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.
Bibi followed his wonderful idiots toward his own car (Bibi liked to ride to crime scenes in solitary splendor, whenever possible), then stopped. ‘I said the wood is wood, the vinyl is vinyl, and the glass is glass. You heard me say that?’
Tony and Ennis nodded.
‘It appears to me that this purported car’s exhaust system is also made of glass. Of course, I was only peering under from one side, but I had a flashlight. Quite a powerful one.’ For a few moments he just stood there, staring at the Buick parked in front of Shed B, hands in his pockets, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet. ‘I have never heard of a car with a glass exhaust system,’ he said finally, and then walked toward his car. A moment later, he and his children were gone.
Tony was uncomfortable with the car out where it was, not just because of possible storms but because anyone who happened to walk out back could see it. Visitors were what he was thinking of, Mr and Mrs John Q. Public. The State Police served John Q. and his family as well as they could, in some cases at the cost of their lives. They did not, however, completely trust them. John Q.’s family was not Troop D’s family. The prospect of word getting around
— worse, of rumor getting around — made Sergeant Schoondist squirm.
He strolled to Johnny Parker’s little office (the County Motor Pool was still next door in those days) around quarter to three and sweet-talked Johnny into moving one of the plows out of Shed B and putting the Buick inside. A pint of whiskey sealed the deal, and the Buick was towed into the oil-smelling darkness that became its home. Shed B had garage doors at either end, and Johnny brought the Buick in through the back one. As a result, it faced the Troop D
barracks from out there for all the years of its stay. It’s something most of the Troopers became aware of as time passed. Not a forebrain thing, nothing like an organized thought, but something that floated at the back of the mind, never quite formed and never quite gone: the pressure of its chrome grin.
There were eighteen Troopers assigned to Troop D in 1979, rotating through the usual shifts: seven to three, three to eleven, and the graveyard shift, when they rode two to a cruiser. On
Fridays and Saturdays, the eleven-to-seven shift was commonly called Puke Patrol.
By four o’clock on the afternoon the Buick arrived, most of the off-duty Troopers had heard about it and dropped by for a look. Sandy Dearborn, back from the accident on Highway 6 and typing up the paperwork, saw them going out there in murmuring threes and fours, almost like tour groups. Curt Wilcox was off-duty by then and he conducted a good many of the tours himself, pointing out the mismatched portholes and big steering wheel, lifting the hood so they could marvel over the whacked-out mill with BUICK 8 printed on both sides of the engine block.
Orv Garrett conducted other tours, telling the story of Mister D’s reaction over and over again. Sergeant Schoondist, already fascinated by the thing (a fascination that would never completely leave him until Alzheimer’s disease erased his mind), came out as often as he could. Sandy remembered him standing just outside the open Shed B door at one point, foot up on the boards behind him, arms crossed. Ennis was beside him, smoking one of those little Tiparillos he liked and talking while Tony nodded. It was after three, and Ennis had changed into jeans and a plain white shirt. After three, and that was the best Sandy could say later on.