From a Buick 8 Read online

  "What's doin, boys?" Orville asked, but before anyone could answer him, Mister Dillon began to howl. Sandy Dearborn, who happened to be standing right beside the dog, had never heard anything quite like that howl in his entire life. Mister D backed up a pace and then hunkered, facing the Buick. His head was up and his hindquarters were down. He looked like a dog does when he's taking a crap, except for his fur. It was bushed out all over his body, every hair standing on end. Sandy's skin went cold.

  "Holy God, what's wrong with him?" Phil asked in a low, awed voice, and then Mister D let loose with another of those long, wavering howls. He took three or four stalk-steps toward the Buick, never coming out of that hunched-over, cramped-up, taking-a-crap stoop, all the time with his muzzle pointing at the sky. It was awful to watch. He made two or three more of those awkward movements, then dropped flat on the macadam, panting and whining.

  "What the hell?" Orv said.

  "Put a leash on him," Tony said. "Get him inside." Orv did as Tony said, actually running to get Mister Dillon's leash. Phil Candleton, who had always been especially partial to the dog, went with Orv once the leash was on him, walking next to Mister D, occasionally bending down to give him a comforting stroke arid a soothing word. Later, he told the others that the dog had been shivering all over.

  Nobody said anything. Nobody had to. They were all thinking the same thing, that Mister Dillon had pretty well proved Curt's point. The ground wasn't shaking and Tony hadn't heard anything when he stuck his head in through the Buick's window, but something was wrong with it, all right. A lot more wrong than the size of its steering wheel or its strange notchless ignition key. Something worse.

  In the seventies and eighties, Pennsylvania State Police forensics investigators were rolling stones, travelling around to the various Troops in a given area from District HQ. In the case of Troop D, HQ was Butler. There were no forensics vans; such big-city luxuries were dreamed of, but wouldn't actually arrive in rural Pennsylvania until almost the end of the century. The forensics guys rode in unmarked police cars, carrying their equipment in trunks and back seats, toting it to various crime scenes in big canvas shoulder-bags with the PSP keystone logo on the sides. There were three guys in most forensics crews: the chief and two technicians. Sometimes there was also a trainee. Most of these looked too young to buy a legal drink.

  One such team appeared at Troop D that afternoon. They had ridden over from Shippenville, at Tony Schoondist's personal request. It was a funny informal visit, a vehicle exam not quite in the line of duty. The crew chief was Bibi Roth, one of the oldtimers (men joked that Bibi had learned his trade at the knee of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson). He and Tony Schoondist got along well, and Bibi didn't mind doing a solid for the Troop D SC. Not as long as it stayed quiet, that was.

  Now: Sandy

  Ned stopped me at this point to ask why the forensic examination of the Buick was conducted in such an odd (to him, at least) off-the-cuff manner.

  "Because," I told him, "the only criminal complaint in the matter that any of us could think of was theft of services--eleven dollars" worth of hi-test gasoline. That's a misdemeanor, not worth a forensic crew's time."

  "Dey woulda burned almost dat much gas gettin over here from Shippenville," Arky pointed out.

  "Not to mention the man-hours," Phil added.

  I said, "Tony didn't want to start a paper trail. Remember that there wasn't one at that point. All he had was a car. A very weird car, granted, one with no license plates, no registration, and--Bibi Roth confirmed this--no VIN number, either."

  "But Roach had reason to believe the owner drowned in the stream behind the gas station!"

  "Pooh," Shirley said. "The driver's overcoat turned out to be a plastic garbage can. So much for Bradley Roach's ideas."

  "Plus," Phil put in, "Ennis arid your dad observed no tracks going down the slope behind the station, and the grass was still wet. If the guy had gone down there, he would have left sign."

  "Mostly, Tony wanted to keep it in-house," Shirley said. "Would you say that's a fair way to put it, Sandy?"

  "Yes. The Buick itself was strange, but our way of dealing with it wasn't much different from the way we'd deal with anything out of the ordinary: a Trooper down--like your father, last year--or one who's used his weapon, or an accident, like when George Morgan was in hot pursuit of that crazy asshole who snatched his kids."

