build, dressed Friday casual in Dockers, sport coat, and blue dress shirt without a tie. His face couldn’t carry the build or the hair, being very ordinary and middle-aged. His blue eyes were wary.
“It’s just routine,” Steffans said. “We have to check and double-check every possibility.” He could see Marvin didn’t believe that, but it was true-most cases were broken by following a well-marked routine.
“I didn’t see her Saturday morning,” Marvin said, “so I don’t know what time she left her house. I know she was home by five-thirty, because that’s what time it was when I checked my watch when I was in her kitchen heating water to make her a cup of tea. I’d been there about, oh, I’m not sure, twenty minutes? But of course, by then, Bill’d been dead for hours.” He bit his lip and stroked the top of his head, yanking his hand away when he encountered the bristly haircut. New style then. Was that important? Steffans wrote a very brief note-he was a thorough note taker-while Marvin mused, “God, what a mess! I still can’t believe he’s gone.”
“How long had you known him?”
“Years.” When Steffans held his pen ready and looked inquiring, Marvin calculated and said, “Twenty-six, twenty-seven years. Maybe twenty-eight. I worked for him for a while, foreman in the plant.”
“Why’d you quit?”
“Got a better offer, which wasn’t difficult. Bill Birmingham hated to pay a man what he was worth. Not a bad boss, a little hard, and tight. Good businessman and better friend. Liked him, liked his kids, liked his wife.”
“You married?”
“Twice, once right out of high school, lasted ten months, no kids; then nine years to Alice. Three kids, all girls, all doing fine, turned out nice. ’Course, a lot of that is due to Alice’s second husband, a good man, walked the second two down the aisle when they got married.” Marvin was looking inward, a half-smile on his lips, and half of that was pained.
Steffans made another note. “Did you murder Bill Birmingham?”
That directness surprised Marvin; he looked up, mouth half-open, eyes wide. “No,” he said.
“Do you know who did?”
“No!” This came out a bit sharply, and he grimaced. “No way I could know that,” he said. “I wasn’t there when it happened.”
“Where were you?”
“At home.”
“Alone?”
Now he was amused. “Yes, as it happens. I had some friends over the night before and we sat up late, playing poker, shooting the bull, drinking beer. I got up Saturday, but I was feeling so bad I had to call Buddy Anderson, who I was supposed to meet for golf, and beg off. I don’t know if it was the beer or the sandwiches, but I was pretty sick all day Saturday. I stayed home with the TV, so I was there when Char’s son Bro called me late in the afternoon with the news, and asked me to come over. Char was taking it hard, he said, and asking for me.”
“Were you surprised?”
“Hell, yes! I thought that when old Bill went, it would be a stroke, him having high blood pressure and all.”
“No, I mean that Charlotte Birmingham would ask for you.”
“Oh. No, not at all. I’ve sat up with her and one or another of the children many a time. Been there for the good times, too. Done it so much people are surprised to learn I’m not a member of the family.”
As she drove behind Jill and Lars around the millpond, Betsy noted small houses of the post-World War II variety, then a wide, grassy field full of motor homes, closed trailers, and antique cars. Jill turned there, and a little farther along were some enormous, modern sheds on one side of the narrow street and on the other an old cemetery. At least some of the enormous sheds were bus barns, their big open doors showing that inside were not city buses, but the luxury kind that are rented to groups making jaunts. Except one of the barns had antique cars inside and in front of it.
There were more antique cars parked on a sandy verge along the narrow lane.
Betsy was so busy looking around that she almost failed to notice that Jill, on making another turn, had immediately pulled onto that scrubby verge. She slammed on her brakes as she went past Jill’s car, and pulled in at the far end of the row, beside a sky-blue vehicle the size of a Conestoga wagon. It had blue and white striped awning material for a roof. The hood was small for a car that size, and the radiator sloped backward from its base. Like most of the antique cars, its wheels were wagon size, with thick, wooden spokes. When she got out, she could hear that the car’s engine was running, but in a very peculiar manner. Every antique car she had met so far had its own motor sound, but this one had to be the strangest.
Jill and Lars were walking up to an old, white clapboard house. There was a big sign, BOY SCOUTS OF AMERICA, over a screen door marked only by a small concrete slab. Betsy took two steps to follow, then turned to listen some more to the huge car’s motor. Yes, it was inhaling sharply between short engine sounds,
“Whaddaya think?” he asked as he stopped beside her.
“What is it?” asked Betsy.
“A 1901 Winton. Single cylinder. This is the car that made a transcontinental crossing of the United States, New York to San Francisco, before there were paved roads or gas stations.”
“Wow,” said Betsy. “The pioneering spirit was still alive then, I guess.”
That remark pleased him. “And I own a hunk of it.” The man got in and put his machine into reverse. Whining and tilting dangerously, it backed onto the lane, but then rolled smoothly on down toward the bus barns. Apparently it only sniffed while idling.
She went up the walk and through the screen door-which made a very nostalgic creak when opened and a satisfactory slap when it closed. But this wasn’t a home. The floor was faded linoleum tile; the walls were dotted with Boy Scout posters and an old black bearskin.
They had come in through the long side of a rectangular room. Tables of assorted sizes and styles were scattered around it. Behind a long one made of plywood, under the bearskin, stood three women and two household-moving-size cardboard boxes. On a nearby table was a stack of the banners drivers were to put on their cars, canvas squares with ANTIQUE CAR RUN, the soft drink symbol, and big black numbers printed on them. Ties ran off each corner.
The women behind the table were all wearing big green T-shirts with the logo of the Antique Car Run printed on their fronts. Half a dozen men and four women waited patiently in two lines in front of the table. Lars and Jill were among them.
One man at the head of the line was laughing at some jest he’d already made, and as the woman handed him a shirt and a clear plastic bag of materials, he asked, “What’s the difference between roast beef and pea soup?”
“What?” asked the woman.
“Anyone can roast beef!” he said. She made a “get away with you” gesture at him, and he turned to leave, laughing heartily.
On the long table was a big computer printout listing each driver’s name, hometown, kind of car, and number of passengers. When it was his turn, Lars announced, “I’m Lars Larson, number sixty-three,” and one of the women ran a finger down the list. When she found it, she ran a highlighter mark through it.
“Welcome to New London, Lars,” she said. “Are these your two riders?” she added, smiling at Betsy and Jill.
Jill nodded, and Betsy said, “No, but I’m a volunteer. I’ll be logging departures tomorrow.”
Another woman, very brisk and tiny, asked Lars, “What size T-shirt do you wear, dear?”
“Two-X,” he replied, and she asked the same question of Jill and Betsy, then turned to one of the enormous boxes, which came up to her armpits, to dig around until she found examples in the right sizes.
