diner’s door, holding hands and dreamy eyed, I silently wished them good times.

So inspired, I headed for the back booth to see if any of the ladies might be interested in driving over to the river to see if the water still ran downhill. I’d just started to unreel my line when somebody screamed out in the parking lot.

I was the one on my feet, so I was the first one out the door.

A second scream guided me toward a pale blur at the far side of the lot. The blur was Lee Curtis’s gray-primered A-V8 coupe. Lee was sprawled on the ground beside the open driver’s door with Estelle kneeling beside him. For a second I thought I heard the sound of running footsteps crunching on the gravel, then I had other things to worry about. Reaching past Estelle to the dashboard of Lee’s rod, I pulled on the headlight switch. In the back-glare from the sealed beams I could see blood smearing Lee’s face and soaking his T-shirt. I put my hand on his chest, trying to ignore the sticky wetness. He was breathing.

“ ’Stelle, what the hell happened?”

“He hit Lee,” she blubbered. “Over and over!”

“Who did, ’Stelle?”

“The old man trying to steal Lee’s car.”

Sure enough, by the dash light I could see a couple of wires torn loose from the ignition switch.

The gang gathered around us, stunned and goggling. Fairmont wasn’t a place where you got to see a lot of people beaten into a fair imitation of a cube steak. With nobody else around to do it, I started giving orders.

“Marty, go inside and call the doctor and Lee’s folks! Hey, Johnny Roy, I got a blanket behind the seat in my rod. Bring it here!”

I peeled off my jacket and wadded it up under Lee’s head. Then I used my driving scarf to sop off some of the blood. After a minute Lee started to moan.

“Take it easy, man.” I said.

“Wha...” he started to mush, then his swelling eyes snapped open. “My car!”

“Still here. He didn’t get it.”

“ ’Stelle...”

“He didn’t get her, either.”

Lee groped for his girl and she caught his hand, pressing it against her teary cheek.

“He was hot-wiring my rod, Kevin. He had a gun... Swear to God... He busted me with it... Moved faster’n a snake... Never had a chance.”

A bulky shadow fell across me, blocking out the lights of the diner. “The doc and Lee’s folks are on their way,” Marty Snustaad reported.

Eddie, the counter man from the Route 22, came hustling up as well. “I called the night marshal, too.”

I looked up at him sourly. “Jeez, Eddie! Aren’t things bad enough as is?”

Night Marshal Hiram Dooley was a redoubtable and fearless foe of Fairmont township’s most dangerous criminal elements, like anyone under twenty who wears a leather jacket and drives a hot rod. Broad-shouldered, bullet-headed, and bristle-skulled, he scribbled in his little black notebook between glowers at my gang and me.

Dooley and I go way back. Mostly it’s for laughs (on my part, anyway) but tonight, with a friend of mine beaten to a pulp and his girl crying, with his blood on her skirt, the Dewlap was beginning to bug me.

Lee’s folks had him propped up in the end booth while Doc Jorgenson, our sawed-off local sawbones, worked on him. The doc was worried about a possible concussion. That only left ’Stelle for Dooley to pick on.

“All right, Miss Archer, let’s have it again,” the Dewlap demanded. “You left the diner and then what happened?”

Estelle sat perched on one of the maroon Naugahyde counter stools, shivering hard. “We left the diner,” she repeated, fighting to keep her voice steady, “and we were about halfway across the parking lot when we saw the door on Lee’s car was open. Somebody was kneeling on the ground beside it.

“Lee yelled that someone was trying to steal his car and he ran over to stop him. There was a fight. The man... the thief, had a gun, and he hit Lee with it... he kept hitting him, as hard as he could! I saw Lee fall and all I could do was scream and then everyone was coming out of the diner and the thief ran off. That’s all.”

The girl took a shuddering breath and Dooley scowled, checking her words against his notes. “What did this car thief look like, Miss Archer?”

“I couldn’t really see, Marshal. There was hardly any light. He wasn’t very big, but he moved fast, really fast. He was wearing a suit, a dark suit. I remember I could see a white shirt and a dark necktie. And he had gloves on. And his hair was light-colored; I think he had gray hair, so he must have been older. And he had that gun... and he hit Lee with it!”

’Stelle gritted her teeth and screwed up her eyes, trying to hold it together.

Dooley sighed like a deflating truck tire and deliberately flipped his notebook shut, stowing it in the pocket of his uniform shirt. “All right, Miss Archer. Let’s quit the fun and games. Now how about telling me the truth!”

Estelle’s head snapped up, her dark eyes wide and startled. “But I am, Marshal! I am! That’s what happened!”