  We were all silent for a moment. Cops have nightmares, any Trooper's wife will tell you that, and in the bad dream department, George Morgan was one of the worst. He'd been doing ninety, closing in on the crazy asshole, who had a habit of beating the kids he had snatched and claimed to love, when it happened.

  George is almost on top of him and all at once here's this senior citizen crossing the road, seventy years old, slower than creeping bullfrog Jesus, and legally blind. The asshole would have been the one to hit her if she'd started across three seconds earlier, but she didn't. No, the asshole blew right by her, the rearview mirror on the passenger side of his vehicle so close it almost took off her nose. Next comes George, and kapow. He had twelve blameless years on the State Police, two citations for bravery, community service awards without number. He was a good father to his children, a good husband to his wife, and all of that ended when a woman from Lassburg Gut tried to cross the street at the wrong moment and he killed her with PSP cruiser D-27. George was exonerated by the State Board of Review and came back to a desk job on the Troop, rated PLD--permanent light duty--at his own request. He could have gone back full-time as far as the brass was concerned, but there was a problem: George Morgan could no longer drive. Not even the family car to the market. He got the shakes every time he slid behind the wheel. His eyes teared up until he was suffering from a kind of waterlogged hysterical blindness. That summer he worked nights, on dispatch. In the afternoons he coached the Troop D-sponsored Little League team all the way to the state tournament. When that was over, he gave the kids their trophy and their pins, told them how proud of them he was, then went home (a player's mother drove him), drank two beers, and blew his brains out in the garage. He didn't leave a note; cops rarely do. I wrote a press release in the wake of that. Reading it, you never would have guessed it was written with tears on my face. And it suddenly seemed very important that I communicate some of the reason why to Curtis Wilcox's son.

  "We're a family," I said. "I know that sounds corny, but it's true. Even Mister Dillon knew that much, and you do, too. Don't you?"

  The kid nodded his head. Of course he did. In the year after his father died, we were the family that mattered to him most, the one he sought out and the one that gave him what he needed to get on with his life. His mother and sisters loved him, and he loved them, but they were going on with their lives in a way that Ned could not . . . at least not yet. Some of it was being male instead of female. Some of it was being eighteen. Some of it was all those questions of why that wouldn't go away.

  I said, "What families say and how families act when they're in their houses with the doors shut and how they talk and behave when they're out on their lawns and the doors are open . . . those can be very different things. Ennis knew the Buick was wrong, your dad did, Tony did, I did. Mister D most certainly did. The way that dog howled . . ."

  I fell silent for a moment. I've heard that howl in my dreams. Then I pushed on.

  "But legally, it was just an object--a res, as the lawyers say--with no blame held against it. We couldn't very well hold the Buick for theft of services, could we? And the man who ordered the gas that went into its tank was long gone and hard to find. The best we could do was to think of it as an impoundment."

  Ned wore the frown of someone who doesn't understand what he's hearing. I could understand that. I hadn't been as clear as I wanted to be. Or maybe I was just playing that famous old game, the one called It Wasn't Our Fault.

  "Listen," Shirley said. "Suppose a woman stopped to use the restroom at that station and left her diamond engagement ring on the washst
and and Bradley Roach found it there. Okay?"

  "Okay . . ." Ned said. Still frowning.

  "And let's say Roach brought it to us instead of just putting it in his pocket and then taking it to a pawnshop in Butler. We'd make a report, maybe put out the make and model of the woman's car to the Troopers in the field, if Roach could give them to us . . . but we wouldn't take the ring. Would we, Sandy?"

  "No," I said. "We'd advise Roach to put an ad in the paper--Found, a woman's ring, if you think it may be yours, call this number and describe. At which point Roach would get pissing and moaning about the cost of putting an ad in the paper--a whole three bucks."

  "And then we'd remind him that folks who find valuable property often get rewards," Phil said, "and he'd decide maybe he could find three bucks, after all."

  "But if the woman never called or came back," I said, "that ring would become Roach's property. It's the oldest law in history: finders-keepers."

  "So Ennis and my dad took the Buick."

  "No," I said. "The Troop took it."

  "What about theft of services? Did that ever get filed?"

