THE PERFECT CRIME THE PERFECT CRIMEMy father loved used cars even more than he loved the White Sox, if possible. A Used-Car Nut is even more dedicated than the ordinary car worshiper. A true zealot never thinks in terms of a new model. His entire frame of reference and system of values is based on acquiring someone else’s troubles. It is a dangerous game, and the uncertainty of it appeals to the true Used-Car aficionado the same way that Three Card Faro draws on the profligate.
My father, in company with other Used-Car fanatics, loved to spend long Saturday afternoons roaming the Used-Car lots on the South Side of Chicago, beating the bushes for hypothetical great buys and spectacular deals in Willys-Knights, Essexes, and Hudson Terraplanes. And when the Used-Car type actually tracked his car down and made the buy, it was a total commitment. All the way. And if the car turned out to be actually functional, his love for it far transcended the love and involvement of the lesser men who simply went to a dealer and bought a new car.
Anybody can buy a new car and expect to get a fairly operative machine, but it takes guts, knowledge, and a reckless sense of deadly abandon to come home with, say, a Lafayette Six previously owned by other shadowy drivers that had gone through God knows what hells, and to feel confident of victory. A used car, therefore, is a far more powerful love object than a new one. And my father played this deadly game to the hilt. Each succeeding used car was loved and babied, petted and honored in its turn.
Some of the great emotional scenes of his life occurred on Used-Car lots when he was deserting the Pontiac Eight for the “new” DeSoto. He would even go back day after day to see if they were treating the Pontiac well, and then would get moody and morose when it finally disappeared forever off the lot.
The new DeSoto—he always referred to each used car as “new”—at first would seem strange and formal to us, vaguely unfriendly, like living in someone else’s apartment. On Saturdays, when we cleaned the car, we’d find foreign hairpins and other people’s lost papers under the seats. But gradually the DeSoto or the Pontiac or the Hupmobile would become Ours.
Of course, at that time cars had distinctive personalities and characteristics in themselves and did not all come stamped out of the same mold, painted with the same paint, and advertised by the same agency. A Terraplane man was a completely different breed than, say, a Buick type. John Dillinger drove a Terraplane, which said a lot for the Terraplane type—an angry, rakish, wild machine. It was not a matter of Status then, but of attitude and personality, and the Used-Car man had the fiercest loyalties of all. He was usually not only dedicated to certain makes of cars but to specific years within the breeds. I remember spending long afternoons with my father, hunting for a particular Graham-Paige that reputedly was of the finest of vintage years.
The day we found that beautiful midnight blue four-door Graham, with its stark Gothic radiator grille, was one of the true Festival days of that epoch. She sat bracketed between an elderly Plymouth and a stodgy LaSalle, glowing darkly with a sort of prim, contained politeness—a true aristocrat unaccountably cast in with the rabble. She had more than a few years on her, but was spotless and ageless.
The old man lit up like a Christmas tree and immediately went into his cagey Used-Car Buyer’s cool, calculating bargaining character. It was exciting, in several ways. The contest between Father and his Friendly Fred, the imminent loss of the trusty old Pontiac—did the Graham have a sponge-rubber transmission? The lurking reefs of disaster were always there.
Later, the first time he wheeled the midnight blue Graham up the driveway and around the back, was just the beginning of it—the week-long Festival of Love for the new Graham.
At the time I was just below the legal minimum age limit for driving. And I used to sit in the back seat and watch my father shift gear, casually make left turns, back into parking spots, and wheel the Graham around like a second skin.
In the Midwest driving is like breathing. Kids living on the Maine coast learn to sail at a certain age. They all do. In the Midwest, driving is simply part of life, and they are serious about it. Afternoons, when the car was parked in back, I would sit in the front seat and practice shifting gears, working the clutch, and mentally whistling down US 41 in the center lane. And once in a very great while, when we would be out for a drive on a Sunday, my father would maybe let me back the car out of the driveway, or on the really great days he’d say:
“You want to take over?”
Do I want to take over! What a question!
He’d sit next to me:
“Easy on the clutch now.”
I’d ease the clutch out.
“Wait now, don’t shift to Second yet. There, get it moving. All right, into Second now. Well, for crying out loud, push the clutch all the way IN before you shift! YOU’RE GONNA STRIP THE GEARS! Here, lemme do it!”