“You can get yourself and your boyfriend into a lot of trouble lying to the police, Miss Archer. Who are you covering up for and why?”

I’d been leaning against the counter a couple of stools down, feeling my temperature gauge kicking into the red. “You’re way off the beam, man!” I snapped. “Everyone here’s giving you a square count, especially ’Stelle.”

Like a teed-off Durham bull, Dooley swung to face me. “Come off it, Pulaski! A pistol-packing grandpa coming out here to steal one of your gang’s jalopies? Not likely!”

“Then whaddya think did happen?” I demanded.

“That the Curtis boy got into a beef with somebody out here and you worked him over. Now either he doesn’t want to squeal or he’s afraid to!”

The Dewlap wasn’t going to be satisfied until he had a juvenile delinquency problem to call his own, just like the big-city cops.

“Jeez, Dooley! Hang a wreath around your neck! Your brain just died and your head’s in mourning!”

“Watch that smart mouth, Pulaski!”

“Go check out Lee’s rod,” I said patiently, trying to gear myself down. “You can see where somebody hot-wired it.”

“Maybe so, but who’d want to steal one of those junk heaps except another member of your gang?”

I reminded myself that the momentary pleasure of busting our friendly neighborhood justice merchant in the chops would not make up for six months at the county youth farm. “Look! Nobody here stole anything or beat up anybody! Ask Eddie!”

“Well, maybe so,” the Dewlap grudged, “but this whole crazy yarn just doesn’t make any sense.”

“Neither did Mr. Kennedy robbing his own jewelry store, but that happened, too.”

Dooley winced. Awhile back, the night marshal had tried to run another Fairmont hot rodder in for a burglary he hadn’t done, and he still hadn’t entirely forgiven me for proving him wrong.

“It just doesn’t make any sense,” Dooley muttered.

“Maybe not, Hiram.” Doc Jorgensen came waddling up to join us. “But these kids are certainly telling the truth about one thing. This wasn’t any common beating. That boy was pistol-whipped, and savagely. The cuts from the trigger guard and gunsights are unmistakable.”

“Are you sure, Doc?” the marshal asked.

Doc Jorgensen lifted one bushy eyebrow. “I interned in a Chicago receiving hospital back in the good old days, Hiram. I know what a Joliet facial looks like.”

Lee’s folks took him into the hospital in Indianapolis for X-rays and Sally Tremain and her girlfriends drove Estelle home. Me, I patched up Lee’s ignition and drove his car back to the Curtis farm.

Lee stowed his rod in a shed off their big barn and as I got out to open the doors, Race, the Curtis’s sheepdog, yapped out to meet me. Race and I are old buddies. He planted his forepaws on my chest and panted dog breath into my face as I gave his ears a good scratch.

I backed Lee’s rod into the shed/workshop and shut it down. Then I snapped on the overhead light and did a slow walk-around on the car, checking it out.

Lee and I had both been building Model a’s but we’d produced two radically different machines. The A-Bomb was a fenderless roadster powered by a Model B straight-four. Lee, on the other hand, had put together a full-fendered A-V8 coupe. That is, a Model A with a V-8 engine swapped in from a later-model Ford.

Lee’s car was still sort of a work in progress. The body had been sanded down and primered but it hadn’t been painted yet, and the cuts and welds of the chop job done on the top still showed as raw, blackened scars. The interior had been gutted to bare metal as well, with nothing replaced but the cut-down ’40 Ford dashboard and steering wheel and some fake leopard-skin covers on the bench seat.

Like most of us who’d gowed up a Model A, Lee had Deuce-nosed his car, replacing the stock radiator shell, radiator, and hood with parts taken from a ’32 Ford, both for the better cooling and for the sharper look. I lifted the side panel of the hood and studied the inside of the neat engine compartment.

The dirt-common twenty-one-bolt Flathead had been lifted from the same wrecked sedan that had donated Lee’s steering wheel, dashboard, and hydraulic brakes. The mill had been rebuilt with Denver heads, an Almquist dual-intake manifold, and a pair of reconditioned Stromberg 97 carburetors, a mild soup job put together by a decent mechanic who didn’t have a whole lot of money to spend.

I leaned back against the rough plank wall of the shed and crossed my arms. I had to admit the Dewlap was right about one thing. Something wacky was going on here. To me, or to any other rodney, Lee’s beast was a thing of great beauty, a cool machine getting cooler. But to your average suit-wearing square, this car would be about as appealing as a cow pie.

