‘How could folks not know?’ Ned asked. ‘Something as big as this, how could it not get out?’
‘It’s not so big,’ Phil said. ‘I mean, it’s a Buick, son. A Cadillac, now . . . that would be big.’
‘Some families can’t keep secrets and some families can,’ I said. ‘Ours can. Tony Schoondist called that meeting in the The Country Way, two nights after the Buick came in and Ennis disappeared, mostly to make sure we would. Tony briefed us on any number of things that night. Ennis’s sister, of course — how we were going to take care of her and how we were supposed to respond to her until she cooled down — ‘
‘If she ever did, I wasn’t aware of it,’ Huddie said.
‘ — and how we were to handle any reporters if she went to the press.’
There had been a dozen Troopers there that night, and with the help of Huddie and Phil, I managed to name most of them. Ned wouldn’t have met all of them face to face, but he’d probably heard the names at his dinner table, if his dad talked shop from time to time. Most Troopers do. Not the ugly stuff, of course, not to their families — the spitting and cursing and the bloody messes on the highway — but there’s funny stuff, too, like the time we got called out because this Amish kid was roller-skating through downtown Statler, holding on to the tail of a galloping horse and laughing like a loon. Or the time we had to talk to the guy out on the Culverton Road who’d done a snow-sculpture of a naked man and woman in a sexually explicit position. But it’s art! he kept yelling. We tried to explain that it wasn’t art to the neighbors; they were scandalized. If not for a warm spell and a storm of rain, we probably would have wound up in court on that one.
I told Ned about how we’d dragged the tables into a big hollow square without having to be asked, and how Brian Cole and ‘Dicky-Duck’ Eliot escorted the waitresses out and closed the doors behind them. We served ourselves from the steam tables which had been set up at the front of the room. Later there was beer, the off-duty Troopers pulling their own suds and running their own tabs, and a fug of blue cigarette smoke rising to the ceiling. Peter Quinland, who owned the restaurant in those days, loved The Chairman of the Board, and a steady stream of Frank Sinatra songs rained down on us from the overhead speakers as we ate and drank and smoked and talked: ‘Luck Be a Lady’, ‘The Autumn Wind’, ‘New York, New York’, and of course ‘My Way’, maybe the dumbest pop song of the twentieth century. To this day I can’t listen to it — or any Sinatra song, really — without thinking of The Country Way and the Buick out in Shed B.
Concerning the Buick’s missing driver, we were to say we had no name, no description, and no reason to believe the fellow in question had done anything against the law. Nothing about theft of services, in other words. Queries about Ennis were to be taken seriously and treated honestly — up to a point, anyway. Yes, we were all puzzled. Yes, we were all worried. Yes, we had put out watch-and-want bulletins — what we called W2’s. Yes, it was possible that Ennis had just pulled up stakes arid moved on. Really, we were instructed to say, anything was possible, and Troop D was doing its best to take care of Trooper Rafferty’s sister, a dear lady who was so deeply upset she might say anything.
‘As for the Buick itself, if anyone asks about it at all, tell them it’s an impound,’ Tony had
said. ‘No more than that. If anyone does say more than that, I’ll find out who and smoke him out like a cigar.’ He looked around the room; his men looked back at him, and no one was stupid enough to smile. They’d been around the Sarge long enough to know that when he looked the way he did just then, he was not joking. ‘Are we clear on this? Everyone got the scoop?’
A general rumble of agreement had temporarily blotted out The Chairman singing ‘It was a Very Good Year’. We had the scoop, all right.
Ned held up a hand, and I stopped talking, which was actually a pleasure. I hadn’t much wanted to revisit that long-gone meeting in the first place.
‘What about the tests that guy Bibi Roth did?’
‘All inconclusive,’ I said. ‘The stuff that looked like vinyl wasn’t exactly vinyl — close, but not quite. The paint-chips didn’t match up to any of the automotive paints Bibi had samples of. The wood was wood. ‘Likely oak,’ Bibi said, but that was all he would say, no matter how much Tony pressed him. Something about it bothered him, but he wouldn’t say what.’
‘Maybe he couldn’t,’ Shirley said. ‘Maybe he didn’t know.’
I nodded. ‘The glass in the windows and windshield is plain old sandwich safety glass, but not trademarked. Not installed on any Detroit assembly line, in other words.’
‘The fingerprints?’
I ticked them off on my own fingers. ‘Ennis. Your father. Bradley Roach. End of story. No prints from the man in the black trenchcoat.’
‘He must have been wearing gloves,’ Ned said.
‘You’d think so, yes. Brad couldn’t say for sure, but he thought he remembered seeing the guy’s hands and thinking they were as white as his face.’
‘People sometimes make up details like that afterwards, though,’ Huddie commented.
‘Eyewitnesses aren’t as reliable as we’d like them to be.’
‘You done philosophizing?’ I asked.
Huddie gave me a grand wave of the hand. ‘Continue.’
‘Bibi found no traces of blood in the car, but fabric samples taken from the interior of the trunk showed microscopic traces of organic matter. Bibi wasn’t able to identify any of it, and the stuff— he called it ‘soap-scum’ — disintegrated. Every slide he took was clear of the stuff in a week. Nothing left but the staining agent he used.’
Huddie raised his hand like a kid in school. I nodded to him.
‘A week later you couldn’t see the places where those guys chipped the dashboard and the wheel to get their samples. The wood grew back like skin over a grape. Same with the lining in the trunk. If you scratched a fender with a penknife or a key, six or seven hours later the scratch would be gone.’
‘It heals itself?’ Ned said. ‘It can do that?’
‘Yes,’ Shirley said. She’d lit another Parliament and was smoking it in quick, nervous little puffs. ‘Your father dragooned me into one of his experiments once — got me to run the video camera. He put a long scratch down the driver’s-side door, right under the chrome swoop, and we just let the camera run, came back together every fifteen minutes. It wasn’t anything dramatic, like something in a movie, but it was pretty damned amazing. The scratch got shallower and started to darken around the edges, like it was working to match the paintjob.
And finally it was just gone. All sign of it.’
‘And the tires,’ Phil Candleton said, taking a turn. ‘You shoved a screwdriver into one of em, the air’d start to whoosh out just like you’d expect. Only then the whoosh’d thin to a whistle and a few seconds later that would stop, too. Then out comes the screwdriver.’ Phil pursed his lips and made a thpp sound. ‘Like spitting out a watermelon seed.’
‘Is it alive?’ Ned asked me. His voice was so low I could hardly hear it. ‘I mean, if it can heal itself — ‘
‘Tony always said it wasn’t,’ I said. ‘He was vehement on the subject. ‘Just a gadget,’ he used to say. ‘Just some kind of goddam thingamajig we don’t understand. ‘Your dad thought just the opposite, and by the end he was just as vehement as Tony had ever been. If Curtis had lived — ‘
‘What? If he’d lived, what?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. All at once I felt dull and sad. There was a lot more to tell, but suddenly I didn’t want to tell it. I didn’t feel up to it and my heart was heavy with the prospect of it, the way your heart can grow heavy at the prospect of toil which is necessary but hard and stupid — stumps to pull before sundown, hay to bundle into the barn before afternoon rain. ‘I don’t know what would have happened if he’d lived, and that’s the God’s honest truth.’
Huddie came to my rescue. ‘Your dad was bullshit about the car, Ned. I mean bug-eyed bullshit. He was out there every spare minute, walking around it, taking pictures of it. . .