  "Oh, well," I said with an uncomfortable little grin. "Eleven bucks was hardly worth the paperwork. Was it, Phil?"

  "Nah," Phil said. "Specially not in those days, when an IBM typewriter with CorrecTape was state-of-the-art. But we squared it up with Hugh Bossey."

  A light was dawning on Ned's face. "You paid for the gas out of petty cash."

  Phil looked both shocked arid amused. "Never in your life, boy! Petty cash is the taxpayers" money, too."

  "We passed the hat," I said. "Everybody that was there gave a little. It was easy."

  "If Roach found a ring and nobody claimed it, it would be his," Ned said. "So wouldn't the Buick be his?"

  "Maybe if he'd kept it," I said. "But he turned it over to us, didn't he? And as far as he "was concerned, that was the end of it."

  Arky tapped his forehead and gave Ned a wise look. "Nuttin upstairs, dat one," he said.

  For a moment I thought Ned would turn to brooding on the young man who had grown up to kill his father, but he shook that off. I could almost see him do it.

  "Go on," he said to me. "What happened next?"

  Oh boy. Who can resist that?

  Then

  It took Bibi Roth and his children (that's what he called them) only forty-five minutes to go over the Buick from stem to stern, the young people dusting and brushing and snapping pictures, Bibi with a clipboard, walking around and sometimes pointing wordlessly at something with his ballpoint pen.

  About twenty minutes into it, Orv Garrett came out with Mister Dillon. The dog was on his leash, which was a rarity around the barracks. Sandy walked over to them. The dog wasn't howling, had quit trembling, and was sitting with his brush of tail curled neatly over his paws, but his dark brown eyes were fixed on the Buick and never moved. From deep in his chest, almost too low to hear, came a steady growl like the rumble of a powerful motor.

  "For Chrissake, Orvie, take him back inside," Sandy Dearborn said.

  "Okay. I just thought he might be over it by now." He paused, then said: "I've heard bloodhounds act that way sometimes, when they've found a body. I know there's no body, but do you think someone might have died in there?"

  "Not that we know of." Sandy was watching Tony Schoondist come out of the barracks" side door and amble over to Bibi Roth. Ennis was with him. Curt Wilcox was out on patrol again, much against his wishes. Sandy doubted that even pretty girls would be able to talk him into giving them warnings instead of tickets that afternoon. Curt wanted to be at the barracks, watching Bibi and his crew at work, not out on the road; if he couldn't be, lawbreakers in western Pennsylvania would pay.

  Mister Dillon opened his mouth and let loose a long, low whine, as if something in him hurt. Sandy supposed something did. Orville took him inside. Five minutes later Sandy himself was rolling again, along with Steve Devoe, to the scene of a two-car collision out on Highway 6.

  Bibi Roth made his report to Tony and Ennis as the members of his crew (there were three of them today) sat at a picnic table in the shade of Shed B, eating sandwiches and drinking the iced tea Matt Babicki had run out to them.

  "I appreciate you taking the time to do this," Tony said.

  "Your appreciation is appreciated," Bibi said, "and I hope it ends there. I don't want to submit any paperwork on this one, Tony. No one would ever trust me again." He looked at his crew and clapped his hands like Miss Frances on Ding-Dong School. "Do we want paperwork on this job, children?" One of the children who helped that day was appointed Pennsylvania's Chief Medical Examiner in 1993.

  They looked at him, two young men and a young woman of extraordinary beauty. Their sandwiches were raised, their brows creased. None of them was sure what response was required.

  "No, Bibi!" he prompted them.

  "No, Bibi," they chorused dutifully.

  "No what?" Bibi asked.

  "No paperwork," said young man number one.

  "No file copies," said young man number two.

  "No duplicate or triplicate," said the young woman of extraordinary beauty. "Not even any singlicate."

  "Good!" he said. "And with whom are we going to discuss this, kinder?"

  This time they needed no prompting. "No one, Bibi!"

  "Exactly," Bibi agreed. "I'm proud of you."

  "Got to be a joke, anyway," said one of the young men. "Someone's trickin on you, Sarge."