I heard Race barking out in the barn lot and I saw a set of headlights turning in from the road. I recognized the anemic grumble of Marty Snustaad’s ’38 DeSoto sedan. I’d asked Marty and Johnny Roy to pick me up and take me back to where I’d left the A-Bomb.

I ducked under Lee’s hood for another second before buttoning it up. Then I turned out the light and closed the shed doors. I was also careful to snap on the heavy padlock I found hanging from the hasp.

I knew I’d be coming back out to the Curtis farm the next day. Somehow I also knew I’d be coming back to trouble.

Early on the following morning I tore out county road 11A to the Curtis place. Sure enough, Marshal Dooley’s black Plymouth was parked in the barn lot. Dooley was standing beside the shed where I’d left Lee’s rod. Lee was out there, too, in his bathrobe and pajamas and with a bandage on his head, as was Mr. Curtis, with his inevitable old felt hat tugged down over his eyes. Another tall, lanky, handsome-homely man, Mr. Curtis had been the model they’d built his son on.

Somebody wasn’t there, though. Race didn’t come out to meet me as I turned in from the road.

“Hey, Lee,” I said, hoisting myself over the A-Bomb’s welded door. “What’s goin’ on, man?”

“He came back, Kev.” Lee’s voice was tight. “The son of a bitch tried to steal my car again and he shot Race!”

Lee’s rod still stood inside the shed, but the doors had been forced open, the hasp and padlock dangling from splintered wood.

“You brought this car back here last night, Pulaski,” Dooley challenged me. “What time was it?”

“About eleven-thirty — twelve o’clock, I guess. Race was alive then.”

“We got back from the city about two-thirty, Marshal,” Lee’s father added. “Race didn’t come out to meet us. That was kind of funny, but Lee’s mother and I were worried about gettin’ him to bed. We didn’t think much about it at the time.”

“Did you see anything funny out here, Pulaski?”

I tried to remember. Had there been a set of headlights trailing behind me as I’d driven out to the farm?

I shook my head. “I dunno. Nothing I can really say.”

The driver’s door of Lee’s rod was standing half open. I stepped around it and hunkered down to study the dashboard. Yeah, the ignition wires I’d fixed last night had been torn loose again and a hot-wire installed.

Lee came up behind me. “Whoever he is, he sure wants my car bad.”

“Or something in that car,” the Dewlap said, eyeing us suspiciously.

I shook my head. “Nah. He’s after the car.”

“How do you figure that, Pulaski?”

“By using the common sense God gave a gearshift knob, Dooley. The tools and junk under the seat and the stuff in the glove box are all like I left them. Nothing’s been scattered around. This guy went straight to the hot-wire job. He wasn’t searching, he was stealing.”

“Jeez,” Lee breathed, “I’m sure lucky he wasn’t able to get her started.”

“No luck to it, man.” I stood up, digging into my jacket pocket. “Here are your keys and your distributor rotor.”

“Damn! Thanks, Kev! I owe you! You saved my tail again.”

I shrugged. “So stand me a malt next time we hit the diner. Make it a double and we’ll be evens.”

Lee had to get back to bed — the doc wanted him to take it easy for a few days — and his dad had a sad chore to do. Dooley made all the right noises about notifying the county sheriff and keeping his eyes open and we got out of there. As we headed back to our cars, Dooley gave me that old look again.

“All right, Pulaski. What made you pull the rotor on that car the way you did?”

“Hell, Dooley, I dunno.” I lit up from my soft pack of Luckys and offered the night marshal one. “It just sort of seemed like a good idea.”

As Dooley drove off, I sat in the A-Bomb and smoked my smoke right down to the butt, just thinking.

What the heck was it about Lee’s rod that made it so important to somebody? I mean, car thieves might clip a set of wheels for a joyride or to strip down for parts, but if they botched the first grab, they’d just move on to the next one. They wouldn’t stay after that one specific car unless there was something extra-special about it. And there wasn’t anything extra-special about Lee Curtis’s A-V8.

I was certain of that. Lee and I had swapped tools, parts, and help working on our cars and I knew Lee’s rod as well as I knew my own. There just wasn’t anything there.

That we could see, anyway.

I fired up and headed out, hunting for the guy who had sold Lee his wheels.

Lee had bought his Model A from another of the local farmers. Mr. Wright had been using the coupe for a field car until the rear end had gone out on it and he’d been happy to sell the remains to Lee for five dollars. Luckily for me, Mr. Wright was an adult I was in good with. He didn’t have a teenaged daughter, and I’d resuscitated his old Farmall tractor after every other mechanic in the county had given it up as a lost cause.

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.

“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?”