Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Vol. 38, No. 13, Mid-December 1993

McLean scooped up the folder and turned for the door. “Don’t worry, I’ll bail you out.” He grinned at Sarah with a confidence he didn’t feel as he left.

The pickup’s vinyl seat, baking in the autumn sun, hissed when he slid behind the wheel. McLean ignored the sweat running down his back as he jotted questions on the manila folder propped against the steering wheel, absently licking the broken pencil’s tip between scribblings. With a disgruntled sigh fueled by low expectations, he turned the pickup’s snout toward Copper Valley Auto Wrecking.

Herb Krantz only laughed when McLean asked to see Archer’s Blazer. “Hell, it’s in Taiwan bein’ made into refrigerators by now.” He added with a trace of pride, “We work fast here.” He waved toward a collection of steering wheels nailed to the office’s battered sheet metal walls. “I kept the wheel for my collection, it’s that one there.” He pointed to a steel skeleton. “Nothing else was worth saving.”

McLean ran an exploratory finger around the wheel. “You mean this is it?”

“What I said. Kept it because it’s in such good shape, considering he musta hit it pretty hard with his face.” He chuckled. “Didn’t give much, did it?”

McLean had already noticed. “Any more of these come from Blazers?”

“Yep, at least three.” Krantz waved toward a trio of misshapen discs. He spewed a stream of tobacco juice toward the wall, looked at his feet awkwardly, and cleared his throat. “Look, you’re an educated man and work for the lawyer lady and stuff, and what with Archer being dead and all, what do you make of this? Damned things arrived yesterday.”

Krantz shambled over to a battered desk, pushed a stack of parts books aside, and produced a sheaf of papers from the United States Bankruptcy Court in Medford. He thrust them across the desk almost apologetically.

McLean glanced at them out of politeness, knowing it was small repayment for Krantz’s time, even though he knew as much about bankruptcy proceedings as he did about brain surgery. His eyes traveled the sheets while his mind sought the best way to tell Krantz to call a lawyer. Rex Archer’s name stood out like a priest at a rock concert.

“Archer was your partner?”

“Yeah.” Krantz’s tone made it clear his partner’s death was an annoyance but no reason to mourn, and he accepted McLean’s advice to call a lawyer with the same enthusiasm he’d show for a double amputation.

McLean returned the papers and left, almost plowing over another customer as he concentrated on his next stop, the coroner’s office. There he skirmished with an indifferent receptionist and a hostile Dr. Thurston Barton.

“Of course it was Archer.” Barton, short, round, and as pale as his clients, thumped his government-issue desk. “I know my business, thank you very much, even if I am only part-time.” And, McLean thought dryly, a full-time gynecologist, hardly an expert on violent death.

“I wasn’t questioning your abilities, doctor.” McLean rubbed his nose, which twitched from the formaldehyde-laced air. “It’s just that there was no usable identification on the body and it says here,” he tapped the insurance file, “that his dental records were destroyed last summer when his dentist’s office was vandalized.”

Barton rolled his eyes. “There are other ways, you know. For one thing I had enough of the body to make an accurate estimate of the victim’s height and build. There were also X-rays of a broken leg, and the breaks matched perfectly. Besides—” Barton’s smile chilled the room, “—most of his teeth were gone, burned away.”

“Even the rear molars?”

“Yes. The jaw was fractured in the crash.”

“I see, hit the steering wheel, did he?”

Barton’s exaggerated sigh wafted around the room. “Of course he hit the damned wheel. If you don’t mind, the county isn’t paying me enough to answer some insurance man’s inane questions.” He jerked a folder from a stack on his desk and flipped it open.

McLean paused at the door. “Please satisfy a neophyte’s curiosity. What color were the bones?”

Barton lifted his head slowly. “White, you blasted ghoul. Pearl white.”

The secretary, lip-syncing as she read the National Enquirer, lifted her head fractionally and popped her gum at McLean’s distracted goodbye.

Moses nudged his visitor in the crotch, then stood motionless, waiting to be petted, a hard demand to resist since the one hundred forty pound Rottweiler wouldn’t move until satisfied.

Axel Reed grinned over one shoulder as he scooted his wheelchair toward a bank of computers. “So there’s no confusion — you want these photos blown up, and you want large colored graphics of each one with special emphasis on these spots: the tires, the interior, the roof, and the underside of the engine, right?”