Next thing I know I’m sitting in the back with my kid brother. Flubbed it again!
I was always trying to curry favor with both the Graham and my father by surprising him, especially on Sundays. The surprise consisted of washing the Graham or polishing the chrome with some pink stuff that my father used.
I was in the garage, working on the front bumper. It was Sunday. The family was going out that night, and I was about to surprise everybody with a spectacular job on the chrome. I polished the rims on the headlights, and it’s a tough job. My knuckles were scraped, my fingernails torn, the pink stuff soaking into my skin, but the grille was beautiful, just beautiful. And then I decided to back the car out of the garage by myself, to really surprise them. So that when they came out on the back porch they would see this blinding vision flashing chrome. In my mind’s eye I could hear them say:
“Why, what has happened to the Graham-Paige? It looks better than new!”
And I would just stand proudly, modestly by and wait for the praise and the honor that would be due me.
I finally finished the job. The Graham was glistening. I scrunched down in the driver’s seat and started the engine. What a sense of Power! I checked the ammeter. It was flickering slightly on the “Charge” side. Gas gauge—quarter full. Oil pressure—forty pounds. Normal.
I eased the clutch in and gently moved the gearshift lever into “Reverse.” Already I was a master of gear-shifting. “Ease out on the clutch gently,” and I began to roll backward out of the garage.
Screeeeeeaaaa.…
I slammed on the brake and the clutch and hung in midair for a split second.
My God! I had scraped the left rear fender on the garage door! I put her in First and tried to roll forward.
Eeeeaawwwrrrrr.
It was stuck! The fender was dragging against the door. My God! I was sweating. And sick with fear. I had really done it this time, all the way!
I quickly scrunched over to the other side of the seat, and out. I was going to push the car into the garage. I couldn’t move it. It was really stuck! I had to drive it in again.
I got behind the wheel and put it into First. I was going to do it real slowly. Reeeal sloww.…
I could hear the door scrunching and ripping. I got out again and looked. I could just see the edge of a huge scrape mark on that beautiful midnight blue fender. The paint was peeling off in long curls. It was jammed, and I didn’t know what to do. I knew that if I moved any further I’d strip off more paint. I had to do it!
I eased out on the clutch.
RRRRRRRR
It was stuck!
I could hear people moving in the house, doors slamming. Any minute now somebody was going to come out! I just knew it. My father! He was going to come out in the backyard to look in the trunk, or to pick up a football or something.
The screen door slammed open, and it was my kid brother. My God! I head him off.
“Hey Ran, hey. Would you go down in the basement? See if you can find my old … ah … my … remember that old skyrocket I had? See if you can find my old skyrocket, will you, Ran? Go on, Ran, see if you can find it for me.”
He looked at me and then went back in the house and down in the basement.
I didn’t want anyone to know what I had done, and time was running out!
I leaped in the car. Any minute now my Old Man was going to come out. I knew it. I slammed it in gear.
EEEEEEEEUUUNK!
It was free!
I turned the key off and got out. There it was! The back fender neatly peeled, a long scratch the entire width of the fender and then some. What was I going to do!?
I knew what to do. Nothing! Absolutely nothing!
Five minutes later I was two blocks away, knocking out fly balls and pretending I had never seen a car in my life.
That night we were all dressed up and in the Graham. I was in the back seat, and worried sick. Nobody had even noticed that the back fender was scraped. I was keeping my mouth shut, and I was sweating: a thirteen-year-old Rascolnikov sizzling with guilt, fighting against the urge to blurt out:
“Stop the car! Look at the left rear fender! I did it! I am guilty! I am unworthy to exist in the bosom of such a wonderful, innocent group on its way to see Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers! I am guilty and despicable!! Rotten to the core!!”
But what did I do? The same thing that modern man always does. Plays it cool. At least as cool as it is possible to be while shuddering under wave after wave of fear and guilt.
We parked the car and went into the movie. I was still safe. Darkness had obscured the raw wounds of my crime.
I squirmed through the movie in a cold sweat, barely able to concentrate on my taffy apple. All I remember was that this guy Astaire kept wearing a high silk hat—like Jiggs—and hopping around on the tops of pianos.
Another crucial moment came when we approached the Graham in the parking lot. I hung back, waiting for the thunderclap.
It did not come. The Chief merely got in the front seat and said:
“Pile in. Let’s go.”
