Free Sam McCain - 02 - Wake Up Little Susie by Ed Gorman Page B

right.”
    “You give me a minute?”
    “Sure.”
    All those great smells. Fresh coffee.
    Cigarette smoke. Cold concrete floor.
    Oil. Grease. New tires. Hot engines.
    Cool engines. Exhaust. And the sounds of glas-paks backing off. And rock-and-roll radio, a little Bill Haley if you
    please. And jabber jabber jabber. Mechanics with customers. Customers with customers. Mechanics with mechanics. And out the doors a beautiful autumn morning. Azure-blue sky.
    Temperature in the high 50’s. The scent of burning leaves. Hawks didn’t soar across the sky on a day like this, they tap-danced.
    “Dick said it would be all right,” I said again.
    He was about my size, my age. One
    difference. His left eye was glass and strayed a bit. He was also a Negro. “I’m pretty busy.”
    “I won’t take much of your time. It’s about Friday night.”
    “Oh. You a cop?”
    “No. I work for Judge Whitney.”
    He grinned. “I was in Korea, man. We coulda used her over there.”
    “She’s pretty nice most of the time.”
    “Yeah? Who says so, Stalin?”
    Car repairman today, The Ed Sullivan Show tomorrow.
    “I told the cops everything I know.”
    “Which was?”
    He shrugged. He was about to say something when another man in coveralls, this one carrying a clipboard, came over and said, “You handle a tune-up about three this afternoon?”
    “Should be able to.”
    “Thanks.”
    “You were saying,” I said.
    He shrugged again. “Dick said he’d pay me double for overtime to make sure everything was working right for Edsel Day. All the electrical stuff, I mean. I’m kind of a half-assed
    electrician. I guess he figured if there .was anything wrong I could fix it. So I put in four hours. Got done for the day here at four-thirty, drove home and had dinner with the wife and kids, and drove back. Punched in at six and punched out at ten. Everything was in good shape.”
    “You know the Edsel they found the body in?”
    “You ki.in’?”
    “You know where it was?”
    “Yup. Right over there in the corner. Along with two others. I put them there myself at the end of the day.”
    “While you were here, did you hear the sound of a car slamming into the edge of the building?”
    “No. But this is a big place and I was playing the radio pretty loud, or I might have been up front talking to Susan Squires.”
    “You tell Sykes all this?”
    “I tried. He didn’t seem much interested.
    He just wanted to know if I’d seen anybody dump the body in the Edsel. I wanted to say, Hey, man, I seen somebody do somethin’ like that, you don’t think I’d call you right on the spot?”
    That sounded like Sykes, all right. Don’t confuse me with the facts. Just let me use my Chief Suspects dartboard and I’ll have this case wrapped up in no time.
    “You take a look at something for me?”
    “I’m really in kind of a hurry.”
    He’d probably been wondering what I had in the lunch sack I carried. I spread the pieces out on his workbench.
    “Taillight,” he said.
    “Right. Make?”
    “Chevrolet.”
    “Model?”
    “Could be one of three or four. But it’s a ‘fifty-five.”
    “Easy to replace?”
    “V. At least usually. But Gm’s union has been threatening a strike. They started a slowdown a while back.”
    “How long to get a replacement?”
    “Couple days.”
    “So the driver probably hasn’t replaced it yet.”
    “Could have. But probably not. Even if it’s in stock, it’ll probably take till tomorrow before he’d have his car.”
    “What if he’s a do-it-yourselfer?”
    “Buy his own kit, you mean? Install it himself?
    If that were the case, he could have it on by now.”
    “If he used a service garage, would it probably be you?”
    “Iowa City and Cedar Rapids aren’t very far away.”
    “So there’s nothing special about this taillight?”
    “Just that it’s broken.”
    I thanked him and started to walk out of the garage when I saw the Keyses. They were both nicely dressed, as usual, Keys in a