Ed Gorman - Wake Up Little Susie

“With the Squires autopsy?”

“That seems like a hell of lot for car insurance.”

I know code when I hear it. I don’t read Shell Scott for nothing.

“Somebody’s there, right?”

“Seems to be the case.”

“Cliffie?”

“Looks like it to me.”

“I’ll try you later.”

“See if you can do better on those rates, will you?”

And he hung up.

I managed to stay in my robe all day.

Didn’t even shave. Watched Maverick.

Laid down to read a detective paperback and woke up at 6cccj A.M. I turned on the radio to a commercial advertising a popular polka band, Six Fat Dutchmen. They’d be in our fair city next week. One night only.

One of the largest group of Negro settlers came to Iowa in the late 1890’s.

Representatives of a coal company that was having troubles with its white workers went south and made job-hungry blacks a lot of promises, a surprising number of which they actually kept.

Come to Iowa and prosper was their message.

By 1910, a couple of different areas of Iowa became Negro mining towns.

I remembered this from my history lessons when, on Monday morning, I went over to Keys Ford-Lincoln to see if anybody had been working late on Friday night before the Edsel premiere. A still-nervous Dick sent me back to the noise and energy of the service garage, where a man named Frank Kelton was working on a 1955 Ford station wagon. Like most other men, he had a lot of family pictures thumbtacked to the wall of his personal bay. He also had a yellowing photo of a group of black miners just stepping out of a mine. One of the men, most prominent because of his height, looked a lot like Kelton.

“Frank?”

“Yeah?”

I could see his coveralls but not his head or hands. They were lost somewhere up under the car he had on the hoist.

“Wondered if I could talk to you. Dick said it’d be all 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 tan two-piece, his wife in a russet-colored suit that hid some of her boxy shape.

“Anything new on the murder?” Dick asked.

“Afraid not.”

“I just wish I hadn’t gone home so early,”

Mrs. Keys said. “If I hadn’t left at seven-thirty, maybe I could have scared him away. You know, with both Susan and me working in the showroom together.”

He slid a commiserative arm around her.

“I’m the one who should have been here. But there was so much last-minute stuff-I don’t think I was here twenty minutes the whole night.” He frowned. “Well, if you hear anything-”

“I’ll call. Don’t worry.” I nodded good-bye to Mrs. Keys.

You can never be sure how Judge Whitney is going to react to a piece of news. One time I told her I’d misplaced a vital piece of evidence in one of her cases, and she poured me a drink of brandy and said we all made mistakes from time to time and why didn’t I just sit down and relax. Another time I told her I was three minutes late for our meeting because my ragtop had had a flat tire, and she threw her brandy glass at me and said it was time I got rid of that “embarrassing juvenile car.” You may get the impression that she likes to start meetings on time.

“How’s her mood?” I asked Pamela

Forrest when I walked into the office that fine fall Monday morning. Pamela was wearing a blue shift with a matching blue ribbon in her baby-blond hair.

“How was Custer’s mood after the Little Big Horn?”

“That bad?”

“She said you didn’t call her.”

“I didn’t have anything to tell her.”

“She said that shouldn’t be any excuse.”

“Just wait till I tell her what David Squires wants. You’ll be hearing her scream.” Then: “Why are you smiling? Do you like seeing me in trouble with her?”