I scrunched down in the back seat and in my relief and nervousness talked a blue streak all the way home.
But later, in bed, the old icy sweat came back. He would have to see it tomorrow, and he would know! There was no escape! I squirmed and sweated for half an hour or so, and then developed a gigantic gut-heaving stomach ache. My mother dragged me into the John, limp and wan, and hung my head over the bowl. Taffy apples of years past squirted out of my nose, my ears.…
“That’ll teach you to listen to me about all that junk you always eat.”
I finally fell asleep out of sheer exhaustion.
The next morning for a few brief rapturous minutes I had completely forgotten that I was a doomed man. And then, halfway through my Wheaties, it all came back. My spoon hung in midair. The sun streamed through the kitchen windows. My mother’s Chinese-red chenille bathrobe hunched over the stove, making coffee. All the old familiar things of my former carefree life lay about me. The cracked plastic radio on top of the refrigerator, the old kitchen table, my Little Orphan Annie shake-up mug, the blue glass Shirley Temple sugar and cream set which meant so much to my mother, all part of a Better Time.
After school that day I went through the motions of ball-playing, a wizened, care-bent figure at second base, knowing full well that retribution was inevitably drawing nigh. It had to come tonight!
My father usually got home from work about six, just in time for supper. We were expected to be in the house no later than five-thirty, washed up, and ready to eat. Tonight I lagged in the gloom, trying to forestall the inevitable. My fellow ballplayers had long since melted off into the twilight. In the distance I could hear my mother shouting for me through the kitchen door, and finally, painfully, I dragged myself home.
Staring out at me from the bathroom mirror—hollow eyed, lined death’s head of a face, covered with Lifebuoy suds.
And then it came. A great angry roar of flying cinders, the Graham-Paige booming up the driveway, roaring around the back angrily, and then—silence.
The water trickled feebly in the sink. My kid brother blabbed somewhere off in the distance. I clung weakly to the towel rack, waiting for the fatal blow.
The kitchen screen door slammed. There was now no escape! A brief thought of drinking iodine passed through my tortured cranium. They’d feel sorry then! But would they? They would probably welcome it, after what I had done!
I hear my mother’s voice from the kitchen:
“What’s the matter?”
And then a bellow of inchoate rage. I knew any minute thunderous footsteps would head for the bathroom. Already I could feel the sobs welling to the surface.
And then my father’s voice, booming in rage:
“Those bastards down at the parking lot! They banged up the fender on the Graham and the bastards deny it!!”
I clung to the sink, bells ringing in my skull. I had been witness to an actual miracle. I would never again be an Unbeliever!
The voice angrily continued:
“I drove it in that lot absolutely perfect! Not a scratch on it!! Come on out and look at it!”
Again the door slammed and silence reigned. I tottered into the kitchen, weak and shuddering with relief. I peeked out of the back window and I could see my mother and father angrily stalking back and forth around the rear fender. They came up the back porch, with my mother saying:
“That’s terrible. Isn’t there something you can do with the Better Business Bureau? Why don’t you call the Better Business Bureau? Don’t let them get away with it. You’re just too easy on people.”
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN ‘EASY’!? I HOLLERED FOR TWENTY MINUTES! The guy says that car wasn’t touched! The lying bastard!!”
“Well, I’m going to call them myself. I’m going to call them.”
She sweeps past me into the dining room, to the phone. My father plumps down at the kitchen table, white with rage. Off in the living room, the sound of my kid brother crying could be heard. He always did this when there was trouble.
I did nothing, just looked innocent. My mother slammed back into the kitchen.
“You’re going to get satisfaction now. I really told them. It’s that lot across from the Real Estate office, right? Across from the Real Estate office?”
“Yeah.”
Never in my life, before or since, have I enjoyed meat loaf so much. Mashed potatoes and peas and carrots—a magnificent repast!
The next day my father came home from work beaming, radiating victory from every pore.
“They paid off, the bastards. Ten bucks for a repaint job! The guy said he’d paint it himself. I said ‘No.’ In a pig’s ear. I want the dough. I’ll get it fixed myself. I’ve got to admit you were right. They called up that phony and really burned his ear. He paid up!”
Once again I felt at home at the kitchen table. I belonged in this well-ordered, virtuous environment. Justice had been done, and I could proceed again along the great highway of Life, sun shining, birds singing, with a clean windshield and a full tank of Phillips 66.