  "I'm keeping that possibility in mind," Tony said, -wondering what any of them would have thought if they had seen Mister Dillon howling and hunching forward like a crippled thing. Mister D hadn't been trickin on anybody.

  The children went back to munching and slurping and talking among themselves. Bibi, meanwhile, was looking at Tony and Ennis Rafferty with a slanted little smile.

  "They see what they look at with youth's wonderful twenty-twenty vision and don't see it at the same time," he said. "Young people are such wonderful idiots. What is that thing, Tony? Do you have any idea? From witnesses, perhaps?"

  "No."

  Bibi turned his attention to Ennis, who perhaps thought briefly about telling the man what he knew of the Buick's story and then decided not to. Bibi was a good man . . . but he didn't wear the gray.

  "It's not an automobile, that's for sure," Bibi said. "But a joke? No, I don't think it's that, either."

  "Is there blood?" Tony asked, not knowing if he wanted there to be or not.

  "Only more microscopic examination of the samples we took can determine that for sure, but I think not. Certainly no more than trace amounts, if there is."

  "What did you see?"

  "In a word, nothing. We took no samples from the tire treads because there's no dirt or mud or pebbles or glass or grass or anything else in them. I would have said that was impossible. Henry there--" He pointed to young man number one. "--kept trying to wedge a pebble between two of them and it kept falling out. Now what is that? And could you patent such a thing? If you could, Tony, you could take early retirement."

  Tony was rubbing his cheek with the tips of his fingers, the gesture of a perplexed man.

  "Listen to this," Bibi said. "We're talking floormats here. Great little dirtcatchers, as a rule. Every one a geological survey. Usually. Not here, though. A few smudges of dirt, a dandelion stalk. That's all." He looked at Ennis. "From your partner's shoes, I expect. You say he got behind the wheel?"

  "Yes."

  "Driver's-side footwell. And that's where these few artifacts were found." Bibi patted his palms together, as if to say QED.

  "Are there prints?" Tony asked.

  "Three sets. I'll want comparison prints from your two officers and the pump-jockey. The prints we lifted from the gas-hatch will almost certainly belong to the pump-jockey. You agree?"

  "Most likely," Tony said. "You'd run the prints on your own time?"

  "Absolutely, my pleasure. The fiber samples, as well. Don't annoy me by asking for anything involving the
gas chromatograph in Pittsburgh, there's a good fellow. I will pursue this as far as the equipment in my basement permits. That will be quite far."

  "You're a good guy, Bibi."

  "Yes, and even the best guy will take a free dinner from time to time, if a friend offers."

  "He'll offer. Meantime, is there anything else?"

  "The glass is glass. The wood is wood . . . but a wooden dashboard in a car of this vintage--this purported vintage--is completely wrong. My older brother had a Buick from the late fifties, a Limited. I learned to drive on it and I remember it well. With fear and affection. The dashboard was padded vinyl. I would say the seatcovers in this one are vinyl, which would be right for this make and model; I will be checking with General Motors to make sure. The odometer . . . very amusing. Did you notice the odometer?"

  Ennis shook his head. He looked hypnotized.

  "All zeros. Which is fitting, I suppose. That car--that purported car--would never drive." His eyes moved from Ennis to Tony and then back to Ennis again. "Tell me you haven't seen it drive. That you haven't seen it move a single inch under its own power."

  "Actually, I haven't," Ennis said. Which was true. There was no need to add that Bradley Roach claimed to have seen it moving under its own power, and that Ennis, a veteran of many interrogations, believed him.

  "Good." Bibi looked relieved. He clapped his hands, once more being Miss Frances. "Time to go, children! Voice your thanks!"

  "Thanks, Sergeant," they chorused. The young woman of extraordinary beauty finished her iced tea, belched, and followed her white-coated colleagues back to the car in which they had come. Tony was fascinated to note that not one of the three gave the Buick a look. To them it was now a closed case, and new cases lay ahead. To them the Buick was just an old car, getting older in the summer sun. So what if pebbles fell out when placed between the knuckles of the tread, even when placed so far up along the curve of the tire that gravity should have held them in? So what if there were three portholes on one side instead of four?

  They see it and don't see it at the same time, Bibi had said. Young people are such wonderful idiots.